healthy distraction and the art of comics (re)bagging and boarding

in

Stated yesterday that I know that the writing's not going well when I've (re)bagged and boarded a lot of comics and I've (re)bagged and boarded a lot of comics this week and while I do stand by what I said yesterday, I’ve evolved my thinking through the recognition that it's become a largely automatic – the winnowing is more or less complete – distraction to help me think things through on The Work at hand and, whereas, normally, I’d get pissed at myself for such an attention-switching (while I like and use some of what Cal Newport has to say, I don’t believe that he has as solid a grasp of the creative impulse as he seems to think he does); Rick Rubin, in THE CREATIVE ACT, is, unsurprisingly, far more on target:

"Distraction is one of the best tools available to the artist when used skillfully. In some cases, it's the only way to get where we are going....

We might hold a problem to be solved lightly in the back of our consciousness instead of in the front of our mind. This way, we can remain present with it over time while engaging in a simple, unrelated task...

Distration is not procrastination. Procrastination consistently undermines our ability to make things. Distraction is a strategy in service of the work." 

The key is that you must have a problem in mind, as I certainly did – my problem being that I didn’t know what the problem was only that there was a problem, my old standby, "What am I not seeing" – and, while little writing-writing (the placing of words in order on a screen is, after all, only a part of the process) was actually done over the last couple of days of bagging and boarding, not only was the problem found but solved: I realized I had committed my cardinal sin of thinking of form first and attempting jamming the story into that.

Egregious error corrected and words flowing, somewhat, though fragmentary. A new focus on one thing only, a simultaneous all in AND lowering of the stakes: I’m not going to run out of chips; this is only being written so it can be finished and I can do the next thing and so on and so on until I’m no more. (Does lowering the stakes allow me more self-permission to let things come as they do? Perhaps.)

Side note the first: never underestimate the amount of video game and toy history you can gleam from 50+ years of comic books advertising.

Side note the second: whoever came up with the adhesive comic book bag is a both genius and a bastard: those static film adhesive coverings are all over the place, stuck to every part of The Paintshop and my person, the forget-me-nots of the collecting world.

fumes / refuel

in

Running on empty and well and truly stuck in the main things (my fault for working two things too similar to one another yet also quite different – but not different enough, apparently) so I'm making an attempt to bring back The Etudes, with specific rules sourced from other, earlier attempts at an "unsticking" exercise: 50-100 word fictions, written and published in two days (Mon/Tue or Thu/Fri)... and that's all I've got. Will probably add more specific rules to each individual piece to meet the moment of the required unsticking. Thinking of this, from Rick Rubin's THE CREATIVE ACT:

"There are no bad rules or good rules. Only rules that fit the situation and serve the art, or those that don't. if the goal is to create the most beautiful work possible, then whatever directives are truly in service to that end are the right ones to use... they can challenge you to become better, to innovate, and to bring out a new side of yourself or your work."

This being the theory.