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The Master’s Artist: The Art of Rest

June 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In case you haven’t been reading this blog (or my tweets or my Facebook posts), my life has drastically changed. Which means a drastic change to my writing and creative process.

These days, I’m learning the art of rest.

I’ve had to come to terms with this word that reads like sin to me. I’ve had to accept that sometimes undisciplined is okay, that sometimes, undisciplined means rest. Sometimes it means savoring those snippets of my son’s life that dance like the sun through the leaves, creating ever-changing patterns. Sometimes it means sitting back and, for a moment, just a quick moment, doing nothing.

Read the rest of the post: The Art of Rest.

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The Existential World of Chess

June 15, 2011 By 1 Comment

I am learning how to play chess.

I’ve never learned before. Okay, that’s a lie. I learned in elementary school and even played a game or two back in the day–the day, meaning when I wasn’t choreographing dance moves to New Kids on the Block or Debbie Gibson and filming the dance in front of a live studio audience made up of my stuffed animals. I didn’t like chess back in elementary school. I wasn’t exactly what you would call a strategic thinker (maybe you got that from the choreographing antics).

I haven’t touched the board since the sixth grade. Except to dust it. (We have this really cool one my husband got in Africa.) To be honest, I don’t really want to learn now, what with learning how to be a mother and all. I think there’s enough learning going on.

But the story demands it. I can’t fake it.

So I checked out a couple of books from the library. (When my husband saw them, he mentioned that he already has some books on the subject and would be happy to teach me how to play. My husband is an excellent teacher when it comes to things like these, but I don’t want him to realize how stupid I am, so I’m reading about how to play first.)

The book I’m currently making my way through (slowly–see above comment about learning how to be a mother; see also numerous tweets about having a boy who doesn’t believe in naps) is Let’s Play Chess: A Step-by-Step Guide for New Players by Bruce Pandolfini.

When the man says “step-by-step…for new players,” he wasn’t joking. With some detail, he explains the chessboard, the difference between a board and pieces, between White and Black players (meaning, according to the lighter and darker squares on the board, not according to ethnicity), between a piece and a pawn. He describes what a move is and informs us that you can’t capture your own forces (no friendly fire here!). He defines legal and illegal moves: “A legal move abides by the rules of the game: it can be played. An illegal move violates the rules of the game: it can’t be played.”

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

He also gives us handy mantras and mnemonic devices, like “light on right” (to remember the starting position of the board for naming the horizontal ranks and the vertical files) and “queen on the square of her own color.”

Here’s the interesting thing: chess raises existential questions, like the fact that you can’t move a unit in two different directions on the same turn (except for the knight), or that while the rest of the pieces retain their original queenside or kingside designations throughout the game, no matter which side they have now moved to, the pawn is renamed every time it moves. Identity crisis? Chameleon?

Perhaps there’s a story to the game itself, to how the pieces move, to how they exist in time and space. Maybe this will be my saving grace as I attempt to relearn this difficult enterprise.

Or, perhaps, I’m doomed, for according to Bruce, “If you can’t ‘see ahead’ it’s hard to play chess with logic and purpose.” I’m more of a live-in-the-moment sort of girl.

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Write Like You Might Live for Another Few Decades

June 10, 2011 By 4 Comments

I had a scare recently. The doctor felt a lump in my breast.

He wasn’t too concerned. Statistics were on my side: I’m young! I have no family history of breast cancer! I’m breastfeeding! Just to be sure, though, he scheduled an ultrasound for me.

Most of the time, I took my cues from him. I feared not, for statistics! But some of the time, I worried. Who would take care of my husband and son if the worst what if came true?

What ifs have a funny way of making me think about how I would live my life if I only had a limited time left. Okay, so we all have a limited time left, but if I knew my limited time to be shorter than average, would I live differently? Often, we use a question like this to make sure we’re living Quality Lives, that we’re not setting aside the Really Important for the Frivolous.

