Wells, Filled and Otherwise

Shauna posted recently about 'filling the well'. To be honest, it's a term I only started hearing a couple of years ago when I started spending time with writers.

The idea seems to be that creativity is a cool liquid, of which we drink deeply. Sometimes, a project can leave us feeling drained. Times like that, we need to stop drinking and let others' waters replenish our own.

At least, I think that's the idea. It's one of those things folks tend to talk about as though everyone else already knows. I've had to pick the metaphor up on the run.

I get the feeling writers expect to approach their new project with a well filled to the brim with sparkling ideas. With every day's work, the bucket has to dip just that little bit deeper. A few I know fear that one day they 'go to the well' and hear nothing but a dry thunk.

Me, I don't like this metaphor so much. It's so.....

passive.

If I have a well of ideas, its a bloody great artesian thing.

I'm a productive guy: I write a novel or two a year. Do maybe a dozen, two dozen paintings. Fill a couple of sketchbooks and occasionally bring a little extra spark to my gentle whoredom in the tattoo studio. I don't lower a bucket and hope to find something. For me, it's about not being knocked down by the spray.

So what do I do to stay creative?

1. Distrust Mood: I had the great good fortune to have the idea of a 'creative mood' drummed out of me early on. Stephen King puts it nicely in this article, where he suggests the muse is most likely to find you if you're already sitting there working.

2. Care for Your Tools: I keep my pencils sharp, my brushes soft, my pens inked, my typewriter oiled and my laptop clean. I also eat pretty well and stay in reasonable shape. I know painters who wouldn't dream of letting paint sludge dry on their brushes, but they do nothing to care for the hand and arm and brain doing the work.

3. Permission to Fail: By definition, every day cannot be our best. That's okay, no big deal. The more we practice our arts, the better we get. The better our 'average' becomes. I find it helpful to accept that today's work might suck, then get on with it.

4. Blood to Brain: Thinking burns glucose. It also requires oxygen, and the clearing of waste products. How does all that happen? Yup, blood flow.

When I feel blocked during a work session, I charge up the old heart. These days I have a heavy bag behind the house, and whaling on it feels great. Before the bag, I'd do pushups or situps. I'm often surprised at how a quick shock of activity like that will clear those blockages.

5. Sidestep: I like to jump around in different media. Even the ones I'm bad at. As long as it gives me a little bit of fun, what's the harm?

In fact, a sidestep was how I started writing in the first place. One of the reasons I started down this road was that I was doing an enormous amount of work-for-hire drawing comics. It was great fun, and I was forced to stretch my art in ways I never would have otherwise tried, but... I missed telling my own stories. Doing two comics at once was so time-consuming it was out of the question, so I sat down and wrote a novel. And another. And....

And lastly, COFFEE: I drink a lot of coffee. A lot.

Even when I'm going down a wrong turn, I get there quickly.

Balance

Charles wrote another of his thought-provoking posts today, this time about giving yourself the freedom to 'write ugly'.

This is possibly the single most important piece of advice for ANY creator.

They call them roughs for a reason, folks. To finish that all-important first draft (without which, there is nothing to edit), you have to give yourself the freedom to do whatever you need to. Outline, draw pictures, make it all up as you go along. Change characters' names in mid-chapter if you must. Write an extra scene with someone who's already died, then decide if they 'stay dead' or not. Write your chapters in the wrong order if that's the way the story comes to you, but please, write it.

Sounds easy. Hardest damn thing in the world, some days. There are a million individual head games that get in the way. Almost all of them add up to some variation of your Inner Critic sitting on your shoulder and trying to edit the work-in-progress.

For me, the hardest days usually come right after the best ones. You know the good days. The ones where the work just flows, the words come steadily and they're even good. I have a day or two like that, and my inner critic starts in with, "You did such a nice job yesterday. Why can't you write like that now?" and variations thereof. One minute I'm tapping slowly along, the next it's an hour later and I'm still debating comma placement in a single sentence.

That critic needs a short, short leash. With a choke chain.

