I’m a huge fan of John Irving. If you happen to not like the stuff I write and wish I’d never gotten the itch to put it out in public, then you can put at least a bit of the responsibility on his shoulders. To me, his work is the perfect blend of literary and popular fiction. You get the brain candy of his absurd plots and loveable characters, and yet, when you’re done, you don’t feel like you’ve just junked out. Your brain has been nourished, you’re a little more understanding of everyone’s eccentricities, and you understand that you can laugh and cry about the world at the same time. I remember reading someone’s review of A Prayer for Owen Meany. They used the book as a test for whether or not a relationship could last. If the person reading it didn’t like it, then they simply didn’t have a soul, and there would be trouble ahead. That’s pretty high praise for a book, but it’s praise that is well earned.
Irving’s writing has soul. If he was a musician, he’d be an old blues player. His writing is very firmly grounded in the world of the average American, and he has a talent for making those lives into epic tales of love and loss. Yes, he seems to have a predisposition towards bears and writing about writers and New England and a number of other things that you come to expect will show up at least once in every couple of novels, but that’s what he knows, and I would argue that it’s a testament to his talent as a writer that he’s made those things vivid enough for us to notice their repetition.
I haven’t read his latest novel, Last Night in Twisted River, yet, but it’s on the bookshelf begging for me to finish off those other books and get to it. I’m looking forward to the moment I can do that.
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Wow. Copyblogger’s How Your Emotions Are Strangling the Life Out of Your Copy is right on the money. I struggle with this all the time.
Whenever you feel like you’re taking a risk, an emotional response is triggered. Your emotional needs feel threatened. The filter is engaged, and your bold copy turns into a big puddle of boringness.
Yep. Been there, done that. And I know that this article is directed more towards editorial style blogging articles, but it is also true for prose and poetry. In fact, the problem is especially pernicious in prose and poetry because you can hide the fact that you just censored yourself behind a bunch of metaphors and neat literary devices.
I don’t worry about random people judging me so much as friends and family. You get this awesome idea or insight, and maybe it’s a bit weird or a bit dark. Even if you’re exploring the idea with a completely fictional character, you’re the one who’s thinking about it, who’s putting it on the page. It’s in your brain. Somewhere. And what does this say about you? I wonder if a guy like Stephen King worries about this stuff. He manages to write some of the most fucked up characters imaginable and I’ve often heard people say, “Thank God he’s a writer,” even after praising his imagination. The suggestion, of course, is that if he wasn’t a writer, he’d be one of those fucked up characters. And, when you look at it that way, what a nasty thing to say about a writer…
I’ve noticed in myself and humanity as a whole that even the best of us feel this need to undercut anyone who’s successful. We have to find the faults. We have to take them down. That’s one way of bringing them to our level. The other way would be empathy – realizing that no matter the talent or success of somebody, they still love, hate, fear, and worry about what people think of them, just like we do. It’s hard, when someone like Stephen King makes it look so easy. But next time, instead of saying, “Thank God he’s a writer,” I’m going to simply thank him for doing what he’s doing, which is paving the way for other writers to think strange thoughts and write about the possibilities those thoughts open up… and not feel guilty about it.
I recently stumbled upon Michelle Malkin, someone I had no clue existed but who is apparently quite popular with the far right of the United States. I found myself gritting my teeth as I read attack piece after attack piece, each one held together by questionable links and even more questionable reasoning, and as I continued to read, I tried to figure out what it was about Malkin’s “journalism” that made it so distasteful. After all, my last post was an undisguised bashing of Rahim Jaffer, a politician I find particularly loathsome.
So, what’s the difference between someone like Malkin and someone like me? I fear that the truth is: not much. Both of us believe that we’re one of the good guys and that whoever or whatever we attack constitutes the bad. Our arguments seem rock solid to us and hopelessly contrived to each other.
This isn’t anything new, of course. We’ve all complained about how polarized debate is becoming at one time or another in the last decade. It’s almost as much fun to complain about polarization as it is to be polarized. And as we become more and more aware of this polarization, it’s tempting to blame it on the rise of the Internet – and the rise of blogging, in particular. After all, if we didn’t have all these “amateurs” out there editorializing everything to the point that facts are considered secondary to the narrative they’re trying to convey – and instead left it all to “real journalists” to deliver informed, well researched news – wouldn’t we be better off?
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Since seeing Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on creativity, I’ve thought a lot about muses. When we hear someone refer to a muse, we often think of a beautiful woman with whom a poet is deeply in love, writing poem after poem after poem for. I shudder to think of how many poor women have been tormented by moronic attempts at verse because of this personification. Ladies, you have my sympathy.
That’s not to say muses aren’t important. Gilbert’s talk made me realize that, far from simply being an easy source of inspiration, they’re a necessary mechanism an artist uses to keep from becoming too self-absorbed while creating some very personal and subjective things. A muse brings coherence to these personal experiences, making them transcend the person. It simultaneously allows an artist to maintain a comfortable distance from whatever it is that torments him to create and provides a framework in which others can understand those creations.
