2 posts tagged “skill”
"You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say." — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald’s worlds are apt for any artist. Whatever the artform or medium the true artist pursues her or his creation not for the purpose of simply bringing this one project to fruition, but because she or she is committed to the process of manifesting ideas into physical form accessible to others through sight, sound, touch, taste and even smell.
The experience of applying structure to the what lives in one’s heart and mind requires not only commitment to attending to one’s bursts of inspiration, but also ascertaining the skills necessary to render comprehensible the dream-like concepts and hopes of one’s mind, and images that so enrapt one’s thoughts. The artist adept at her or his craft delivers them in a manner that stimulates the observer, taster, listener, reader.
She or he brings into form a work that when the admire, in physically touching the artist’s creation, is moved in other, more aesthetic and less measurable, but no less potent ways. The admirer as did the artist come to know the artist, as did the artist her or himself, in completing this leg of the process.
So much of what we as artists create is a recreation of who we are, our identity that is forever changing and evolving. Just as each story the author weaves is autobiographical, each song the musician either writes or reinterprets in her or his understanding of the music, and each painting the painter completes, is but one more rung on the ladder toward defining not only their purpose in having committed themselves to their chosen artistry but also in discovering and revealing their need to create. And with that they are given a wider glimpse and perspective of the one directive that so drives their inspiration.
Author and poet, David Mura, says that, “… when the writer discovers why she or he is writing,” realizes the larger story that is coming through them, “…that writer is then able to write all the smaller stories they imagine and are drawn to write.” [David Mura, author of Turning Japanese: Memoirs of an Sansei, , Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity, After We Lost Our Way, Angels for the Burning, The Color of Desire: Poems.]
As artists we live in the macrocosm of our hopes, dreams and wishes held within the microcosm of our imagination. These creative desires manifest themselves and all their comprising aspects the various projects we perceive within and bring to completion in physical form. We experience these desires in their early stages of their appearance as inspiration.
Inspiration is our need, the urge within us, to tell these smaller stories, paintings, and piece of music that form a mosaic to the larger end of clarifying for ourselves and others to see why we create. The compilations of our work, the body of our creative endeavors are in essence an ode, or rather numerous variations on a larger theme of who we are, and our need to bring life to what would otherwise remain a wish or thought hidden in our memory.
To create something just for the sake of completing that one creation is myopic and gives short shrift to the intricate and complex beings we are. No one painting can express the essential nature of an artist, both as a human being and a person who has experienced and followed through on the compulsion to bring form to the chaos of yearnings of their heart and soul.
For those who say,"I had not the energy nor the desire to persist,” perhaps what lay embedded in their words is, “I lacked the strength to discover and experience who I really am.”
A human individual is never a means to an end, rather the end of long sought after revelations, the creations of which the artist’s hand unveil during each step of utilizing their craft and skills.
The hardest thing about being a writer is making good use of your time.
Time is a writer’s most precious commodity, after imagination—and maybe even before.
For it is in the conservation and consolidation creating an abundance of time, that our imaginations percolate.
I would imagine this is the way it is for all artists. Yet for writers there is the added practicality of not only getting the words out and on paper, but the time it takes to write/type them, and then order, arrange and rearrange them. Following that there is the required dormancy or period of simmering--like with cooking soup having been brought to a boil, and the making of which cannot be rushed.
Poet, Marie Ponsot, a wife and mother now in her eighties, suggests 7 minutes is all a writer needs to place their stamp upon the day. Seven minutes. A wife and mother myself, Ponsot’s words are music to my ears.
Time.
Seven minutes.
Consistency.
Why is it that I’m always looking for the big clumps of time to donate to my writing?
It makes me feel better to say I have worked 3, 4 or 5 hours this day on a certain piece of writing. That comes from having read article of writers discussing and disseminating their processes of crafting a story wherein they talk of having written up to 18 hours a day at some points. Perhaps they did.
But that’s not me—at least not now.
Then there is the question of whether the amount of time one puts into their writing in each sitting is directly equivalent to the quality of the writing created?
Perhaps.
A more overriding concern is—how best to apply one’s time to one’s writing if the goal is to achieve fresh, vibrant and imaginative prose and dialogue that keeps the reader engaged unto the last syllable? What is the worth?
Quality.
I’ve always revered old people, particularly the ones who delved into an art form during their youth or early midlife and brought it to fruition through the decades they have lived--six, seven, eight, even nine for some—and while attending the routine affairs of life like raising children, holding down a nine-to-five job, caring for elderly parents—living life.
There’s something about the time they’ve given, the years, hours and days, they’ve hung in there—committing themselves to not only the development of their artistic skills, but their presence in the flow of life—from which all writing comes.
Life like, writing is not easy. It flows one day after the next, like the words of a sentence that go on to form paragraphs, chapters and eventually a short story and/or a book.
I here wisdom in Ponsot’s choice of seven minutes--not ten or five—seven.
Seven in Tarot is the sign of change.
There are also seven days in the week—the time in which God is said to have created the Earth.
This day.
Seven minutes.
Perhaps, one day, a book.
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