If I knew I had only months or a year left, I would change things about my life. I would eliminate blogging, tweeting, facebooking. I would exchange fiction writing for writing letters to my husband and son to read when I’m gone. I would ask my husband to take off as many FMLA days as he could so we could have many, many family cuddle days. This is how I would spend my Last Days.

But I can’t spend a lifetime of Last Days. I have to spend most days like Ordinary Days. Chris has to go to work so we don’t fall into debt. And as far as my writing? I believe my writing–my attempts to create something truthful and beautiful in this world–have the possibility of leaving a legacy for Keegan. Even if I never receive worldwide renown (I’m sure this is just around the corner–any day now!), crafting words (and sometimes music or yarn or food) shows Keegan (and perhaps others) a piece of who we are meant to be as humans. Just as my husband displays kingdom truth and beauty in business, I do so in writing. In this way, we serve God’s kingdom work. Keegan needs to see this.

The sono showed the lump to be benign. So today, while Keegan naps, instead of holding him and watching him sleep (like I did yesterday, so thankful that, at least for now, breast cancer won’t be robbing me of a life with my son), I sit at computer and write. I toil over words, discovering, responding, communicating.

And when he wakes up, we’ll go to the dairy farm for milk and cheese. Then we’ll dance to Tchaikovsky or maybe Fiddler on the Roof. And yes, when he eats, I’ll tweet and facebook. It’s my lifeline to adult conversation, after all.

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On My Short Story

May 19, 2011 By 2 Comments

I open my Dragon Dictate app from my iPhone (so technological! so advanced!) and listen to the notes I dictated yesterday from my walk. The high school girls, on their way home from school, chatting, each with one ear piece draped from an ear to an mp3 player. The older Korean gentleman (why do I think him Korean? why not Japanese or Vietnamese?) watering his rose bushes then winding his garden hose into a plastic box.

I’ve been playing with this one short story since before Keegan was born (more than a lifetime devoted to this piece!). I don’t know if it will be any good. It’s too ordinary to be really good. But it expresses something about how I see the world around me. By world, I don’t mean some vast, all-encompassing thing. I mean my neighborhood, really.

Somewhere along the line, the story got out of hand, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. When I began the piece, I had something specific I wanted to explore and communicate. I danced with satire, but discovered that it needed a gentler hand, that things weren’t what they seemed.

The other day on our run, I saw the family who first inspired this story. I hadn’t seen them in several years, yet there they were, the daughter and granddaughter in the front yard, the grandmother pulling up to the house in her Acura. I wanted to stop and tell them: did they know somehow? Did they remember me from our meeting years ago? But I opted against seeming like a creeper.

The New Yorker had a story on Ree Drummond, of Pioneer Woman fame. She blogs about everyday life (though a somewhat romanticized, perhaps even Hollywoodized version–and soon it will be a Hollywoodized version in the form of a movie) of life on a ranch. So many interesting stories! So exotic to most of our everyday lives! My suburban life by comparison is dull. Maybe that’s why I write fiction. But this life–this suburban life–holds something all the same.

So I plug along, a paragraph at a time, stopping on my walks/runs with Keegan to jot down a note, holding a sentence in my head, tasting it like you would wine, while grocery shopping. And maybe a bit of truth will emerge from this everyday suburban life.

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You Tawkin’ to Me?

April 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

A strange occurrence. As I mentioned before, my husband and I have been watching old episodes of NCIS via Netflix DVDs. The other day, McGee said this:

Oh, wow! You’re reading Moonstone! Hey, you know Dorothy Sayers thought that was the best detective story ever written. And T.S. Eliot called it the first true English Detective novel.

This is significant because at that very moment, I was reading (and am reading) Moonstone. Well, not at that very moment because I was, at that very moment, watching TV and doing Pilates. But you get the point.

Also, I came across this from Jonathan Franzen about writing a novel:

The more you pursue distractions, the less effective any particular distraction is, and so I’d had to up various dosages, until, before I knew it, I was checking my e-mail every ten minutes . . . and I’d achieved such deep mastery of computer solitaire that my goal was no longer to win a game but to win two or more games in a row–a kind of meta-solitaire whose fascination consisted not in playing the cards but in surfing the streaks of wins and losses. My longest winning streak so far was eight.

