Today, we’re going to talk about The Others. Nope, not those people from Lost who walked around at first in regular looking clothes and then wore burlap bags—or about the feeling of “otherness” we writers sometimes (oftentimes) feel. But about—others—expectations outside of ourselves. Expectations, desires, and even our own projections as seen from the outside in. 

In Art & Fear, our text for the last month and for all of June as well, David Bayles and Ted Orland write:

The problems arise when we confuse others’ priorities as our own.  We carry real and imagined critics with us constantly—a veritable babble of voices, some remembered, some prophesized, and each eager to comment on what we do. ..As an artist you are expected to make each successive piece uniquely new and different—yet reassuringly familiar alongside your earlier work. You’re expected to make art that’s intimately (perhaps even painfully) personal—yet alluringly and easily grasped by an audience that has never known you personally.

When the work goes well, we keep such inner distractions at bay, but in times of uncertainty or need, we begin listening. We abdicate artistic decision-making to others when we fear that the work itself will not bring us the understanding, acceptance, and approval we seek.

(Chapter IV, page 37-38)

Hmmm…many of us, those that are published or agented have an “official” Other. We have an editor, an agent, or both. Or many. We publish with more than one house, our editors move to other houses or leave publishing, agent/author relationships may end and new business relationships begin. It can be—if we let it—be to our artistic detriment. So how then do we keep the worries about Others out of our work, when as Bayles and Orland stated THE WORK isn’t going well?

To be honest, I am not sure.  I have the voices of Others—well, the imagined voices of Others in my head, because those in my artistic life are thankfully supportive. One esteemed Other said to me recently, “Write the book you most want to write. The one you are afraid of writing.” And also encouraged me to “use your gifts of voice and dialogue” in doing so.  I was given a task but the direction and the outcome are all up to me, so why do I feel so afraid?  I could say, because this time it matters, this is a make or break point in my career, that I want to be more widely read, touch more lives, etc. But I have had similar fears at all stages of my writing career—if I get this first book—publishing the next will be easier. If I make this list, I am all set. Basically, it is all baloney. And my baloney has a first name—f-e-a-r, fear.

So I keep learning. I have learned not to negotiate with fear but to let it just sit with me while I work. I don’t pour it a cup of tea, nor do I berate it for being there—I simply try to welcome it and when I let it take a seat at my table—somehow, thankfully, the invitation has some of the fear—the most strangling kind—evaporate. And the fear that is left—the water in the boiling pan—helps me churn my work into something I care about.

Mystery & Magic

May & June: Observations on Art & Fear

My idea of  an "actor"

Back in the 90’s when I wanted to be an actor I had a stereotype in my head of what an actor should be.  An actor should be thin, wear back, stand tall, be unafraid, be adventurous, be sullen, be the life of the party, be out there—living on the edge. I don’t know why I thought this. Some of my friends, most of my friends were actors, and some of them were all those things but only some. I wasn’t an actor because I didn’t see myself as one. It came down to that…the mystery and the magic of a self-proclamation.

  I talk to students from seventeen to seventy who are afraid to call themselves writers. I get it. I understand it. But I do think holding up that banner and announcing to the world: I care about THIS; THIS is who I am is important. Publishers may accept our work or pass on it. I do in my role as editor of the YA and Children’s portion of Hunger Mountain, we may dub or bestow someone with the title “author” but what we can’t do is ever bestow the power of the self-definition of writer on someone. That has to be done long before publication in any form, arts journal, small press, or major publishing house can or will.

In Art & Fear, Bayles & Orland state: “ The belief that ‘real’ art possesses some indefinable magic ingredient puts pressure on you to prove your work contains the same….” And later when talking about comparing oneself to others, this is stated: “Whatever they (other artists) have is something needed to do their work—it wouldn’t help you in your work even if you had it."

I didn’t need to be tall and thin and wear black and be bold and adventurous to be an actor. Lots of actors aren’t. I also don’t need to be or do anything but be who I am as a writer. All I need to do is do the work, the exhausting but exhilarating work. I need to sit down and write. I need to capture my thoughts, work with them, shape them, and then share them. Share them to small groups first and hopefully with large audiences later. That is all the mystery and magic there is—hard but enjoyable work.

Dealing with Doubts

May & June: Observations on Art & Fear

“Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between you and what you should be and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all—and for those who do, trouble isn’t long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms.”

             Bayles & Orland, from Art & Fear

I am better at dealing with doubts these days—writing doubts. I somehow know how to dodge at least some of the bees that swarm and rise and look like they will attack, leaving me in the fetal position with a thousand creative bites swelling and stinging and calling attention to all to come and see me as the sad and pathetic  person I know myself to be. Ouch, that doesn’t sound like I am better with writing doubts, but I am. Honest. 

