tiny projects

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This interregnum between the penultimate drafting of the main thing and final typesetting and design might be granting me a peek into where I'll be heading, creatively, once it's done: a full embrace of Rubin's experiment train of stake-lowering thought, a practice of tinier, smaller projects, each project existing solely to explore and finish and move on. Partway there with the weekly Shards, but I'm aiming to expand aspects of its intent (namely, that they're nothing but experiments) across the totality of my creative practice; now that the ambition to have anything resembling a creative career is dead and buried, I’m having fun simply tinkering or, as my late grandfather would say, “potting around.”

chapters

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Opened to a random page in Rick Rubin’s THE CREATIVE ACT and landed on this perfect encapsulation of where I’m working on getting my mind/work to go:

"Our life's work is far greater than any individual container. The works we do are at most chapters. There will always be a new chapter, and another after that. Though some might be better than others, that is not our concern. Our objective is to be free to close one chapter and move on to the next, and continue that process for as long as it pleases us."

anchorings

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As I paddle around across the shrinking pool in my little liferaft of me, plugging punctures and airholes as I go, I've come to understand that The Work – no matter how little time I get for it, no matter if it's now a minuscule part of my day – is my anchor which, I suppose, begs the question of whether it’s contributing to the sensation of drowning or if it’s what keeps me grounded for all the other things I have to do during the day – or feel threatened to have to do throughout the day.

(For purposes of sanity preservation, I’m going with the former until shown otherwise.)

What does contribute to the drowning is, however, any remnants of caring about a career, about reception, about anything outside my own control: all that’s in my control is showing up and being present with it and doing the best work with what little time I have and finishing it and throwing it to the world and starting something new because that rhythm, its pulse, its breath, that rhythm is my heartbeat through all of it and has been for the last 30 years. Lower the stakes / experiments / Rubin etc etc.

Related: never again will I underestimate the ability of the first movement of Gorecki's SYMPHONY NO. 3 to bring me a modicum of grounding and creative uplift but thenagain I've said this never again for the 20 years it's served that purpose so I won't hold my breath, especially when it comes to anything involving memory.

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

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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.

lowering the stakes

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A desire, over the next several months, perhaps the next year – or, hell, whatever remains of my creative life, to figure out how / force myself to write fiction faster – not in a Walter B. Gibson two-novels-a-month-for-nearly-20-years (285/326) sort of way – but in a way that's at least moderately quicker than my current and past.

(I'd be stoked with a longer short story / novellete per quarter.)

Key part: perpetual mental effort to lower the stakes, as Rick Rubin puts it in his excellent THE CREATIVE ACT (excellent – though an index wouldve been far more useful than blank ruled pages in the physical book) –

"We tend to think that what we're making is the most important thing in our lives and that it's going to define us for all eternity. Consider moving forward with the more accurate point of view that it's a small work, a beginning. The mission is to complete the project so you can move on to the next. The next one is a stepping-stone to the following work. And so it continues in productive rhythm for the entirety of your creative life."

– and relegate the belief that I was defined by a single work (ref: seven-year-paragraph) to the shitheap of my personal creative history.

fumes / refuel

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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.

listening to rick rubin read to me

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In a manner not dissimilar similar to how it took me eight years of mowing two two-acre lawns every week (I'm since retired) to start listening to podcasts, I've only just – after 11 years of running nearly every day – started listening to audiobooks (also a recent first) during the day's run. While my latent drummer muscle memory makes music-while-running a likely non-starter (as I will either run in tempo with the music or attempt to fit the music in my head to my tempo ) audiobooks present none of those difficulties (though they have their own, chief among them being a difficulty in processing everything that's coming at me, like listening to someone who won't shut up).

General practice: if I like what I'm hearing – as I do now, with Rick Rubin reading his own THE CREATIVE ACT (reminds me of David Lynch's CATCHING THE BIG FISH) – I buy the physical book both for easy revisitation and as a repository of noted memory. Along with Rubin, the other one that got that treatment was James Clear's ATOMIC HABITS (excellent, by the way. Might re-listen at some point). What both have in common was that the author themselves read the book; in Rubin's case particularly, it felt like / feels like I'm working with him; I get why artists want to. Can't imagine standard audiobook guy voice having the same impact – though standard audiobook guy reading certain lines is amusing in and of itself.

Sticking with non-fiction of the manual/idea variety for now (though I might add poetry), things that I have a harder time making myself make the time to sit and read each day. Philosophy, too.