Ah-ha! I knew it! Even the greats cannot resist the evils of the Internet and Solitaire. I bet he’s a Words with Friends user, too.

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The Hogwash of “Write What You Know”

April 14, 2011 By 1 Comment

“Rule number seven: always be specific when you lie.”
- Gibbs, NCIS Season 1, episode 23 “Reveille”

Lies, and stories, are in the details. Confession: I am lazy. Or, I can be. It’s easier to either write a story with a knowledge base I already have (a character who specializes in something I’ve specialized in, for example), or to fake it (I’ve seen this on TV. . .).

Which is funny because I love research. In college, I wanted all the lurid details of Tchaikovsky’s possible affair with the nephew of the dean. Or how Bartok used folk music in his creations. Or why Sondheim’s lyrics to “I Feel Pretty” disappointed him. In grad school, I actually enjoyed the detailed exegeticals. On my trip to Israel, my hand protested the amount of notes I took. I considered for a brief moment getting another masters, this time in archaeology, because of my new-found fascination. I struggled reigning in the information for the articles I was to write.

But when it comes to fiction, I’m lazy with the research. I want to get lost in these worlds and characters, but I don’t want to get off my butt and take a shooting class to learn about the character with a fascination with guns or read copious amounts of comic books to understand what makes this teen-aged boy tick. I’d rather write what I know–places I’ve already lived in, characters with my interests.

Writing what I know limits me. At some point, it bores my reader. Worse, it keeps me in my comfortable box. Maybe it should be “know what you write.” This is why I’m trying something new with one of my short stories. I’m going to write about something about which I have a minuscule knowledge base. To be honest, it scares me a little bit. What if I can’t learn enough to pull it off? What if I still come off the idiot? What if it looks like I’m trying too hard?

So I dive into a new world. I’m not sure when I’m going to learn about this new subject with a new baby (isn’t that new subject enough to learn?), but this character (and her short story) demands my attention. She chats to me while I’m running. She hangs around while I’m trying to feed Keegan (although she politely averts her eyes since she’s rather modest). She joins me in my afternoon tea. You wouldn’t think it when you first met her, but she’s determined. Not feisty exactly–she’s too quiet to be described with that term–but decided. Persevering.

Wish me luck.

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Getting to Know the Delete Key and Other Thoughts on Writing

April 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“Striving toward art wasn’t so much about selection as about rejection.”
- Charles Turner in “Ends of the Earth,” a short story published in Image (No. 68)

Which is why I’m deleting every word I wrote yesterday. I used to think that the creation of art was linear. Every day, you add words. Not that you never delete them, but the additions would over-compensate the subtractions so that by the end of the day you’d always have more words, not fewer. You’d progress along the journey, arrive somewhere new, even if it was a rest stop on the way to the final destination.

Not so much.

Not to say I’m not progressing, but my idea of progression has changed. It’s not so different from practicing piano. I can spend hours perfecting a passage only to come to the same passage the next day as if I’d never seen those notes arranged in that way before in my life.

The direction I wanted to take my story yesterday (so innovative! so symbolic! so ironic and even iconic!) seems vapid today. But this is how we create art. I can’t put my finger on the correct metaphor: it’s not linear, but neither is it cyclical. It’s a journey, but more meandering, less direct. My GPS would not appreciate the deviations I’d take from the route she so efficiently mapped out for me (“turn around when possible,” she’d repeat).

So I reject more ideas than I choose, more words than I keep, more stories than I finish.

***

I write slower these days. Perhaps it is laziness or fear. Those are possibilities. Certainly it has to do with my new “interruption” (and such an adorable interruption he is!). But in some ways, I also write more deliberately. This may be part and parcel of my new life: I write in my head more while walking with Keegan or doing (another) load of laundry (really, how much laundry can one ten-pound baby create?).

