"Don't Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started"

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“Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.”

            Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative.”( Workman, 2012.)

Steal Like An Artist is a book to keep close by you as you work.  Kelon’s first point among the ten is  “Steal Like An Artist.” He quotes from artists of all sorts. For example, Kobe Bryant, the basketball star, says, “There isn’t a good move that isn’t an old move.”  Bryant says that all his moves were copied from his heroes—he watched tapes of them until his could do what they did, but he had to adopt what he learned to his own body. So, it might be Michael Jordan as channeled by Kobe Bryant.

Kleon encourages us to bow toward and imitate our cultural ancestors until we have combined all of them into our own rich mixture.  “Nobody is born with a style or a voice. In the beginning we learn by pretending to be our heroes.”

 Yoko Ono says, “Start copying what you love. Copy. Copy. Copy. Copy. At the end of the copy you will find yourself.” Daunting on the one hand, but straightforward on the other. Pick someone you respect and copy.

Last summer I invited my students to copy, copy, copy the writer they most admired. The voices of Eudora Welty, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ernest Hemingway, channeled by my students, filled the room. How did the students accomplish this? They studied the machinery of each writer, examining the structure of the language, the voice, the inner workings of each sentence. Like taking a clock apart and putting it back together. My students learned a lot and the writing improved. And they got to spend a bunch of time with their heroes.

You too can do this. You just have to let go of your resistance to “stealing” and put on your analytic hat. Answer that question – how did he do it?

Exercise: Identify an author you admire. Take a couple of pages of her work and break it down. Read it aloud. How does she create sentences? Pronoun then verb—in that order or another? Does she repeat? Is her writing full of metaphor? If so, how does she pull the metaphors onto the page? And then read it aloud again. And again.

Print out the magnifying glass and go into the minute details of the workings of this machine.

Start a journal entry and, one page in, begin to imitate or “steal from” your designated author. Write in the same rhythm and choose a similar structure to the sentences. Write for three pages. And then go back to your own voice. What have you learned? Read your piece aloud.

Reflect Upon Your Present Blessings

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Reflect upon your present blessings, of which

every man has plenty;

not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Charles Dickens

It’s a good idea as a writer to step back from your narrative, dialogue, description and make a comment about life.  We all long for wisdom – we want to be set right or awakened or turned up side down, if only for a moment, and we are happy to find tidbits of wisdom tossed into a work of fiction.  Let’s take a tip or two from the Greeks:

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.

Sophocles Oedipus Rex

We know this, don’t we, but isn’t it helpful to be reminded of in the middle of an extraordinary play!  This thought becomes part of our take-away from the evening, consciously or unconsciously.

Unwanted favors gain no gratitude.

Oedipus at Colonus.

How often do we imagine we are helping someone when in fact we are just bothering them?  I call this part of me Lady Bountiful, the part of me that gets thrills from playing the helpful benefactor, often, it turns out, to people who are not interested in my help. Sophocles, yes Sophocles, can jolt me to awareness about this.

Philosophy tossed into the middle of the narrative stops the reader and gives us pause.  Abraham Verghese, in his novel Cutting for Stone, offers this thought:

It was a sacred object.  But for a four-year old, everything is sacred and ordinary.

We stop to think, is this true for me?  Does the child in me treat everything as sacred? Should I?

Commenting on his wife’s remark, late in life, that she hates him, the narrator of John Updike’s  My Father’s Tears, says this: 

As well as love one another, we hate one another and even ourselves.

I read this and stop and think. I suddenly feel melancholic, hating to think this might be true of all marriages, of all relationships. The narrator has snagged my attention and won’t let go.

Hope is the deep orientation of the human soul that can be held at the darkest times.

Vaclav Havel

Havel knows what he is talking about, having been involved in the Polish fight for freedom.

Exercise: Take a look at your work.  Do you stop to impart wisdom from time to time?  Choose a piece you are writing, or simply begin a piece in your journal.  Half way through, stop and ask yourself, what am I trying to say here?  What can I say to stop my reader short, to make her pause and reflect?

When I...

