I Am Trying to Break Your Heart: Thoughts on making art

Point Wilson Light, Fort Townsend, WA (Diana+, Kodak 400VC-3)

This week I watched "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," the documentary about the band Wilco. The film got me thinking about art and art-making. I decided to collect them here. I hope you'll share your thoughts in the comments if anything sparks your interest.

1. The film was shot in grainy black and white, which had the effect of focusing your attention and eliminating distractions. It also gave the movie a certain nitty-gritty feel that fit the subject matter. I'm wondering: What would it mean to write in nitty-gritty black-and-white?

2. As the band's manager points out, there are two types of potential: artistic and commercial.

3. I want to make collaborative art. What would a band of writers look like?

4. I wonder what it's like to perform songs over and over again, playing with them, tweaking them as you go, responding to the mood of the audience and the mood of the muse each time? Is there any equivalent in writing? Maybe during the editing phase, or if you give live readings of your work. But I can't find a one-to-one correlative here. Maybe the closest thing can be found in live storytelling (which is different than giving a reading). (note to self: will you please finally listen to that burning desire to tell stories on stage? find a venue, already. or create your own if you have to, dammit!)

5. David Fricke, the senior editor of Rolling Stone, said the following while describing Wilco's album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I like what he says about having to "sit with it." I think we need to sit with more things., both in the making and in the receiving of art. "There's pretty stuff in there. There's hard stuff in there. There's mystery in there. There's really sweet tunes in there! And there's an abrasion in there, as well. But it's all there, and you really have to kind of sit with it. You have to allow yourself the time to get something out of it. ... We expect everything to happen like that. ... People are just so impatient. And as a result, we're looking at things in ways like, 'Well, how much time do I have to devote to this?' And it's really sad, because music, art, literature, poetry, even great technological inventions -- they're not meant to be done and done with that quickly."

6."It's hard to be working with somebody that needs more than you can give them. I'm more interested in playing music with people I can share with than give things to." ~Jeff Tweedy, lead singer of Wilco, speaking about a band member who was asked to leave

7. Making collaborative art sounds beautiful when it's all flowing and grooving. It sounds grueling and heartbreaking when the group dynamics sour. Like life, then.

8. I posted this next quote in my last post (about editing as a creative act), but I love it enough to post it again. There's something so freeing and alluring -- and frightening! -- about creating something and then pulling it apart to make it more interesting. "We generally go for a pretty straight definitive version of what the song sounds like it should be, and then, deconstruct it a little bit to see if there's some more exciting way to approach it. There's no reason -- at all -- not to destroy it. We made it, so it's ours to destroy. And that's liberating and exciting in a really creative way." ~Jeff Tweedy

Editing is a Creative Act (In The Word Cellar)

Diana+ (Kodak 400-VC3)

"We generally go for a pretty straight definitive version of what the song sounds like it should be, and then, deconstruct it a little bit to see if there's some more exciting way to approach it. There's no reason -- at all -- not to destroy it. We made it, so it's ours to destroy. And that's liberating and exciting in a really creative way." ~Jeff Tweedy, singer/songwriter (in "I am trying to break your heart," a documentary film about the band Wilco)

The writer's worst nightmare: The blank page.

The writer's other worst nightmare: The editing process.

Both have a reputation for intimidating writers and making us long to get up and do some laundry. Personally, I think the blank page is way scarier than editing. The beginning of a project -- those moments (or years) before a word is written -- can paralyze me with possibility. I'm working on changing that, trying to see the blank canvas as an invitation rather than a terrifying wasteland.

Maybe you think revision is worse. Maybe you consider it a dark monolith squatting between you and the joy of a finished piece of writing. I say it's not so! I like revising. All those written words to cover the blank page! All those sentences and punctuation marks to ward off bright white panic! Revising is often one of my favorite parts of the writing process.

Look at the word revision: Re-vision. That's not so scary. In fact, it's rather nice. I think of it as rewriting. No matter what you call it, editing is a creative act.

Yes, there are two different mojos that go into the writing process -- the creative and the critical -- but I think both can be creative acts. On one hand, you have the purely creative mojo, during which you should quiet your inner critic and analyst and let the words fly. On the other hand, there is a time for your editorial, critical eye to rove over your work. But I don't mean critical in a mean-spirited way. I mean critical in a creative way; use your thinking skills to make the work rock.

The only thing your critic and analyst should be doing is helping your creative mojo to better serve the work. If they start ranting or whispering about the value of the work -- about how good or bad it is -- rejigger their wiring until they understand that they're part of the creative process, not part of a panel of judges. This will quiet their cynicism and bitterness, and engage them in the process of making art, which is probably what they've secretly wanted.

Reshaping a work after the first pass of creation is part of the creative process. You move paragraphs around, change words, delete sentences and then sometimes put them back in. You play with the words as though you're shaping wet clay into something beautiful. Until the very end stage of proofreading, all editing is simply rewriting, or, writing again.