Who’s to say if this is a better way to write or not? I still put words to page that will end up in the trash. But I’ve lost the rush to write, the need to produce a certain number of pages each day or each week. Maybe I’m only losing my discipline. Or maybe it’s only for a time. Or maybe it’s a change in how I view writing.

***

Writing has become less important.

Also, writing has become more important.

No longer do I care as much about tallying pages at the end of the day. And while I still research journals and agents, while I still aspire toward publishing my books (don’t you want to meet Marnie and Sarah and Morning?), I no longer feel defined by that. Not to say I’m defined by motherhood now. That’s not it exactly. But infants nurse for but a moment. I spend my time memorizing Keegan’s smiles–that is my art.

Yet the need to create, to form in my part of the world something beautiful, especially through my writing (but also through gardening, through family meals, through music made together, through knitting) drives me to continue typing. I want to teach Keegan what it means to be fully human, and that means to nurture creativity in myself and in my family. Someday he’ll teach me, for his creativity will be something different from mine.

So I still write. And I delete. And I walk away from the computer and dance to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with babe in arms.

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Finding the Familiar

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“Most of all the cooking in the world is comfort food. It is food designed to remind us of familiar things, to connect us with our personal histories and our communities and our families.”
- John Lanchester, “Incredible Edibles” in The New Yorker (March 21, 2011)

I came across this passage in an article the other day describing modern food. Of course, the article went on to say how modern food these days deviates from the familiar, but the point stands: we seek the familiar. It reminds us that we belong, that we are loved, that we are known.

Several years ago, my husband asked me why I write. I answered, “So that others won’t feel alone.” A year or so later, I came across the C.S. Lewis quote: “We read to know we are not alone.” Perhaps I’d read the quote before and subconsciously connected it to why I write. Perhaps it’s a common sentiment that many recognize.

As writers, we’re told to find the fresh–a fresh voice, a fresh angle, a fresh take. This is true. The world would be bored by the same old story told over and over again.

But the world also longs to hear the same old story told over and over again. We long for the comfort of the known–to know that the hero wins and how, to know that Elizabeth ends up with Darcy or that it is in Romeo and Juliet’s death that their families reconcile. How many times can I watch When Harry Met Sally? Or read Anne of Green Gables? Yesterday, I read “Childhood Lost,” a poem by blogging friend Eric Swalberg. It broke my heart because I sensed the familiar–an emotion of fleeting time on which I’ve been meditating since Keegan’s birth.

Part of the job of the artist is to reveal humanity, and this requires creating things in such a way that the audience sees things from a different perspective. But even as we do this, we invoke the familiar so that the audience says, yes, I know this house, this family, that girl. And in knowing our characters, the audience knows that they, too, are known.

In this familiarity is life itself. It is more than Google stats or page counts or number of comments. These may tell us we are popular (or not so popular) for a moment, but they’re ecclesiastical. It is not a belonging that lasts. When we write words to page, paint oils to canvas, strike keys on piano, the timelessness of our creations is not in the masses, in the bestsellers or high bids. It is how we resonate with one another, connect, communicate, commune, if only with an individual. And in this type of familiarity, we find the unique, the fresh–how my mom wields spices for her pumpkin pie recipe, how my neighbor cares for his roses, how my son sleeps with the same expression his father sleeps with. Hollywood’s bland worlds and practiced anti-accents ultimately fail us. Mass marketed fruit paintings may look pretty on our walls, but they don’t touch us. Commercial jingles may move us to consume, but they don’t move us to create.

So today, I write about the rose-tender in my neighborhood, the cloves in my mother’s pumpkin pie, the sleep of my son, offering my familiar that you might find yours. And in this way, art again creates community.

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Forging Yourself

March 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

“Modigliani might have done stronger work in painting if he weren’t driven to forge a signature look–to make a name for himself, as his time ran short.”

