Surprise Book

This afternoon in the writing group I've attended weekly for 26 years, a writer read from a book that none of us knew she'd been writing. And it is terrific! It is splendid! And she has a huge amount of it done.

This event is roughly equivalent to discovering that your next-door neighbor of 20+ years has a ten year-old child at home who has never been mentioned. And a rather brilliant kid at that.

She was simply writing along on this never-really-meant-for-publication project. And now it blurps forth in full sharp glory. I may not have mentioned: it's an exceptionally bold book as well.

Telling oneself that a project is just for fun or private writing is an excellent disinhibitor and freer of creativity.

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Blog Free

The tune that's running through my head is "Born Free," which is probably from my Peter, Paul & Mary days.

Blog Free, however, is my current set of lyrics. As I was just saying to one of my brothers on the phone, the cool thing about this kind of writing is that it's almost unlimited.

No editors. No revisions. No meeting market requirements. No deadlines. No need to stick to the subject.

Plus a conversation results.

It's like a pulpit without all the complications of a church. Or other similar comparisons. Free swim--I think I may like that one the best. (Note the chihuahua in the orange bikini.)

After more than 35 years of freelancing, to be able to just maunder around in language. Say things any which way. Well, it does good things for my lungs. I can feel the freedom physically.

Wow, what a pleasure this is.



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Do Something Extra

Last night, for the sheer fun of it, I wrote the most bizarre little item I've ever written (and there's considerable competition in my oeuvre for that honor.) It was a one-pager, a humor piece (my intent, anyway), aimed at the slot that The New Yorker fills with satire and wordplay.

I won't burden you just now with the details of that story. What I want to say is that it was a delight to do. It wasn't like work at all. Not like revising my long-time novel-in-progress, which has its pleasures but is work.

The light free feeling came because this writing was extra, and I had no thoughts weighing on me about whether the piece was going to turn out to be good, or saleable, or both, or neither. Writing it was a loose unweighted walk, after a day of backpacking. Though it took four and a half hours, a substantial amount of time.

The same principle--do a little something extra--works in other arenas than writing. The book I co-authored with Allan Luks, The Healing Power of Doing Good, notes that people dealing with overwhelming job pressures and looming burnout can ease their feelings sometimes by doing some little useful extra that nobody expects or requires of them.

It works because:
*it puts the power back into the hands of the doer
*it's a reminder of how much fun the work (without external pressures) can be



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Clay Collins: Creative Freedom

I just stumbled across a blog on a kindred subject: The Growing Life, about the blogger's creation of a life and career outside of corporate institutions.

"One of the great tragedies of human existence is that so many of us toil for another person, who is in turn toiling for someone else, who is working for someone else’s interest. And on and on. There are entire corporate chains of command comprised of people working for someone else’s interest rather than their own. In far too many cases, there is no there, there."

I feel much the same way about large organizations, and not only from the point of view of what it's like to work there. My objection is: it's too hard to locate the conscience in an organization where the final deciders are the amorphous stockholders, presumed to be interested in profit by any means.

So there's much I agree with this blogger Clay Collins, who describes himself as "a trafficker of ideas, an outdoorsman, a proponent of human rights, a creative visualizer, and a believer in a better world."

There's one idea, though, which crops up here and there in the posts and comments on this highly popular blog, that drives me crazy. Irritates me enormously. And that is: a trace of feeling superior to those who work day jobs for salaries, etc. Examples:

*"At a very young age, I somehow knew that the schooling process was bullshit."

*"It's the dilettantes that really get to grow."

*"The paradox of intelligence (POI) says that in general, the more intelligent you are, the less brainpower you’re likely to keep for yourself."

*"Who’s winning the battle for your mind?"

My stance is that I do my thing and people who are doing something else no doubt have their reasons. No doubt I'm inclined toward righteousness or I wouldn't be so easily irked by it.

Anyway, I very much like, on the whole, the way this guy thinks. I save my wee smackdowns for the people who are almost meeting my impossible standards. (I often niggle about how Bill Moyers presents something; never give a thought to Rush Limbaugh.)

