The Writing and Artist's Lifestyle, Part 2, Living the Analog Life

So I've listed a couple of hundreds of dollars of office supplies, and now let us assume that you're starting to put together the supplies I've mentioned. I saw on a mediocre but better than average website, while I was searching for comic-book writing suggestions, the following on that site's banner, "Writing is like vagrancy, don't quit your day job!" There is some truth to that, and I've talked about more than one reason why such a statement contains a great deal of truth. Putting together a couple of hundreds of dollars of office supplies is not easy for anyone who lives in a budget, and for a "writer and a vagrant," it is even less easy. I budget in an office-supply raid every other month, and I never leave the office-store without spending 80 dollars. However, that 80 dollars is in the budget, and I have the things I need without being in debt.

If you are capable of working, then you should work as you set out as an artist of any kind. It gives you more money to buy computer-stuff and office supplies as well. To look at a sterling example, after T.S. Eliot had become noted as a poet who would make the history books, he decided to take a full-time job as a banker, because he felt the job might help him connect with reality a bit better. He wound up a professor at Harvard University. However, the point he made still stands, and even though Eliot's work isn't the greatest English writing ever done, he has a well-deserved place in the history books as a very good writer who had something to say that was worth saying.

Another thing to hit before we start is the loaded word, "talent." I'll relate a story because I think it helps people. I made the mistake of going to school to major in music when I first graduated from High School. It wasn't a mistake because I wasn't talented, or even because the music program was awful, it was just a mistake. In the program we were learning rudimentary skills in every one of my classes, except Jazz Combo, where we were expected to use our skills at least "as-if," we were advanced players. Everyone was discouraged, everyone was dropping out, but we had a real bad seed in my combo. One day this bad seed had just had enough, and it wasn't like we weren't all upset, but he's complaining about, "I just don't have the talent to do this. I don't have what it takes."

I was practicing pretty hard, and I knew this kid was smoking dope more hours than practicing. I was also willingly in drug-rehab counseling that first year of college. Finally, our combo leader got sick of this kid and told him, "A lack of talent can often be cured by some trips to the woodshed." In other words, quit worrying about talent and practice - @#$%.

The reality to me is, you don't have to even be very intelligent to be a good or even a great artist. A personal with severe mental retardation might be able to write great children's books, and that actually isn't that easy to do! I had friends who began instrument lessons so tone-deaf you ran out of hearing when they started playing, and who two years later won national competitions for their instrument.

There are two sides to this equation. First, a writer has to write. "How do you write a 200 page book? You have to write at least 200 pages of words! " I quipped that at a pretensious English major one time, and I hope she commited herself. She should have commited herself years before I quipped that statement at her. If you are a comic book artist, you have to draw comic book art. If you're a musician or a composer, you have to either play your instrument, or compose music. This should be so fundamentally obvious, but it is awe-inspiring how many aspiring artists haven't figured out this simple statement. "An artist has to work at making art."

The other side of the equation has to do with our principle about not driving ourselves insane as artists. Do what you can handle, and take your time when you are tired or upset. For example, I want to be a contemporary classical composer who writes for traditional classical music instruments and who has a basic working knowledge of classical music tradition. That is a very tall order. In particular, I need heavy-duty work on my secondary piano skills. I have the time and the money to take the lessons I need, and I have a couple of teachers in my area in mind. However, I do not have the emotional endurance at this point to be pushed as hard as even an encouraging teacher would push me in those lessons. So, knowing that I would be blitzed and self-commiting to an institution if I took those lessons, I'm taking some time off from lessons. Currently, I'm just doing some simple exercises on the piano and improvising on the piano for enjoyment. I'm also doing some self-learning out of some very good composition and theory text-books.