The other night, I saw Robert Pinsky  (poet laureate of the United States, 1997 -2000) talk about poetry on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.  Charming, engaging and passionate, he talked most particularly of his love of music and the importance of rhyme and tonality in poetry. As well, we saw a clip of Pinsky reading his poems with a live jazz band – his voice like another instrument riffing right along with the clarinet and the saxophone.  Pinsky says “I think the rhythms in a lot of my writing are an attempt to create that feeling of a beautiful, gorgeous jazz solo that gives you more emotion and some more and coming around with some more, and it’s the same but it’s changed, and the rhythm is very powerful, but it is also lyricism. I think I’ve been trying to create something like that in my writing for a long time.” (The Progressive)

"Samurai Song" by Robert Pinsky When I had no roof I made Audacity my roof. When I had No supper my eyes dined. When I had no eyes I listened. When I had no ears I thought. When I had no thought I waited. When I had no father I made Care my father. When I had No mother I embraced order. When I had no friend I made Quiet my friend. When I had no Enemy I opposed my body. When I had no temple I made My voice my temple. I have No priest, my tongue is my choir. When I have no means fortune Is my means. When I have Nothing, death will be my fortune. Need is my tactic, detachment Is my strategy. When I had No lover I courted my sleep. Watch Pinsky recite this poem

I hear the music in Pinsky’s work. Notice Pinsky’s repetition of  “When I” at the beginning of each paragraph.  Read the poem aloud and you will see that this powerful and lyrical language, this repetition pulls you into the poem.  It’s what Jack Grapes calls “a sung verse… public voice, meant to rouse and inspire.” Mary Oliver uses the same voice in How Would You Live Then? --repeating “What if” and achieving a similar reaction in the listener. Read the poem aloud and you will feel the effects of the rhythm of repetition of What if.”

How would you live then?

 What if a hundred rose-breasted grosbeaks

     flew in circles around your head? 

What if the mockingbird came into the house with you and

     became your advisor? 

What if the bees filled your walls with honey and all

     you needed to do was ask them and they would fill

    the bowl? 

What if the brook slid downhill just

     past your bedroom window so you could listen

    to its slow prayers as you fell asleep? 

What if you painted a picture of a tree, and the leaves

     began to rustle, and a bird cheerfully sang

     from its painted branches? 

What if you suddenly saw that the silver of water was brighter than the silver

     of money? 

What if you finally saw that the sunflowers, turning toward the sun all day

     and every day --- who knows how, but they do it ---were

   more precious, more meaningful than gold?

Exercise:  Repeating the phrase  "When I "' or “What if” build a series of sentences that, due to the repetition of “When I” or “What if," become an incantation.  Vary the length of the sentences.  For example, "When I think of gin, I grin.  When I think of gin and grin, I reach for the bottle.”   Or, “What if I wrote the poem that’s been living in me all these years.  What if it got published? What if I had to go the publishing party and I had no dress.  What if I went naked” Of course, I’m am trying to be funny to lighten the burden here, but this is serious and valuable stuff.

Think of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. He repeats the phrase many times, varying the length of the sentences.  You can go serious with your tone, like Oliver and King, or be lighthearted, talking about chocolate ice cream for example. It's the exercise that counts. It's the rhythm and tone of your writing that will be the incantation. 

Throw Your Dream into Space Like a Kite

Throw your dream into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back: a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country. Anais Nin

When you wake up you gotta show the love in your heart. Carol King.

It’s the start of a New Year. We need to be awake to all the world has to offer us as artists. The Anais Nin quote came to me as I tilled the field of New Year’s Resolutions. The Carole King line floated across the TV screen. I learn once again that each moment offers a fruit ripe for the picking.

One of King’s backup musicians, Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar – acoustic guitar, conga, electric guitar, vocals reminds us that we are here “to serve the song.” Writers have to serve the story. Hence those long hours over a paragraph. What does this piece want to say? And, as one of the musicians says, “We are here to get people to feel.” How do we best do that, we ask, as we agonize over the appropriate word for the blue of our protagonist’s eyes. Are they azure, beryl, or blue-gray. Blue-green or cerulean, cobalt, or indigo?