But there's a reason this entry is called Balance. The critic is important. The critic keeps us from serving up the dog's breakfast and calling it a feast. Release your inner critic on that first draft and let the blood and hair fly. Pat your critic on the head when it trots back with blood dripping from its muzzle. Your second (and subsequent) drafts will thank you.

Here's a visual example, from a tattoo I did a while back. Below is the first and second draft:

Those faint lines all over the show are my original blue pencil layouts. I just scribble them in, feeling around for size and mass and general shape. Look at how many weird things those leaves did and how the stick insect's body is one big blue cloud, I fiddled with it so much.

But those blue mistakes were necessary to the second draft: that dark pencil sketch. There, I (more or less) picked out one line. I gave the sketch light and shadow and general form. If this had been a story instead of a drawing, the characters would have the same name throughout at this stage. The plot would make sense, and any sense of symbol or theme I picked up in the first draft would be amplified. The main thing is, that early searching and flailing has now been simplified.

Of course, the finished tattoo was the actual 'final product', but the literary metaphor would break if we tried to stretch it that far...

If I'd let my critic off its chain too soon, I might have sat there with my pencil in one corner of the drawing, fussing and fretting over a bit of twig, or the veins in that one leaf. I'd probably *still* be fretting that leaf on the right, or that front leg on the left. The tattoo would never have been done, let alone the full sleeve it grew into.

If I hadn't let it off at all, well... How many people want an incoherent scribble for a tattoo? How many people want to read bad writing? Who in this world wants less than your personal best?

It's all about balance. Charles uses a metaphor of personal appearance. Get too critical too soon, and you'll be the literary equivalent of Tammy Fay Baker sleeping in full makeup so not even her husband would see her true face. Go the other way, and you go the Kevin Federline route, showing up for important public occasions looking like you just rolled out of bed.

Now go write ugly!

Quite the Service You Got Here

Happy Happy Joy Joy

According to this article, authors, painter and sculptors are some of the happiest people. Bartenders, cashiers and waiters are among the least.

Clergy are happiest overall (no creative blocks, since the text is written for them?), while roofers are the least. Poor damn roofers.

The article cites the satisfaction of serving others as the source of a lot of that personal and professional happiness. It's certainly what gets me up in the morning. It never ceases to touch me that people find it worthwhile to part with their hard-earned cash for my offerings.

Used to seem to me, everybody needs to eat, but nobody *needs* a painting, tattoo, drawing, or a story. Now I'm not so sure. Art and stories, beauty and entertainment, all fill a need deeper than any can of pork and beans can touch.

It's just harder to put a finger on the needs those things fill. But there's no mistaking the charge of knowing you've touched another person's life.

I credit that feeling of service to others to my own happiness. And my happiness to my continuing and unnatural youth...

That Twisting Urge

95,000 words

Good Friday with Clan Dynamo was much fun. Jotted 1000 words-ish in a note pad at odd moments. It did occur to me that my tennis game would probably improve if I didn't stop in the middle of the action to get down a couple lines of dialogue.

I have a real urge to tell stories. Probably no surprise given I'm writing a first draft in three months, but there you are. Although I've only been 'writing' a couple of years, that urge has been there all along.

Waaaaaaaaaaayyyyy back in my sidetracked twenties, I was the World's Greatest Dinner Guest. My jokes and stories were in great demand (great advice for any starving artist: make people want to feed you), as my various hosts knew that they would laugh, cry, tremble in terror, laugh until they cried, tremble until they laughed, whatever. I made it all up on the spot, or took bits out of my life and put the appropriate spin on them as the mood demanded. It was all about moving my audience in the moment. I was That Guy.

Back then of course, I didn't write. I was tattooing and painting and living as fast as I could (Full Throttle and Fuck It is more than just a writing style...), and those dinners (and picnics, pub nights, bong sessions, coffees, etc.) were the only way that urge could claw its way out of my skin.

I gradually realized I wasn't getting any younger, and the urge twisted. I got serious about my comics, and as is the way with me, turned the machine all the way up to eleven and snapped off the lever.

And completely lost the ability to tell a decent story. Old friends would meet me for dinner and say, "Tell the one about the vomiting Egyptian," or "What about that guy who took off his pants." Half the time, I couldn't even remember how they went. I'd fall back on a joke about two nuns and a cheese grater instead.