Don't be afraid to dig into your writing. Get your soft writer's hands dirty. Plunge them down into the loam of your words, all the way up to your wrists or elbows, however far you need to go. Stop fearing the rewriting process. It's all writing. Dig and move and sing in the pages of your creation. Own the editing process. Be brave enough to change things. You created it. Allow yourself to deconstruct it and put it together again in a new, more interesting way.

A word on a practical issue: Keep copies of vastly different revisions, in case you want to pull something from one version into another.

One word of caution: You could rewrite forever. Don't. Allow yourself to finish things and enjoy them.

I've completely revamped essays four or five times before I began to find their true shape and the story they were trying to tell. I loved the process of rewriting them, of unearthing something new and true, of discovering the art as I was making it.

I know some of you are still having a hard time believing me, but I invite you to try re-envisioning what the editing process can look like. During your next editing session, tell yourself that you're just writing again.

And let me know how it goes.

**Post your writing questions in the comments or send them to jennifer{at}thewordcellar{dot}com.

In The Word Cellar runs on the second and fourth Wednesday of the month. Read other posts in the series here.

Hold on to hope

Diana+ (Kodak GC400)

I have a guest audio post over at Liz Lamoreux's site (Be Present Be Here). I wrote a piece based on one of Liz's prompts {in this moment} and felt inspired to record a spoken version of it. I don't normally do audio posts, but I enjoyed making this one so much that I may just do more.

Here's a snippet of what you'll hear:

In this moment I am holding onto hope, just the thinnest, most translucent strand of hope. It's been a hard day, the kind that comes along every so often and leaves you with an emotional hangover. The kind of day that makes you wonder every hour, "What happened? Why were we so angry? How did we let it get so ugly?"....

I hope you'll click over to hear the rest.

And while you're there, I hope you'll check out Liz's Be Present retreats. The "Reveal" retreat this fall is packed with goodness. In addition to Liz, Madelyn Mulvaney and Susan Wooldridge (author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words) are teaching.

Lessons from Supposed Ruin

Seattle busker (Diana+, Kodak GC400)

I traveled to Seattle a few months ago and got my first-ever look at the city. Our hotel squatted near the Space Needle, and although we didn't make it to the top, I found plenty of interesting sights scattered underneath. I took my Diana+ with me everywhere, eager to try out one of my first rolls of 35mm film. I took several shots that had me giddy with delight before my camera jammed in front of the fruit stand outside of Pike's Place Market. Delight turned to despair. What about my pictures of the Space Needle as viewed through tree branches? And my photo of the Sweet Big Ass grapes sign? I fretted I'd lost them all, including the sweet old busker pictured above.

Later that evening, in near darkness at the end of a hallway, Dar helped me to untangle the film from the camera and wrap it in foil, a last-ditch effort to keep out the light and salvage anything we could. It turns out that I'd loaded the film incorrectly because I'd been in a hurry that morning. Oh, the agony of haste!

When I got home about a week later, I took the foil-wrapped film to the lab along with two other rolls. When I returned to pick them up, they handed me three rolls, but only charged me for two, saying that the third was blank. I was sad, but not surprised.

That third roll of film sat untouched on my desk for a week or more before I felt a nudge to crack open the squat little canister and unroll the negatives. And there -- there! -- were my photos. The Space Needle! The Sweet Big Ass Grapes! The busker who looked like a leprechaun! The carousel! Lemons and tomatoes at the fruit stand! The images were spaced unevenly across the negative, but the images themselves were fine.

That experience reminded me of a few things about making art -- and about living. Take your time with things that will matter in the end. Keep going until you risk breaking something important. Don't let disappointment ruin your adventure. Trust the experts, but don't blindly believe them when they say all is lost. And when you think all is lost, check just to be sure.

What Art Form Do You Turn To?

(Diana+; Kodak GC400)

I wrote a little blurb for someone tonight about why I like dabbling in other art forms. I thought I'd share it here as a way to generate some thought or discussion in this community about how secondary creative endeavors interact with your primary art form. Please share in the comments!

As much as I adore words, as much as I'm writing even when I'm not sitting down to write, there are times when I need a break from words. Sometimes I need the break, but more often it's the words themselves that break from me. Sometimes the words leave me, or go silent, or do whatever it is they do when they don't show up in any coherent manner for awhile. To get me through those times, I'm learning to engage in the visual world of the right-brain. After a lifetime of believing I had no ability in the visual arts, I find myself playing with paint, mixed media, and analogue photography. Writing is my passion and my life's work, and sometimes everything gels and it feels like play. But I play with paint and photography as pastimes, something fun to do as a distraction. If I happen to make art in the process of having fun, so much the better! But mostly I like these other media because I can be a beginner, and because they give me another way to create. I like cooking for much the same reason. These non-verbal creative acts are good for the writer's soul, and good for the writing itself, even though I don't exactly know why that is. I just know that it is.