As the year turns, I bow in the direction of my spiritual antecedents. I recite Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin and the Pslams to ground myself in the world that surrounds me. I love this moment in Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese:

                   Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

                           in the family of things.

By our words, we help ourselves and our readers to find our place in the family of things.

Two Last Minute Openings for the Winter Writing Workshop!

Happy New Year!

 

Didn’t receive books over the holidays?  Take a look at the following favorite book lists, one from NPR and one from The New York Times

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/30/166251839/best-books-of-2012-the-complete-list

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/09/books/review/10-best-books-of-2012.

No time to read? Download books to Audibles, pick up the CDs of another at the library and listen as you drive.  During my frequent drives to Portland, I have been listening to a long and engaging book called The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. As I listen, I am pulled from the present dull reality of driving on Route 1, back to 12th century England and the power and intrigue surrounding the building of a Gothic cathedral. And as I react to the tale, I am reminded of the simple principle of good story telling: keep your hero in jeopardy. Let him emerge for a moment; let the listener breathe a sigh of relief and POW! Hit him with something unexpected. Sometimes I can’t stand the tension and, without thinking, reach out and turn off the CD, my heart pounding, full of rage at the antagonist. The power of a well-told tale!

Sampling books is a good way to stay up to date without feeling overwhelmed by the numbers. Open a book and read a chapter. You can do so in a bookstore or in a library, or online at Amazon.

Other thoughts and suggestions. Read Hilary Mantel, an award-winning author of historical fiction. At this moment, I’m reading Wolf Hall about England under Henry the VIII. It’s riveting.

And for a great book about the craft of writing, being an artist, or living like an artist, get a copy of Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon.

Are you making resolutions? Check into this website http://www.brainpickings.org and read the resolutions of renowned artists, including Marilyn Monroe. On the same web site, you can read about the routines of renowned writers. It’s always bracing to read these. Here is E.B. White:

I never listen to music when I’m working. I haven’t that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldn’t like it at all. On the other hand, I’m able to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My house has a living room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a passageway to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the phone lives. There’s a lot of traffic. But it’s a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the carnival that is going on all around me. A girl pushing a carpet sweeper under my typewriter table has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my mind off my work, unless the girl was unusually pretty or unusually clumsy. My wife, thank God, has never been protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. In consequence, the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.  (My emphasis)

Happy New Year!

Listening to Christmas

As we begin to embrace both the sorrow of the Newtown massacre and the joy of Christmas, it is good to return to the classic holiday stories. My class of five and I sat around our fireplace yesterday morning, rain falling outside, our meeting room festooned with a tree, two mangers and several bright red Santa Clauses carved out of walnut. The wind bustled, slap dashing against the windows as we read Nabakov, Dickens, Truman Capote, and Russell Banks. And listened to Dylan Thomas reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales. 

Our spirits came together as we heard Truman Capote in A Christmas Memory tell the story of his Christmas as a young boy in Monroeville Alabama, living with relatives in a big house. His close friend and constant companion, a sixty-year-old female relative, looked like “a bantam rooster.” At Christmas, they gathered their pennies (they are quite poor) and made thirty fruit cakes, distributing them to “people who have struck their fantasy” like President Roosevelt, the local bus driver and Haha Jones who supplied them with whiskey for the cakes. Buddy’s companion is full of wisdom. She reflects, “there’s never two of anything.” And, toward the end of the story, she says,  “I’ve always thought that a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord….But I’ll wager that at the very end a body realizes that the Lord has already shown himself. That things as they are – her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.” Words like this calm our spirit and heal us. Read Capote’s story aloud to your family and friends, and smile.

And then, revisit A Christmas Carol and remember the transformation of Scrooge once he was visited by the spirits. After his encounters with the ghosts,

“He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.  May that be truly said of us, and all of us!  And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!”

If you have another moment, listen to A Child’s Christmas in Wales, read by Dylan Thomas. This tale will make you laugh and you will marvel at the music of the language. Listening together with friends and family will bring you close.

Happy Holidays and let’s keep the radiance of today in our eyes and rejoice in our loved ones.