John Lacey » Writing

Art Practice: Meditation Versus Action

John Lacey — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:57:33 +0000

Where do ideas and art come from anyway? It’s all well and good to talk about ‘artistic process’ in an abstract fashion but it really is all about doing something – anything – and then doing something else. Progress in process is all in the doing.

So what happens when you spend more time conceptualising than creating? Well often you’ll have an amazingly impressive idea inside your head that you may never be able to realise. Chances are you’ll be reluctant to start because you sense this gap. You may be so hung up on the idea you have that you’re reluctant to follow the art down new and exciting rabbit holes of possibility.

Oh and before we go any further I want to stress that this is something I suffer from too so I’m not pointing the finger. But to illustrate the point here is a small segment of an interview I did with MGPhenom (Matt Elwood) about his then NaNoWriMo project. It was going to be a novel and a movie script and he had made DVD cover art and plot synopsis and character analysis but was still struggling to write ‘chapter one, word one.’

Now compare that approach with this Jim Cogswell’s comments about creating a painting.

Jim Cogswell:

It’s about ‘where do ideas come from?’ You don’t come up with a painting by thinking of what you want to do. You come up with a painting by taking a step and then reacting to that and then reacting to that.

It can be challenging. I know I want to be a more intuitive artist but frankly I often find my planned out works more personally fulfilling. I’m trying to actually alternate between planned actions and spontaneous flourishes – one careful drawing followed by a wild abstract painting. I’m hoping by alternating between these I’ll develop a greater skill set over time.

How would you describe your approach to creating?

Julia Cameron on ‘Real’ Writers

John Lacey — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:31:52 +0000

Earlier this week my Amazon shipment arrived including The Right To Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into The Writing Life by Julia Cameron. I haven’t had a chance to delve deeply into the book (and many of the tools described are quite similar to solutions offered in The Artist’s Way), however I wanted to share an extract here since it follows on so nicely from this week’s Creative Concepts podcast.

Julia Cameron:

When people undertake writing, it is often not with the agenda of writing but with the agenda of “becoming a writer.” We have an incredible amount of mystery, mystique, and pure bunk around exactly what the phrase means.

The bottom line, the fact that the act of writing makes you a writer, barely enters the equation at all. Instead, we come up with ideas like “Real writers are published,” or “Real writers make a living from their writing.” In a sense, we are saying, “Real writers get validation from others that they are writers. They have apeared in _________. They have received quotes from ________.”

With mythology like this, with a product-not-process orientation like this, is it any wonder that the aspiring writer is seized by anxiety? Even those gifted with a silver tongue doubt that they are gifted with a silver pen. The blank page strikes them like a blank check where they may be asked to fill in an amount larger than the talent they feel they possess.

The act of writing makes you a writer. So go write.

When No One Cares…

John Lacey — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:23:46 +0000

I sometimes get disappointed when something I produce doesn’t get much of a reception. You hope that a project is worthwhile and that somebody somewhere is getting something out of it, and as much as I look for some intrinsic merit to the things I do, I am still sometimes left wondering.

But what if no one caring was actually a good thing?

In the last week I’ve heard two writers explore this issue on separate podcasts. I Should Be Writing’s Mur Lafferty explores the freedom to be found in this condition, while Seth Godin points out that the cost of failing has fallen to nothing at all.

Mur Lafferty on Amateur Writing: Good Parts and Bad:

Being interviewed on podcasts, I mention one thing I love about podcast fiction is I can write whatever the hell I want. Whatever I want. And I can give it to my listeners and they can listen or not. I can write zombie humour audio dramas. I can write a series of novellas about mythology and the afterlife. I can write about superheroes. I could turn around and write chicklit tomorrow. I could write mysteries. I mean, no one is going to pigeonhole me. I can write whatever I want to. And that, I realise is not only the Internet, but it’s also just I am so new that no one cares!

You know, I’ve talked about not caring before, the fact that no one cares that you’re a writer and how that can be a wonderful thing. Because when no one cares you can do whatever you want. They’re not noticing you, they’re not judging you. And if they do notice, then someone cares – and that’s good. But on the other hand, you might be kinda getting yourself into the hole where you’ll be for the rest of your career.

[...]

But your freedom is no one is telling you you can’t. And I think, newbies and wannabes – all of us amateurs – we don’t recognize and appreciate that more often. We don’t say, “You know what, it’s fantastic that no one gives a crap about what I write. I can write whatever I want!”