The Actual Work Part

1. Take your permanent marker and label one of the notebooks you've bought as "Scrap Book Number 1."
2. Take one of your blank books and make a title page in either the area where it suggests a title page, or on the first page of the blank book. Include your name, maybe a name you've given yourself, the date you began writing in the blank book, maybe the time you started writing in the blank book, a title "Journal," or "Diary," at least, but I prefer a title with a caption, "Journal: Life in Slow Motion," and then maybe some other things you want on the title page that seem important to you. Stop there with the diary or journal for a moment, if you feel like obeying the "Gwydion commandments."
3. Start brainstorming in your scrap book. Do not even consider how sloppy or disorganized all of the information might be in that scrap book. Just write in the scrapbook, although timing and dating your entries can be a very good idea. If you see a piece of text you like, copy that in there. Just about anything can go in there. A further suggestion is this, and this is part of not driving ourselves insane when we are trying to make art. Look at it this way, if you write once a month on average, all year, you are not a writer. Period. The same holds true for any other art form you can name. However, don't push yourself to the asylum trying to do it exactly the right way, day in and day out. For a starting writer, writing an hour a week is heads and tails above a lot of people who think they're experienced writers. What you'll find is that you're going to start writing for plenty of hours a week, even if you have a day-job, just because you begin enjoying the process. Further, if you have a day-job, remember to sleep enough to keep a day-job. For myself, once the ball began rolling down the hill-side, I wrote maybe 4 or 5 hours a week without even considering how much work that took. I was also one of the worst writers in the English-speaking world. I don't think that is an exaggeration. I'm unable to work now, and the ball has gone so far down the hillside that I probably spend about 20 hours or more writing every week, and never consider where the time has gone. Practice makes perfect, even when you've had very little outside instruction, and began as one of the worst writers in the English-speaking world.
4. The journal or diary becomes the next question. Always time and date the entries, and take a little more care to be neat and tidy with the handwriting. Also, don't do writing exercises or keep scraps in the journal, because you've got the looseleaf notebooks for scrapwork. Stick to writing about personal things, like how your day went, or your new crush and how you feel about him or her. Stick to those kind of topics. The next thing is, you will make some messes in the journal. Don't throw it out until its full. Take some care with it, but leave the messes in there too. Finally, don't let the journal become "the book of guilt." Write in the journal when you feel like writing in it, and don't get get out the scourge for yourself when you don't feel like writing in the journal. I am very serious, if you begin by writing just an hour a week, you'll eventually be drinking Nyquil so you can get sleep, because you'll be so obsessed with the process.
5. Now this next part presents some difficulty. One thing to do is to sit down with your scrapbook and look at the question, "What do I want to write?" Imagine this, thinking of some of my old friends who loved Star Wars, "I want to write my own better version of Star Wars." I'm serious. Star Wars on its own isn't terrible, and your own better version will probably be a whole lot better, once you've got some writing skills down. Don't worry about plaigiarism issues at this point. Just do the work because you want to do that work.
6. Now you have a specific project you want to work on. Take a label and label one of your notecard boxes. You can take scrap notes on notecards, and you can look at some of the better pieces of your scrap notebook. Label and time and date some other notecards, and take a little more care with those notecards, and then drop those notecards in the box. You can buy dividers for the notecards as well, and it is pretty important to be organized in this case. However, again, nobody is perfect, and some messes are going to be made. What you do is go back to the notecard box and periodically clean up the messes. Yes, this is incredibly tedious, and again, you're trying to do a writing project, not get commited to the asylum, so don't push yourself beyond your limits. However, this does need to get done periodically with a notecard file. You open up the card file and clean up the mess by re-writing and consolidating disorganized cards or by simply throwing out cards you don't need.
7. Another suggestion is that now that you have a project to work on, start collecting materials that relate to the project. For example, you could get the Star Wars books, and books collecting the Star Wars comics, and the Star Wars movies. Then you read the books periodically and sit down with a nice bowl of buttery popcorn and a coca-cola classic and watch the Star Wars movies. In this case, and in most cases, it is best to go over and over the material related to the work you are planning. Also, don't overstuff yourself. For example, if you try to read every Star Wars novel and every comic book ever written, you're going to have a great dumpster of text to read and you'll give up hope. Further, it is really better to confine yourself very tightly to only the material you really, really need to get the work done. If a book you get is useless to your project, sell it back or give it to a friend. So let's say you are a real "Star Wars Traditional." You buy the novels related to the first series released, and the current versions of the first movies released, and you confine yourselves to those and only those. The more specific you can be, and the less material you have, the better off you are going to be when working on this part of the project.
8. Another really good idea is to simply go to the library and browse the catalogue and the shelves, and pick up a stack of books, maybe as many as 10 at a time. Then just look through, "stereo-manual," style and copy bits you find interesting into the scrapbook. If it never comes to anything, that doesn't really matter. However, this is a cheap way of expanding your research without tiring yourself out overly, particularly if you return your library books on time and keep up on your library fees. A little skimming, taking out some scraps, and you will probably find some things to draw on, even if they have no apparent relationship to your project.
9. With books you own, I recommend taking notes in the margin and then drawing things out into the scrapbook or onto notecards. You may want to use pencil, as then you can make new notes if your view on the text changes. Most trade books won't hold up to too much erasing, and I've just decided to keep notecards handy and list the title of the book, the time and date, the page, my reaction, and then I drop those in a second card file I look over periodically when I'm feeling particularly tedious.
10. I am not a magazine subscriber or buyer in general, but if you love magazines, then you definitely need a set of categorized magazine file folders. Drop the clippings you make into the organized file folders in your cabinet. As with the notecard file, consolidation and spring-cleaning are an absolute necessity for filing cabinets, as most sane people can only afford a simple two-stack set of filing cabinets. The same basic idea holds true for newspapers and newspaper clippings.

Now, that was long, and it includes quite a bit of tedious work to do, but don't go the whole hog right away. Keeping only a scrap notebook and a journal is plenty for a beginning writer, and you can just add to your practice when you're sedating yourself to stop writing, which will always happen if you make a good start, and that holds true for any art form. Also, you don't have to do everything the way this is laid out by yours truly, and as you start practicing these things or similar things, you'll inevitably develop your own ways of practicing them. Darn, you disobeyed me.

I am going to come back with the digital portion of this lifestyle, but it may be as long as an hour or so. Hang in there with this stuff, and remember that genius is more about work than being born totally amazing. Doing anything amazing requires a ton of work, no matter how many gifts you are given when you are born on planet earth, and many gifted people never figure out that this is the case. Also, for the scum out there, I quote our old "Nick-at-Nite," friend, Doby Gillis, "WORK? WORK!" I'll be back.