principles
Inspired by CW&T’s own Principles page, I’ve decided it would be useful for myself (and maybe for you) for me to share the principles which define my creative practice in a living document (see principle 08).
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01 :: be unflinching – especially with myself
Rip open every wound, pick at every scab. Let it hurt – but also enjoy myself: honest writing is nothing if not a sadistic yet healing practice.
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02 :: I'm going to make what I want NEED to make
As a good friend (and my editor) once told me: it’s my job to stay ahead of you and your job to keep up with me.
I know I don’t fit into any specific genre or culture (and any and all efforts made to do so have gone down in an all-consuming, scorched-earth inferno) – it’s how I’m wired: my inspirations are wide and broad and cover a swath of media, genres, and cultures and, as such, I will go where those interests and fascinations take me and process them in ways that sound and feel right to me because, whether you like it or not, you, as a reader, come last. Trust me, it’s better that way – do you really want to read yet another thing that reads like it came out of an Iowa MFA workshop?
Bottom line: I create for myself to challenge myself and my present interpretation of the world around and within; as such, know that what emerges from The Paintshop is the fullest statement of myself, the sum total of my experiences, inspirations, and predilections in the moment of the work’s creation, line by line, shard by shard. Take it or leave it.
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03 :: The story dictates the form
Not the other way 'round:
After the seven-year paragraph that took six years and eleven months to reveal that it wasn’t a novel or novella, I’m making efforts at being form-agnostic.
If what I’m writing tells me it wants to be a comic, I’ll write a comic script (and then probably shove it in a drawer after trying to find an artist and failing but that’s a story for another time). If it keeps going and going, then it will probably be something longer.
But I won’t set out in the notion of “I’m going to write a novel now” or “I’m going to write a screenplay”: most of my rough drafts are in script form anyhow, communicative documents to myself that I then “direct” (usually by turning into prose or whatever hybrid i manage to concoct) and/or shepherd into its final medium based on the collision of the work’s needs and my creative predilections at the moment.
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04 :: publish something every day
AKA the whole point of this space over the years: the daily posts are my warm-ups, my sketches – now including actual sketches – hurled into the world simply for the sake of hurling them into the world. I don’t anticipate that anyone will read them let alone enjoy them: they exist solely because I want them to exist and find the daily ritual of their composition in the spaces between the main work to be the most enjoyable method by which traverse the route between brain and publishing. Also a useful means by which to eradicate the need for external validation.
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05 :: I won’t join another social network solely for the convenience of others
I played that game before and I'm not going to play it in whatever this new era is; if readers want to connect with me and follow my work, their options are this space, email, or the newsletter: that's it. I'm not going to waste another second of my life digitally performing atop the latest shiny new slot machine for the ambient convenience of others; should I lose readers or subscribers or miss out on new readers or new subscribers because of it, that’s my problem. I’ll live.
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06 :: If it sounds good (to me), it is good (to me)
As I’ve mentioned far too many times, my creative background is in music composition and performance (drummer) – and I’ve brought that music composition background to my writing, from how I use drafting and handwritten scribbles to summon a phrase or passage or sequence as I would a piano to noodle out a chord or a dissonance to my deliberate evocation of silence and manipulations of rhythm and time.
Music is as much about the notes not played as it is the ones played. But I think Clarice Lispector says it best in AGUA VIVA so I’ll let her finish this one:
“What beautiful music I can hear in the depths of me. It is made of geometric lines crossing in the air. It is chamber music. Chamber music has no melody. It is a way of expressing the silence. I am sending you chamber writing.”
I am sending you chamber writing.
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07 :: But, if it's not working...
... it’s not working.
I don’t allow myself to fear setting aside – or even abandoning – a project no matter how far along it is: if something stops speaking to me (or starts speaking to me in tongues or in a rhythm I can’t feel) and my usual trick of combining it with something else fails to imbue it with new life, sometimes the only way to hear it again is to step away – for a bit or for good.
This doesn’t mean it’s a failure: all it means is that, for the moment, I’m not the writer that the project needs to sire it into life – but maybe someday, I will be (see principle eight, below); I just need to explore other stuff first.
Note: while I fully believe in the idea that sometimes the only way to become the writer the work needs you to be is to write it, I do so with one qualification: sometimes stepping away IS part of writing it – the trick is in figuring out when, as that one song goes, when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.
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08 :: Evolution is mandatory
(This final one is, I suppose, a corollary to Principle 02... )
I recently spent time doing a retrospective of my first book, released ten years ago: I could barely make it through.
Doesn’t mean that I don’t like the book or that I think it sucks or that I’m not proud of having written it or that I’ve disowned it or anything asinine like it (as most previous iterations of me would have done) – only that this iteration of me is in a different space and finds that iteration a stranger. I was, after all, recently 30 when I wrote it, and I am, now, not: for better or for worse, the current, grayer iteration of myself could never have written that book.
(And certainly would have fought harder against that full title.)
Even now, I'm finding that stories and projects I started before LAST CHRISTMAS aren't coming together like they were in that previous epoch: I'm hearing different rhythms, feeling different ones – or, in some cases, not hearing or feeling anything anymore – a surefire sign for me that maybe that particular work isn't part of this new iteration. I don't, after all, have the same conversations at 41 as I did at 31; I can't imagine expressing myself creatively in the same way for years and decades on end.
Could I write something similar to COMICSTORYWORLD down the road? Sure. But we’ll see where the evolution/iterative process takes me; we are all, in each passing moment, nothing if not iterations of ourselves, shedding skins of previous, moving ever forward – though sometimes we stumble, we – even then – fall forward.
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09 :: this is it / this is me
I aspire to nothing save the continuous progression of and improvement at my chosen art: this site, the newsletter, and the zine are, until they are otherwise, my chosen, wholly independent delivery systems for whatever I think, ponder, and create. The expressions and experiments and explorations shared in these spaces are neither aspirations nor stepping stones for anything bigger: they are The Work. I've spent more than half my adult life caring about things out of my control and, as I enter the back half of same, I've little interest in continuing down the same path. This space is – and these spaces are – for better or for worse, the truest expression of myself in this moment; whatever the next moment brings will be dealt with when it's time to deal with it. Until then, this is me, and I'm good with it.
(latest update: sun/20231015)