Seth Godin talking to Merlin Mann on 43 Folders:

The cost of failing has dropped by faster than the cost of a chip. You know, my Dad owns a factory in Buffalo, New York, that bends steel and makes hospital cribs and has union organized labor. The cost of getting that factory was really high and if he screws up it’s going to be really expensive. The cost of getting a blog is $12 and if you screw up no one’s going to notice because they weren’t reading in the first place. What we’ve discovered in the last ten years is that it’s easier than ever to record an album, to treat a customer with respect, to put a new idea out there, to write a book and publish it for free. All these things cost almost nothing and the lizard brain hasn’t caught up to that yet. The lizard brain doesn’t realize that the cost of failure is not that a sabre tooth tiger eats you, but that the cost of failure is nothing. So what 43 Folders people ought to do, I think, is do something that people will ridicule, do something where you will fail, do something that’s a little bit nutty and see what happens. Because the worst thing that will happen is that you’ll fail and no one will notice.

Classroom Community Of Writers

John Lacey — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:49:49 +0000

St Ninian’s Primary School in Stirling, Scotland, introduced a “Writing For Real” program. The headteacher explains:

When I first came here as headteacher, 7 years ago, it was my vision to create a community of writers here at St Ninian’s. It was my aim to get children so skilled in writing that they would be able to help one another when they were writing their books.

Part of this particular approach to writing, that we call Writing For Real, means that children actually publish their books, and they dedicate their books to other people. And they write from the start, with the assumption that their books are going to be read and reviewed by other people, and so there’s real purpose in what they do from the outset of the writing.

I particularly loved the way the students read each other’s books and offer feedback via post-it notes.

From Learning And Teaching Scotland

Wayson Choy: Your Story Is Absolutely Worth Telling

John Lacey — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:16:04 +0000

I thought after yesterday’s rant, we should have something slightly more inspirational and upbeat.

Wayson Choy:

In all my writing, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, my feeling is I’m building a bridge. I’m a unique person in my way, as other people are unique in theirs. And when I read a book I always say to myself, “I want to understand this particular uniqueness that’s not me but that is part of the range of human behaviour.” And so when I write my books I hope that somebody reads my book, crosses boundaries that they hadn’t thought of before and explored, and was empathetic to a human being that really is an awful lot like them.

[...]

I would say your story is absolutely worth telling. Don’t even hesistate to think otherwise, but remember you can only tell your story if you have the craft and learn the craft of writing. Because it is an artform and having said that, I think you deserve the chance to tell your story and you should. I think some people say, “Nothing happened to me.” But if they really think about – especially when they realise how they got to where they are now, and they are honest – they have much to tell and they should tell it.

Wayson Choy is the author of Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying.

Choy almost died. Twice. After suffering multiple heart attacks and a severe asthma attack in 2001, he literally had to learn how to relearn how to speak, write and walk.

So whether I write 50,000 words this month or not, I take great comfort in the knowledge that I didn’t die… or almost died.

I Sacked My Writing Coach!

John Lacey — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:02:24 +0000

I should warn you. What follows is disgruntled, self-pitying and inspired by an inability to actually confront my increasingly vexing NaNoWriMo project…

I am reminded of the lyrics of The Sunscreen Song, that novelty record ostensibly by Baz Luhrmann, with words taken from Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich:

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

And then there’s Merlin Mann’s advice about advice as it relates to NaNoWriMo:

And, the warning? Don’t read too many blog posts like this.

The hounds are out this month, guys, and they smell your fear and self-doubt. So, shovelbloggers will be offering you a tantalizing Vegas-style buffet of endless writing “help” that will range from the indispensable to the stupid to the unconscionably poisonous. And, smile though they might, those folks could care less if all those page views end up killing your word count or distracting you at the one delicate moment you were about to ﬁgure out your troubled third act. Their job is to make you stop working. Don’t let them. Okay?

I am an exceedingly awful writer, truth be told. NaNoWriMo has made me realise this. Not because I lack ideas, not because I can’t string a sentence together. But because I really don’t like ‘showing up.’ I like writing blog posts. I find something quite wonderous about them. I’ll start with a vague idea and somehow by the end of it, almost despite myself, I will have arrived at the end of that thought process, I will know what I now think, I will have expressed it and actually the prose itself isn’t too bad either. But for one reason or another, NaNoWriMo has been a grating experience. I secretly want to punch the next teenager who remarks on how much ‘fun’ it is.