- Peter Schjeldahl, “Long Faces” in The New Yorker

As I read this bit in a an article about Modigliani a couple of weeks ago, two questions came to mind:

  1. Are we more concerned with our legacy than with the work itself?
  2. Are we more concerned with our brand than with taking risks?

This speaks to the relationship of the artist with his audience and how much the artist is concerned with or writes for a particular audience.

(Side note, just this morning, I read in Amy Inspired by Bethany Pierce a section where the protagonist–also a writer–asks this question.)

I don’t mean to say that we should ignore the good people in the marketing department or fight editors (who, most likely, want to help you write the best story you can). It doesn’t mean becoming obscure for the sake of obscurity and weirdness. After all, if art is the revelation of truth, then on some level, it is a communication; it is communal.

But art is dangerous.

Later in the article, Mr. Schjedahl writes that Modigliani is one of the most forged artists in the world. His style and “stock-in-trade imagery” (or “logo-like motif”) gives us a series of works in which Modigliani “practically faked himself.”

I’ve come across this in artists and authors–one work is exactly like all of their others. At some point, they stop taking risks. They stop delving into humanity. They stop asking questions because they found something that worked. But is it wrong when they’ve found something that resonated with a particular audience? Or has the audience merely become complacent with the artist?

At the heart of this may be the question of pride (at least for the artist–I won’t deal with the possible complacency of the audience here). If I write in order to make a name for myself, if I write for my own glory (or legacy), then that limits my art. Fear of disapproval may keep me from exploring truth in my art. But the other side can step in as well. If, in order to protect ourselves–our pride–we use obscurity and esoterism (it’s okay; I can make up words–I’m a writer) to purposefully distance ourselves from audiences (or a particular audience) so that we reject the audience before the audience can reject us (I broke up with you first!), then that, too, can limit our art.

As we all suspected, no one answer exists to these questions. The relationship of art, the artist, and the audience changes from artist to artist and even within an artist’s own oeuvre. I believe my Christianity informs how I practice this and even frees me to explore more deeply without concern as to my own legacy. After all, it’s about God’s glory, not mine. As I focus on the questions in my art, I can trust God to do with the end product what he will. (I’m not saying I do a good job of this. I’m saying I can trust him with that. The ability to do something and the practice of that ability are two different subjects.)

While many within and without the Christian faith critique how Christianity limits our art, in this area, we can look to how it gives us more freedom.

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Where’s That Darn Saddle

March 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I seemed to have misplaced the saddle in which I’m supposed to be back. (Trust me, that sounded funny in my head.) But I have good news:

  1. I actually have bona fide ideas for writing again. (Notice, I didn’t say they were good ideas, but ideas, nonetheless.) The other day, while walking Keegan in our neighborhood, a short story idea came to me. And I’ve been itching to get back to the short story I began BK (before Keegan). Perhaps someday I’ll return to editing my novel. But let’s not get hasty.
  2. Some semblance of a routine (which may allow me to pursue #1, see above) is visible in the distance. Perhaps not even the too-far distance. Exhibit A: this blog. I’m writing an actual, real, live blog post while my dear son naps in his crib.
  3. One small child produces enough laundry to clothe Tibet. (Extensive studies have been done on the amount of cotton needed to clothe Tibet.) This is neither necessarily good nor apropos of the former two points, but it begged saying. Especially as it waits for me on our pool table, aka laundry folding table. Except maybe it does relate in that I have to let go of some things in order to both enjoy my baby boy (and, seriously, how could I not enjoy the most adorable baby in the world?) and work toward finding some writing time so I don’t go crazy (no comment from the peanut gallery, please.) So the laundry sits unfolded and piles of who-knows-what develop on the coffee table and kitchen counter. (I’m allowing the growth of material for a later expedition. Imagine how fun it’ll be to dig through this pile in a few months for that unpaid credit card bill!)

So there you have it. I’m on the search for that darn saddle. In the meantime, me and Mr. Ed will enjoy cooing a smile out of a certain little boy.

Filed Under: motherhood, the creative life, time management, writing Tagged With: , ,
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