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Here’s something cool I just noticed on Chris Cornell’s site. You can hear the song on his site. The lyrics are written by one of his fans, Rory Dela Rosa. Now before everyone gets too jealous about how cool it must have been to write a song with one of rock’s most talented singer/songwriter’s, you should know something about Rory. In April, he lost his six year old daughter to cancer and then he got handed his own cancer death sentence a few months later. As much as I dig Chris’ stuff, I’d take life over collaboration in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, Rory doesn’t have the choice.
One of the coolest things about being an artist is that you get to record parts of you that will live on past your physical death. I’d say the belief I have in that is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religion. It’s no small comfort to know that people will have your poetic best to remember you by. Hat’s off to Chris Cornell for taking the time and helping to make something beautiful out of such awful circumstances.
Steven Johnson wrote a great post about how to write a book on BoingBoing today. I like how he gives himself a lot of time to play with ideas and how he manages that play with Devonthink. I think maximizing creativity isn’t necessarily about putting more effort into thinking creatively as it is about properly handling and recording the flashes of insight that we all have. Having a wide range of tools at your disposal, and especially having one or two that you can access often, will go a long way in allowing creative moments to be properly managed, perhaps avoiding the much feared disease that is writer’s block. I wish I had had a system like this when I started writing. I think the entire process could have been a lot easier than it turned out to be.
I’ve been using Twitter a lot lately as a way to find out about some of the stuff that’s brewing out there just a bit outside of the mainstream. It sort of reminds me of when I’d go into a record store and browse heavy metal CDs, just looking for a band with an interesting name or a great album cover or song names that sent my imagination running. Like anyone else, I still listened a lot to whatever was being played on the radio, but I also enjoyed the excitement of actually finding something myself, without the help of big advertising. Then I’d mercilessly harass my friends about this great band that they absolutely have to hear! My friends are probably very grateful that the Internet has been so successful and I now have an outlet other than them. Feel free, my millions of anonymous friends, to click on to something else, but I’m telling you, you’ll be missing out on me giving you the details on a pretty cool author I ran into on my random Twitter treks… Meet Gretchen Rubin. She’s a writer who, for a while, was stuck in a lawyer’s body. Post-freedom, she’s published four books and has one on the way: The Happiness Project. That’s the one that drew me in to find out some more about her. The premise is pretty cool. It’s a memoir of a year spent trying out all the various tips and tricks, from gurus and scientific studies alike, that are intended to make us happier. Now, there are A LOT of books out there about how to make yourself happier. Hell, there are entire “self help” sections dedicated to it. What makes this one different? Well, I think the really refreshing thing about it is that Gretchen isn’t a guru or a psychologist or a scientist or anyone else you’d expect to be writing on the subject. And she doesn’t pretend to be. Instead, she’s made herself the guinea pig and is giving us her insight on how these ideas work for someone who isn’t trying to sell them. (more…)
Chris Brogan just wrote a great post on writing habits. I just finished the final draft of my first novel, Leaving Wonderland (preview here), and I think he was pretty bang on. His emphasis on structure is key. I wrote Leaving Wonderland in chunks. A scene here, a scene there. Sometimes I didn’t know where something would even fit as I wrote it. But even writing in this sort of haphazard way, I always had the major plot points in mind. The beginning and the end were never in question. This novel was also the last in a long line of false starts. None of those false starts were particularly bad ideas. It’s easy to come up with great ideas for a novel. The problem was that I simply ran out of steam. And I ran out of steam because I hadn’t written enough to know how to keep motivated on an idea. The only cure for that is, of course, to keep writing. Chris takes a much better approach than I did originally, by writing in many different formats and on many different subjects. Always writing about something allows him to hone his skills and get valuable feedback about finished works while he chips away at the longer pieces. One of my karate senseis told us that the only secret to karate is repetition. Same goes for writing. You just have to do it over and over again until it gets to where you want it to be.
This is a great presentation by Christopher Penn on ways to coax your inner creative genius out of hiding. In it, he explores five almost mechanistic techniques that actually make your mind feel like less of a machine and more like the effortless fountain of inspiration we’d like it to be. Wander on an aimless journey of association, turn things into black boxes so you can chain them together (a good software developer will have this form of thinking burned into the circuits of his brain), draw parallels between past and future, experiment with artificial variations of tools and techniques, or start with an already great idea and figure out what it needs to push it to an even higher level. These may seem like simple concepts, but this presentation makes them look fresh again, and if the role of a really good teacher is to point out what you already know in a way that encourages you to go even further in our necessarily solitary search for Truth, then I suggest that Mr. Penn is definitely one of the best.
When I started watching this, I almost wrote it off as some web 2.0 remix version of the infamous “after school special” of days gone by. It seemed – how can I put this? – very straight edge. [ For those who are unfamiliar with the term "straight edge", you can click the link for the wikipedia article or you can just be satisfied with my admittedly biased labeling of this group as journeyman fundamentalists. ] Even after it has gotten over the sizable chunk of time dedicated to admonishing you for ever taking an intoxicant, it goes on to suggest that anyone with a new laptop is probably using it to hide his or her inferior creativity. But just as I started to think that the creator had simply taken everything he had not experienced or did not own and turned it into crosses that the geniuses of the world must bear, the moralizing that had been bothering me got turned down a bit, and I was able to enjoy a Desiderata-like message to the creative class. This side of the video is, I think, captured best when it warns the struggling creative to “avoid the water cooler gang”.