So do go visit this site. Because there's a lot of damn-right good stuff: "Once external factors no longer tie us down, it becomes easy to become our own tyrant bosses... We make what seem to be incredible sacrifices to remove ourselves from restrictive conventional situations, and damn it, after all that sacrifice, it better result in something breathtakingly amazing. So we start setting unrealistic and ego-driven goals (as opposed to the unreasonable authentic goals that bring us alive and cause us to wreak havoc on the world in beautiful ways)."

Now I'm off to wreak some havoc.




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Adding a Flourish

I like the idea of making activities and places interesting that don't "have to be." For example, our culture pretty much expects us to tack up something appealing on our walls. But we're off the hook when it comes to decorating ceilings. Here are some particularly noteworthy ceilings I saw in D.C. last week.

The first two of these are both at the Museum of the American Indian; the other two are Union (train) Station and the oddly shaped ceiling of my funky old hotel room near George Washington U. Of these two last you can probably tell which is which.

I once shared a house with a woman who decorated the walls and ceiling of her bedroom with floral sheets. On the walls the fabric was tacked down smooth like wall paper. For the ceiling, she attached only the corners of the additional sheets and left them loose enough that the centers billowed and swooped downward a couple of feet. She was an art professor at Meredith College. Her room was otherworldly.





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Blake's "Forests of the Night"

A friend just got a tiger tattoo for his 60th birthday.

Which of course brought to mind the William Blake poem:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?....

Blake is asking of the tiger: who made thee? He's writing about where we came from and where we're going, as well as the power and beauty of the animal.

Sometimes when I teach a writing workshop, I ask people to figure out what one question all their writing is trying to answer.

Blake's question is my question, the search that drives my books. "In what distant deeps or skies/Burnt the fire of (our) eyes?"

Do you know the question that drives your art? Is there an image that embodies that question?

I don't plan to get a tattoo, but I do like seeing my question clearly before me as I follow a story into the forests.



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A Brainstorming Game

What's the lesson in creative courage to be found in this image? I'll bet there are many. Any ideas?



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Cut Loose

A lot of folks think of Bradford pear trees as stiff and brittle, rather formal; and there's some truth to that. Yet at this time of year the prim and rather delicate Bradford pear cuts loose like no other leaf in the forest, setting a lovely example.




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Guilt-free Thanks

My Thanksgiving thought: Do something WONDERFULLY DIFFERENT this holiday.

So I ask myself what that will be for me....And after much pondering conclude: I will HARBOR NO GUILT this Thanksgiving for any of the gifts/advantages that have come to me.

In fact that's probably a prerequisite for experiencing gratitude.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.




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A Home-Made Cruise Ship

Two fine bits of inspiration arrived in my e-mail yesterday: a home-made cruise ship and Goethe's timeless encouragement to "...Begin."

My brother Harry, a devoted boater, sent me the link to the amazing ship and its creator, Francois Zanella, a Frenchman whose day job was as a mineworker.

The subject line of the email was "along comes a hero." This man's devotion to his work of art is indeed heroic: he spent 25,000 hours on this project. This amounts to 8.6 years of 40 hour workweeks with no vacations or holidays. You don't have to build boats to appreciate this kind of dedication.

Please go to see this gorgeous piece of work. It can put a still-unrevised manuscript into perspective.

You'll note that the artist is portrayed in his captain's hat. My hat's off to this captain.


And from Mamie Potter, who shot the close-up a few posts ago of the red shoes, comes this quote from Goethe:

"Whatever you would do, or dream of doing, begin it! Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it. Begin it now."

Begin...and remember that Captain Zanella is now sailing around the world on his ship.

The Fishbowl of Creativity

A study at Brandeis led by Whitney Ruscio observed 150 students working on art projects and concluded:

creative success typically comes from real interest, curiousity, and pleasure in the activity.

Working simply to complete an assignment more often results in quantity over quality.

Negative self-doubting thoughts inhibit the process.

Some useful predictors of a good outcome include attention to some aspects of the project, such as planning; the sense of playfulness in the artist's approach; moments of excited surprise; and changes in direction of thinking.

These findings are summarized in a review at www.creativeintensive.org.

The conclusions are certainly a strong argument--if one were actually needed--to stick with the sometimes weird projects that draw our passion, even if others try to discourage us.