Yes, I have next to no willpower. I’m not having fun. So ocassionally I will seek encouragement from various sources… But advice, as Mann and Schmich have observed, isn’t always helpful. You could imagine the solace (or lackthereof) I received when I went looking for encouragement to continue with my memoir project and came into contact with this from Jurgen Wolff:

The one area I would warn most people away from is the memoir. Unless you have been in the public eye or have a truly remarkable experience to relate, it is difficult to interest people outside of your immediate family in your life story (sometimes it’s even hard to interest people inside your family…) Of course, you have the option of self-publishing such a work and distributing it to friends and relatives.

This wonderful quote is from a book titled, “Your Writing Coach: From Concept To Character, From Pitch To Publication.” The tag line of this book is: “Everything you need to know about writing novels, non-fiction, new media, scripts and short stories.”

I guess when it comes to writing memoir everything you need to know is essentially ‘don’t bother.’

But Wolff taps into a much greater anti-memoir sentiment that I have noticed elsewhere and often. I’ve observed it in writing podcasts where hosts tell the memoirist that their work “… is a memoir but it has the devices and language of fiction” as if that made up for the fact that the author dared to write from their own experience. [So widely shared is this belief that authors have taken to calling their works 'creative non-fiction' to try to combat it.] There was also a suggestion that there should be “more novels, less memoirs” because “if you’re working in fiction, good for you, because as far as I’m concerned that’s how to get the truth.”

I get it people. Fiction is the order of the day, and Twilight and Harry Potter the centre of the universe. That’s fine. [I've not read either, though looking at the Twilight movie posters I can't help but think shirtless men - vampiric or otherwise - probably do speak to great life truths. Erm, somehow.] Kudos to everyone whose passions revolve around those things – no, really. I am very happy for you. But lived experience is what interests me. And actually there’s a really good chance I will never finish this memoir, there’s a good chance I will not make 50,000 words by the end of this month. There’s a good chance this will never be published, that it will never see the light of day. So, you know, you won’t have to read it. You probably won’t even have the opportunity to read it. And in the meanwhile it keeps me off the streets and from J-walking or loitering or something…

Write What You Know. Write What You Feel.

John Lacey — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:52:22 +0000

Write what you know. Write what you feel. It’s classic writing advice. Here screenwriter Bill Grundfest and Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. offer their thoughts on the importance of writing from your own perspective and from your own personal history.

Bill Grundfest (whose credits include writing and producing Mad About You) on The Writing Show:

So it comes from writing not from your head, but from your guts and from your pain and from your humiliation and all that stuff. And I see a lot of scripts where it involves, ‘And then the police get them in the interrogation room and they interrogate them!’ And I’ll ask the writer, I’ll say, ‘How many interrogations have you been in?’ And they’ll say, ‘Well, none.’ I’ll say, ‘So why are you writing about interrogation rooms? There are people actually who have been in interrogation rooms who are writing about interrogation rooms. But I’m gonna guess that there’s a lot of stuff that you have experienced that only you know. And you can put that stuff in any genre.’

Berry Gordy Jr. talking about The Motown Legacy on Motown 50 podcast:

When we were in the creative business my feeling was ‘Wait a minute – what is the human element?’ And rather than write what somebody else I think they would like, I told the writers and all the people ‘Write what you feel. It’s about YOU. What do you feel? Because you’re a normal person, I’m a normal person.’ So if we write what we feel then we’re not gonna look down on those people and say, ‘Well, wait a minute, we feel this way, we’re gonna write this for these people over here. Or we’re gonna write this ’cause it’s commercial. Or we’re gonna do this…’ I said, ‘No, always stick with what you feel.’

To what extent do your life experiences inform your writing?

Karen McQuestion: Every Acceptance Is A Victory

John Lacey — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:37:16 +0000

The wonderful Cynthia Harrison (who has been a dear friend to this blog and supporter of my efforts) has published an amazing interview with Karen McQuestion on writing, rejection and the power of Kindle publishing.

I strongly recommend you read the entire interview at Cynthia’s website but I just wanted to include Karen’s comments about rejection here. Hopefully they will inspire and comfort you as much as they have inspired and comforted me.