I was on a camping trip a few years back with some friends. One of them painted in her spare time. We were looking at this tree in front of us, and she was telling me that painting a tree like that would frustrate her because there would always be at least one branch that looked out of place. Being in one of my more philosophical moods, I thought aloud, “You know, that might be the path to genius – that one branch that you just can’t get right.” Here’s my reasoning… That branch that’s out of place is out of place because of something very unique to the painter. Her brain somehow sees it differently, and the harder she tries to take herself out of the scene and represent what’s actually there, the more apparent her affect is. It’s sort of like the Observer Effect in physics. I think some of the best art is created when someone notices that Observer Effect and, instead of trying to escape it, tries to really understand it, to embrace it. They turn the apparent flaw into a unique ability. No one else can describe the scene or paint that picture quite like they can. And certainly, in my own experience, my favorite bits of writing or musical composition have always resulted after a long period of trying to improve upon a flaw, where I finally give up trying to fix it, and in a moment of defiance I just do what comes naturally. So, for those of you out there who are stuck in a rut in terms of trying to improve your art, ask yourselves if it’s really a rut. It’s great to push the boundaries, but if something is being incredibly resistant to being pushed, maybe it deserves a closer look. Or, to quote one of my favorite philosophers:
The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.
Amy Tan does a great talk on creativity. Creative people are the way they are for different reasons, but I empathize particularly with Tan’s approach, where the creative process is a way of resolving ambiguities that we notice in ourselves and in the universe around us.
These are amazing times for an indie musician. We can now have what would have been million dollar recording studios two or three decades ago for a few thousand dollars. New Macs are coming right out of the box with applications like Garage Band, and there are even a few open source recording packages for the PC user with a tight budget. Musicians of any caliber and any means are so empowered to explore their creativity in the twenty first century. You used to have to woo a record exec to hear how you’d sound with a little bit of production. Now, nothing can stand in your way. Except for lack of knowledge, that is. I learned some of this stuff really slowly. There’s a lot of information out there, but most of it is at a level that’s way too high when you’re just starting to learn. Yes, once you know the basic principles, the language people use starts to make more sense, but I think it’s sad that there aren’t more beginner level resources out there. So, here we go… my advice on two ways to break out of that “basement sound” scenario. WARNING: Once you master these, things will only get more difficult because you’ll now notice a bunch of other things that the pros are doing that you don’t hear in your own recordings. Like any art or science, the journey is an endless one, so make sure you enjoy it more than the imagined destination. 1. Use compression! You’ll probably see the biggest gain in quality here with vocals and drums. Here’s the basic problem scenario… the drums or vocals are too high, so you turn them down… then a little later in the song, they seem too low, so you turn them up. That’s an extreme. Maybe things just don’t seem to sit well in the mix. You wish you could ride the fader (manually raise and lower the volume level) for each track in a way that would keep things loud enough without jumping out. Well, in a nutshell, that’s compression. The basics of most compressors are as follows: * A threshold level: How loud do you want the signal to be before I start working on it? * A compression ratio: How much do you want me to squash a signal that gets over the threshold? * An attack time: How quickly do you want me to get there? * A release time: How quickly do you want me to let go once I’ve done my thing? Yes, there’s a lot more to it than that, and I’m not telling anywhere near the whole story. But knowing the above is enough to get you on your way. You can look up tons of “recommended” levels and ratios, but in the end, just trust your ears and some common sense. Does the volume jump very quickly in your source track? Then you’ll want a shorter attack time if your goal is to keep it sitting well in the mix. Don’t set the threshold so that the compressor is active all the time. You want some variation in volume to make things sound alive, and you don’t want to make background noise as loud as the actual instrument. 2. EQ (almost) everything. Yes, there are some cases where the track is just perfect as is, but most of the time even a track that sounds great on its own needs a little EQ to sit well. Do your recordings sound muddy? This is a classic sign of not using EQ properly. Again, there are lots of recommended settings for EQ, but a basic principle that will get you a long way without tons of memorization is this: the muddiness is there because different instruments are competing for the same frequency bands. They mask each other out. If you cut a frequency, say, on the bass guitar, and then cut a different frequency on the kick drum, you are creating areas in the sound for these instruments to stand out without competing. The reason I mention the bass and kick drum is that these are two instruments that tend to occupy the same (lower to mid) frequencies. Play around with it a bit and you’ll find your own favorites, which may or may not match very closely with pro favorites. Anywhere you feel “there’s not room in this mix for these two” is probably a good area to use this principle. Past that, I think EQ is very much a question of taste. Should this instrument have more of this particular frequency level? If yes, boost it. If it should have less, cut it. But thinking in terms of making pockets for competing instruments to stand out in, your recordings will be light years ahead of where they were. That’s it for now. Let me know if this helped you any and I’ll look into adding more of the tricks I’ve learned so far. Good luck!