However, I still wrestle with creative fear. For years I have wanted to take an African dance class. I lived right by a studio in Brooklyn but I could never make myself sign up. For years I have wanted to study mosaics. I am fascinated with how broken pieces can be put back together to create something glittery and beautiful. Even now in acknowledging both of these creative pursuits out loud, right here in cyberspace, where friends may ask me or hold me to account for trying, I am not sure if I will. I want to…but what if I look like a failure? What if I have two left feet? What if I stink? What if people laugh at me? What if I can’t laugh at myself? What if I need help? What if I look like a fool?

Ok, you know something. Writing these doubts down they look kind of silly.  But what isn’t silly is being able to be with the discomfort of trying, of wanting, and doing and taking an action. It is a skill. It is a muscle that needs developed each time we try something new. V, the man in my life, takes African drumming and has done African dance in a class where he was the only man. He is brave. Braver than me but I hope his ability to deal with doubts rubs off on me. He said about the dancing, “Ah, I don’t care if I am no good. It is fun.”  I want to feel good when dealing with my doubts. I want them to be fun, don’t you?

The Beginning: Or as Nike Advertises: Just Do It.

 The Art & Insanity of Creativity is the theme for the fall issue of Hunger Mountain, so here on my blog, I am going to spend May and June reading and thinking about art: how we create it, why we create it, and what are the blocks (fears, worries, concerns) that stand in our way. 

I am a new reader of the seminal book Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland. How and why I never picked up this book before a few months back, I don’t know; but I am a firm believer that when the time is right the book will find me. Or perhaps when I am ready I will find the book.  So here I sit with Art & Fear in hand.

The opening of Art & Fear outlines a few assumptions about the artistic life. These are creeds I wholeheartedly believe in:

1.       Artmaking involves skills that can be learned.

Ah, so going to grad school to learn story structure had a point.  So does the building of the Writing Barn where I will soon be teaching and inviting other novelists to come share their work and wisdom.  So does the reading of blogs and writing my Reading Like a Writer essays.  Writing is a constant and consistent study and the study yields constant and consistent rewards.

2.       Art is made by ordinary people.

Oh, I love this one. It reminds me of the Anne Lamott quote, “Plumbers don’t get plumbers block.” The ordinary is extraordinary. That is what observation, which all art making involves, is.

3.       Making art and viewing art are different at their core.

So, this is why “to all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product: the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process : the experience of shaping that artwork. “ And Bayles and Orland even go on to add, “The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your  artwork that soars.” 

I agree. I throw away pages, I do major revisions, I turn picture books into novels and I take my time—ten years from inception of idea to the “final product” of a book is not uncommon for me and it is also not something I am ashamed of. Art takes it’s time. Even when I forget and I want to rush and just get it done and off my plate so I can move on to the next thing or have the semi-momentary feeling of acceptance surge though my veins art is there always to remind me:  take your time, don’t rush, go deeper, be more honest, did you hit the wall yet?, did you breakthrough? Did you learn something new?  Did you allow yourself to where you needed to be?—angry, distraught, frustrated, hopeful, encouraged, devastated. Process is about processing and process is introspective, alarming, uncomfortable but it is ultimately freeing. 

4.       Artmaking has been around longer than the art establishment.

This is why in the Passion for the Picture Book piece that I did for Hunger Mountain has two wonderful writers, and wonderful friends—Kathi Appelt and Cynthia Leitich Smith—going back to the cave paintings as the beginnings of where art and text began to merge to tell one whole new  and newly complete story.

Beginning with the drawings on cave walls, humans have been pairing story and art for as long as we’ve been standing upright.  When we read a picture book in its current form, a “package” of illustrated pages and text, bound between covers, we’re experiencing not only the story in front of us, but we’re also sharing that long human legacy of storytelling that includes two dimensional art.

Kathi Appelt

We all begin with the language of images. We all began that way as babes in arms. We all began that way as members of the human family, starting with the earliest cave drawings. Perhaps even before those. The picture book builds on that early, almost instinctive, visual literacy and fosters our vocabulary, introduces concepts, and nurtures emotional bandwidth. Moreover, the picture book does all this while entertaining, informing, and delighting readers of all ages.

Cynthia Leitich Smith

I loved reading these two quotes from those two fine writers and seeing the similarities there—that both reinforce that art began before the art establishment did whose intention is to judge, to quantify, to declare something “dead” or “over.” Artmaking for the sake of self-expression (an essential component to sanity) is reason enough. It is where all art begins.