Karen McQuestion:

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been rejected overall. Hundreds? Thousands? Maybe tens of thousands. When I first started out it was so painful. I’d try to find meaning in the words (if I was a talented writer and it was a compelling story why didn’t they want it?). There were several times, usually after a near-miss, where I’d get frustrated and decide I was through with writing. That usually lasted a day or two and then I’d get another “really good idea.” Now I put my best effort out there and take rejection in stride. No one owes me publication and every acceptance is a victory. I usually submit a shorter piece fifteen to twenty times before I decide to give it a rest. And after that I may revise and send it out again. Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing.

Cynthia is the author of Your Words, Your Story (a book that arrived in my inbox two days ago and one that I am really looking forward to reading!).

A Novel Approach To Editing

John Lacey — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:28:06 +0000

Some word processing packages have facilities to track revisions to your documents. In her book The Writer’s Survival Guide, Rachel Simon offers a slightly less sophisticated technique for making non-destructive revisions to your manuscript. She writes:

[...] I remembered that I had once read about a writer who threw into a dresser drawer everything he scissored out of his early drafts. I decided to follow this example and see if it helped, though I decided to use not a drawer, but a computer file. I called it CUTS, and whenever I hit a section of writing that I thought I might need to sever from the novel, I simply tossed it in there. Almost instantly, I lost any residual squeamishness about revising my novel, because I knew that if I wanted to reuse those sections, they still existed. This, in turn, reinforced my new ability to see my text as fluid. I could cut, I could retrieve, I could add, I could cut what I added. The novel melted from solid concrete back to a liquid form, one that I could pour and repour into new shapes and sizes. I felt freer than I’d ever felt before. After twenty-five years of writing, I finally felt that I was learning to write.

Although I read a hard cover copy of Simon’s book, I just discovered that you can read the entire book for free at her website.

Minor Memoirs

John Lacey — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:04:08 +0000

Continuing in what seems to be an unintentional series of blog posts inspired by my childhood, while sorting through old papers and documents I found something quite interesting. My autobiography. Well, at least between birth and the age of 12 when my first high school English teacher insisted I wrote it. It is a remarkable and hilarious document that I earnestly typed out (with a typewriter) and stuck photographs – and other artifacts of my childhood – onto. It consists of the following categories:

Birth and Background
My Early Childhood
Early Schooling
Outstanding Memories and Incidents In My Life
My Family Today
My Friends
Interests In Life
My First Impressions Of High School
Hopes For The Future
Special Things About Me

This Is Me Then: Some photographs from different times in my life.

One of the understandings I arrived at doing the morning pages is that moods and thoughts are transistory. I often forget things as quickly and easily as I think of them. Writing them down for future reference can be a fascinating exercise and taking time to document your life at different stages can help build the narrative of your life and give your life today some sense of context. For example this is what I wrote for my Hopes For The Future:

I hope to get good grades in the following years and to go on to complete my six years of school. Then go on to work in a radio station.

I graduated high school and got grades I could feel proud of, but I actually found myself in a radio station before I even left high school. It was community radio, an unpaid gig certainly, but the point was I was doing it. I was music director, producer, researcher, announcer for various radio shows as a teenager and even now there is a Listener’s Choice – Best Production award on the bookshelf beside me from that time. Often when you sit down to a creative endeavour the fears that impede your work don’t have any sense of reality or of history. They don’t consider what you’ve done before, how resourceful you’ve been. Indeed when presented with my current memoir project I had no memory of this other memoir project from years gone by. Now I realise I’ve done it before. I also realise it won’t be hard to better my last attempt. This is encouraging!

I wanted to also note something similar to this that my primary school got us to do. Each year we were given a form to fill in, documenting our then favourite things – foods, activities, friends, music, films and books. This took hardly any time to do and yet builds such a vivid picture of childhood development. I hope schools still do this.

John Lacey » Writing

Art Practice: Meditation Versus Action

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Julia Cameron on ‘Real’ Writers

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When No One Cares…

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Classroom Community Of Writers

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Wayson Choy: Your Story Is Absolutely Worth Telling

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I Sacked My Writing Coach!

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Write What You Know. Write What You Feel.

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Karen McQuestion: Every Acceptance Is A Victory

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A Novel Approach To Editing

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Minor Memoirs

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