Then maybe three years ago or so, I was doing so much comics illustration that I didn't have the time to write comics anymore. Drawing a page, mine or anyone else's, takes maybe six or eight hours. Easy to see why I couldn't do both.

The urge twisted again.

I started writing fiction. Just a little, in a notebook. Then a novel on a typewriter. THen another on a laptop. Then--

Well, I can't tell a joke now to save my life. That storytelling urge is so used up in my work that I fuck up punchlines, stumble over the order of events, you name it.

I've become This Guy: "And these two guys, wait, I forgot. They're not guys, they're girls, and, um, I think, yeah,, that's right, they're nuns..."

Train wrecks, every one. These days people still laugh, but we all know it's at how badly I tell the joke, not the joke itself.

Back in the sidetracked days I used to be with a junkie stripper who fancied herself a writer. Except that she always had a thousand excuses why she couldn't write just at the moment. She could only write on a computer, she said. She wanted to get a bit more life experience, she said. Work took too much out of her, she said.

When she overdosed, she didn't even leave behind a diary. All our friends were puzzled, but I wasn't surprised. She was so afraid of herself and the pain she carried that she'd rather go numb than face it and let the stories come.

Me, I figure my stories would want out if all I had was a circle of faces around a campfire. A medium (printed word) that brings a wider audience? Icing on the cake.

Regular Irregularity - Feel the Love

status: 14,600

You might have noticed that I only got 600 words written yesterday. Some drawings I needed to finish took longer than I thought, and one of my darling fiance's best friends rolled into town, so it was dinner and pool in the evening. Stuff happens.

Sometimes stuff doesn't happen at all. There've been a couple of days in the two weeks since I started where I just couldn't write more than three or four hundred words. The story wasn't talking to me.

But I still got to Day 14 on 14,ooo words. And I'll get to the end of the first draft in about three months. There are two important secrets to actually finishing any endeavor as long as a novel. One is to leave the bad days behind you. So you did nothing yesterday. So what? Don't lose today's progress beating yourself up about it.

The other secret is kind of the opposite. Don't accept slack. You've got to care enough about the work to commit to it. None of us can expect fame or fortune. It'd be nice, but even making a living is a tough slog in the creative industries. There are plenty of fun and wonderful things to do with our leisure time that don't involve sitting with a keyboard or goose quill pen or whatever. You've got to love the work enough to make it a priority.

Couple of years back, I tried to take up the guitar. I practiced scales and chords, even got to the point where I could do a half-decent blues walk and play a couple of songs. But the effort fizzled. there were novels to write and comics to draw, a living to be made and a lovely young lady (the Tiny Dynamo, since she doesn't want me naming her here) whose company I enjoyed. There was a life to be lived, and I just didn't love the guitar enough to put the work in.

But when the novel goes hot, the action's coming fast and the words are tumbling over me spilling out, I'll stop everything else and write for fourteen, fifteen hours a day.

It's all about the love...

Sketching

Status: 14,ooo words.

I'm one lucky bastard. My 'day job' is as an artist. I draw comics, do caricatures, storyboard low-budget movies and do the odd tattoo. Variety pays the bills. There are no carpet-walled cubicles in my life, nor hot grills, cash registers, paper hats or deep fryers. (Actually, McDonalds wouldn't have me: too many tattoos. I'm desolate.) I'm not rich, but I don't know what I'd do differently if I was. It's a happy, happy feeling.

When I'm at 'work', I sketch. I'm a scribbly artist, laying down lots and lots of little looping strokes with my trusty blue pencil until the shape of the thing comes out. By then my hand has a feel for the line, so that when I switch over to the sharpened number two pencil that single best line flows right on out there.

And for comics or tattoos, the pencil line itself is just a stage. The 'real' line is ink: spare, bare and elegant.

I write the same way. This first draft is my blue pencil sketch. There are lots and lots of lines I won't use, and I keep going back to the early chapters as new aspects of the story reveal themselves. This used to be a pain in the ass, but then I found Rough Draft, a thing of beauty and grace.