While away at my MFA residency I’m highlighting posts from early in this blog’s life, posts not seen by most current readers of the Artist’s Road blog.
Create when the tide is in, handle non-creative tasks when the tide is out. This post channels one of the creatives I interviewed on my cross-country U.S. road trip in providing useful advice for any creative.
“Maximizing Your Creativity,” November 29, 2010
While away at my MFA residency I’m highlighting posts from early in this blog’s life, posts not seen by most current readers of the Artist’s Road blog.
Are you ever asked “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a difficult question for most creatives to answer. In the October post below I described how Pulitzer-prize winner Michael Chabon handles that question; he says the problem isn’t coming up with ideas, it’s knowing which to pursue and which to abandon.
“Ideas are Plentiful, Choosing is the Key,” October 24, 2010
Why attend a creativity conference in Cannes when you can instead read Creativity Tweets of the Week? Well, I can actually think of a few reasons why the French Riviera would still be in one’s travel plans.
CREATIVITY
In January of 2008 I participated in a conference in Cannes. A few months later I spoke at a conference in Muncie, the Indiana Riviera.
“Affect Regulation and the Creative Artist,” Cheryl Arutt, Talent Develop: Art enables creatives to “act out” in a constructive way.
WRITING
If you do happen to find yourself in Cannes, pull up a chair at a beachfront street cafe, enjoy some French press coffee, and visit The Artist’s Road on your smartphone. Just watch out for those crazy French scooter enthusiasts who seem to enjoy exploring sidewalks.
An impending data download dump of writing wisdom is about to fill my cranium.
On Saturday I leave for a 10-day residency in my MFA in Writing program in Montpelier, Vermont. A number of readers have encouraged me to share some of my experiences and learning as I follow this path, and I intend to do so. And it seems at least one of my soon-to-be classmates was ambitious enough to blog every day from the previous residency.
This image of VCFA's College Hall is from their Facebook page. I've never been to campus, but I look at this photo and the setting seems too fantastic to be real. It strikes me as a well-painted backdrop for a black-box theatre play set in New England featuring a romance between a bashful poet with nicotine-stained teeth and tangled black hair and a fragile cellist with thick tortoise-shell glasses and band-aids on her knees.
I don’t think I’ll have the brainpower or energy to pull that off.
You can expect some nice, meaty blog posts in the months following the residency, though, as I impart various nuggets of wisdom, complete with full credit to the original sources.
This blog will continue to have new posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but like Johnny Carson pioneered, the Monday and Wednesday items will be “Best of…” posts, a mix of the popular and ones overlooked deserving of more consideration. For the Creativity Tweets of the Week, I’ll do that more like a sitcom “clip show,” pulling out some of the best links from past posts and forming new lists.
The Vermont College of Fine Arts blog has instructed me to tweet from the residency, even suggesting hashes. I will do my best, but my 43-year-old brain isn’t the best at multitasking, so if it’s a choice between listening to a speaker or cramming something I just heard into 140 characters, I’ll probably favor the former. In fact, I don’t think I’ll tweet much at all. I do love to tweet, but there are a lot of things I love to do (like kissing my wife) that I won’t be able to do during residency.
Wish me luck!
How much emphasis do you place on the first sentence of your writing?
My mind has been on this topic since reading a recent comment by one of this blog’s readers. In this short-attention age, in which Nicholas Carr has shown our minds are remapped to make long reading more challenging, and hyperlink-chasers hover on blog posts for only seconds before moving on, is it imperative to grab the reader with an unorthodox opening?
I would argue yes. I’d also argue that sentences like that 45-word monstrosity above must be killed, but that is another post.
Look at some of these classic openings:
Whenever I travel I seek out zen gardens (like this one in Montreal, Quebec), but like Anne Lamott meditation does not automatically follow.
In each case, the author teases out a detail while making you want more.
As a hard-news journalist, my “lede” sentence followed the inverted pyramid model of getting the who, what, when, where, why and how up front. But feature writing is a whole ‘nother beast. I recently came across a celebrity profile article I wrote in 1991. Here’s the opening (yes, it’s two sentences):
“One day she’ll be President.” So says Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, of the largest cult figure of the 1980′s, and next to Saddam Hussein the biggest publicity subject of the 199o’s, Madonna.
Of course, in that case the reader likely already was invested, because it was clear from the headline and illustrations what subject the reporter was writing about. You can’t make that assumption in every case.
Sometimes it’s better to leave them guessing for a bit, which is why in a recent creative non-fiction essay I wrote the opening that prompted last week’s blog comment:
I smiled at the delight of receiving two extra cherries, which almost made up for the fact that the monkey was blue.
Writers of blogs are lectured constantly on the importance of a catchy title, something that grabs your attention. The headline “How to Tame the Kitten in Your Pocket” prompted me last week to click on a Stephanie Wetzel blog post. It proved worth my time and I tweeted it.
But once I’m there, it’s not the headline that keeps me reading, it’s the opening. The first line is the most important part of that opening, at least to me.
How influential is a piece of writing’s opening to you? What focus to you apply to the first lines of your writing?
(Tip of the hat to memoirist and writing instructor (and friend) Sara Mansfield Taber, who has compiled an impressive list of opening lines, including the bulleted ones above.)
The Artist’s Road could use your help. As much as he loves scouring the interwebs searching for the best posts on creativity and writing, he knows he misses some. If you come across a good one, or especially if you authored it, point it out to me via Twitter or Facebook. Don’t take offense if I don’t retweet it, share it or include it in my weekly blog round-up; I still love you.
