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Posts tagged "process"
ArtWork: Seeing Inside the Creative Process
Art Work reveals the artistic notetaking habits of an astonishing range of artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, and other creators by granting rare access to the journal pages and other visual materials they use to capture and foster their work.
From Sasha Frere-Jones’ forward:
As artists, we often prefer the note to the final product; it is an object that is ours alone, free of explanatory fuss and ornament. A mundane list next to three pages of earnestly revised text—shouldn’t we have published it just like that?
From Ivan Vartanian’s introduction, the distinction between journal and notebook:
Where the journal is meant to serve as a daily (or intermittent) record of observations and reflections on a life and its experiences, the notebook is meant as a place of work—for solving problems, jotting an idea, figuring a sequence, determining a position, shaping a phrase. Where the journal documents the life of its owner, the notebook documents the life of an artwork or artistic process.
Here’s Tony Kushner, talking about writing by hand:
Most of my best ideas have not been things that I knew I had in my head. I’ve been surprised by them…and it’s always the case that if you just start moving words around on a piece of paper…if you start limbering up your fingers and get going, you will find your way in.
And Richard Hell:
Notebooks, it seems to me sometimes, are the ultimate art form… Notebooks might be as good as art gets in our time.
(images via grain edit)
(Source: nprfreshair)
90 minutes
Is 90 minutes the magic amount of time you need for a productive work session? explore-blog posted this bit of Tony Schwartz’s article, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive”:
In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again. They named this pattern the Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC. A decade later, Professor Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates itself during our waking lives.
The difference is that during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes. Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity. Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied elite performers, including musicians, athletes, actors and chess players. In each of these fields, Dr. Ericsson found that the best performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes. They begin in the morning, take a break between sessions, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in any given day.
I was immediately reminded of John Cleese’s lecture on creativity:
Cleese specifically advocates taking 90 minutes to create space and time. It takes him about 30 minutes to calm down and open his mind, leaving an hour of creative time working on something.
1) Start with a clear, clean idea
2) Lose that idea by caking on notes and research
3) Hack away at the crud until the original idea emerges
(via)
Need a better word? Skip the thesaurus, and go to the dictionary
There’s another (paywalled) John McPhee piece in this week’s New Yorker on his writing process. After he reads his second draft aloud and makes some adjustments, he starts drawing boxes around words that he thinks can be improved:
You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word… If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one.
Then, you go not to a thesaurus, but a dictionary:
With dictionaries, I spend a great deal more time looking up words I know than words I have never heard of—at least ninety-nine to one. The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.
His reasoning: the dictionary not only gives you a gives you a list synonyms, it also gives you a deeper understanding of the meaning of the word, and sometimes the definition can lead you to a better way of phrasing altogether.
In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words.
Filed under: writing
(via Sara Bader)
“Masterpiece,” Roy Lichtenstein, 1962. Oil on canvas.
My work isn’t about form. It’s about seeing. I’m excited about seeing things and I’m interested in the way I think other people saw things.
I came across this Roy Lichtenstein quote, and then I liked this review of a show in Chicago:
What is lacking in the elegant retrospective at the AIC is any evidence of the source material Lichtenstein used, a choice which deprives viewers of a full understanding of his working process. A selection of drawings (mostly preparatory) help, but they are segregated in a side room painted in a deep purple (the rest of the walls are white) as if to broadcast their difference. The problem is that, lacking this give-and-take between the artist’s working process and finished product, the exhibition becomes too stylish, inviting viewers to float along on pure surface.
Filed under: show your work
I’m writing a book. It’s my third book. You’d think after writing two books it would get easier, but oh no, it does not get easier.
I have been working on it for six months. Two days ago I hit “rock bottom.” I was lying on the couch complaining and talking about quitting while my wife breastfed our son (she should really bill me for these sessions) and at the end, I was so full of self-loathing that I thought, “Fuck it, if it sucks it sucks” and I then drank a bunch of wine and ate dinner and went to bed.
The next morning in the shower the structure finally hit me, and luckily the kid was down for a nap, so I wrote some notes in dry erase on the bathroom mirror, then I got dressed, sat at my laptop and banged out the table of contents. All crap that I had in my head, crap that I should’ve had down months ago. It wasn’t perfect and it still needs work, but holy shit, there’s something.
Later in the day I tweeted, “Can’t tell if I always have a breakthrough the day after rock bottom, or if every day after a rock bottom just feels like a breakthrough.”
Then today Karen McGrane posted this piece, “Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck.” As she writes, she hit a personal low, was a complete mess, and she needed to give a talk the next day. “Twelve hours later, I was on stage. The only thing that got me up there was this thought: ‘Fuck it. I can do this.’”
I had to be forced into a place where I simply did not give a fuck in order to find out what I was really capable of… What elevates someone’s work from “technically excellent” to “truly great” is the extent to which you feel like you’re seeing them live their truth, be fully themselves… Jason Scott, the historian and digital archivist, told me at Webstock that a fitting epitaph for his headstone would be: “He gave a crap. He didn’t give a fuck.”
“Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck.” Our new mantra.