CREATIVITY
. Related post: “5 Steps to Subconscious-Driven Creativity“)
Could you find some creativity articles for me this week? I'd like to place a reservation for a seat on this log in the Shenandoah Valley. If that's booked, the large rock will do.
“Investing in Time Instead of Money,” Dan Blank, We Grow Media: A moving post in which Dan, who is building a business working with writers and publishers, celebrates his wife’s decision to leave a teaching gig to pursue her art and parenting. Kudos to Dan and Sarah for bravely following their hearts and supporting each other in the broad sense of that word. (Related post: “9 Steps to Self-Employment Success“)
WRITING
Have a creative week, and don’t be shy about sharing links with me!
When James Joyce was 40 years old he published Ulysses, and nearly ninety years later on this day, June 16th, millions around the world celebrate Bloomsday. Today, at 43, I finally became a published literary writer at Shaking Like a Mountain with a short creative nonfiction piece titled The Clear Monkey.
This delightful image was posted by Shaking Like a Mountain with my piece. I'm borrowing it.
In my defense: 1) I had never submitted a work to a literary journal before this year. 2) I’m not exactly James Joyce.
I was inspired to write this piece a few months ago while taking a creative-writing course taught by published memoir author Sara Taber at The Writer’s Center. I had also just read Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir by the remarkable author Sue William Silverman. (I’m doubly blessed this month; I’ll get to meet Sue shortly as she’s an instructor in the MFA program I’m about to begin.)
Regular readers know I’m having to learn how to share myself in my writing. I certainly did that with this piece. But Sue writes of the importance of a creative nonfiction writer being true to his or her story, so I did my best to follow that advice.
I’m told it also takes bravery to submit your work to a publisher, to risk rejection and disappointment. I’m not sure what that makes me for the first 43 years of my life, but I’ll gladly accept the “bravery” label now.
Are you putting yourself out there, both in your writing and through submissions? What is your story?
What a delight! Liz Massey of Creative Liberty has interviewed me in a podcast, where she asks me about my return to an art-committed life, inspired by my cross-country U.S. road trip.
Liz has a great web site, full of valuable resources on creativity, and it was great fun being interviewed by her. I wish I had possessed better technology on my end; when you listen to it, Liz is so clear, and I sound like I’m on a Gemini mission. But her questions are fantastic.
My muse prompted me to fish out three highlighter pens and mark up the ten writing pieces I’m critiquing in advance of my first MFA workshop later this month.
The eleven of us come from all four semesters of the program. I’ve never met any of them.
But I’m meeting them through their words. Are they meeting me through mine?
I encountered this resident of Connecticut on my cross-country road trip. He is not one of the creatives I interviewed.
I marked up each manuscript as follows – the yellow pen highlighted action, the orange background information, the pink introspection and insight. The writing instructor I had earlier this year would say the yellow and orange advanced the horizontal story, while the pink told the vertical story.
I then marked up my own manuscript. I saw very little pink.
As I’ve written here before, I’m new to Oprah-style sharing in my writing; as a journalist I tell other’s stories and kept myself out of the narrative. That was the approach I used in the short films I produced of creatives I interviewed on my cross-country road trip.
My 20-page submission chronicles part of that road trip, my experiences and interviews in Vermont and Connecticut. It’s mostly yellow, with a bit of orange.
The vertical story of my road trip is my awakening as a creative, and as the writing sample chronicles only my third and fourth states of a 35-state trip, I don’t have awakening insights to share in that section because I hadn’t experienced them yet. But that absence, that lack of awareness, needs to be conveyed to the reader.
I saw no dinosaurs in Vermont. Perhaps they were hiding amongst all of those trees.
I cheated a bit, sharing this submission first with my writer’s group. Last week these new friends told me my prose is rich with description and crisp in its utilitarian use of language. That’s my journalism at work.
But while my writer’s group colleagues liked meeting the creatives I profiled, they wanted more of me, of how these creatives affected me. They wanted to relate my experience to their own lives.
They wanted more pink.
It will be two weeks before my work is critiqued by my fellow MFA students. But I know in looking at their submissions that they all have their own balance of yellow, orange and pink. Some are almost all orange. Some are really heavy on the pink. I have more yellow than the others, but I’m okay with that, it’s part of my style, my voice.
They all have more pink than me. All of them. And while I am not trying to emulate someone else’s unique style, I am seeking to improve mine.
Thank you, readers of this blog. You’ve provided an audience for my experiment in sharing. This very post would not have been possible for me a year ago. Nor would a short work of creative nonfiction that is going to be published online this week by a literary journal, my first, modest success in my budding creative writing career. If that work were to be highlighted, it would also be heavily yellow, but that yellow prose “shows” the pink “tells” I include.
I have no illusions that folks out there are curious about my innermost thoughts and fears. But to the extent my thoughts and fears can connect with my readers and their insights and introspection – what my writer’s group members are seeking – I promise to put more pink on the page.
The Artist’s Road values the thousands of inspiring people who sample his links on creativity and writing on Twitter and Facebook. As a sign of his gratitude, he vows to adhere to a higher moral standard than members of the U.S. Congress; he will never tweet or post a picture of his “package.”
CREATIVITY
I'll never post pics of my private parts, but I can't make the same promise when it comes to pics of monkeys. Well, to be clear, I won't post pics of monkey private parts.
“Finding Creative People is Easy (and Here’s How),” Kate Canales, The Atlantic: Here’s the subhead: “Instead of searching for creativity, we should be fostering it in people we already work with—and redefining what it is.” (Related: Collaboration and Mutual Respect)
WRITING
For those with fine attention to detail, the answer is yes, one of the monkeys pictured is wearing a cowl. I hear they’re all the rage with simians.
