 If you read last week’s post on creative hobbies, you know I’ve started gardening more as a creative outlet. You also know I used to be an accidental plant-murderer. There are a number of ways to kill plants (not enough water, not enough light, too much light, too much food, not enough food, pests, disease, pruning, etc.), but my primary offense has always been overwatering. I’d see my plants struggling and think, Oh no! They need more water! when in fact, almost always, the plants were actually telling me, Less water, please! before drowning in my frantic and ignorant zeal.
The thing is, I had such limited knowledge and experience that I had only one way to address my plants’ needs: more water. But the more plants I’ve kept alive (and also killed, to be honest), the more I’ve learned to understand what they like: more water, less water, more light, less light, some fertilizer (but not too much), repotting, thinning, pinching, different soil… Now, when I see them struggling, I test the top inch of soil for moisture or feel the heaviness of the pot before watering. When encouraging my herbs to grow a certain way, I cut them at the right spot. I now have a lot of ways to approach gardening, a lot of tools in my toolkit, so to speak, and the experience and understanding to help me use those tools effectively. Which brings me around to my point for this week, because learning how to garden has gotten me thinking about the relationships between experience, instinct, and skill. It wasn’t too long ago, with regards to writing, I used to say that my main method of problem solving was “throw more words at it.” Stuck on a plot point? Throw more words at it. Can’t figure out this character’s motivation? Throw more words at it. Don’t know where to end a scene? Throw more words at it. As with my plants, I had a limited understanding of the problems my stories were having and a limited number of ways to address them, which often resulted in long (and/or many) drafts with lots of unusable words and ultimately a lot of stories that went nowhere or simply weren’t very good. But as I’ve written more stories, done this for more years, I’ve gained more experience with and understanding of my own work and process, which has ultimately translated into what I think we’d call instinct. Now, I can be working on a project, run into a problem, and understand within a page or two what’s wrong. Maybe I’m starting the scene too early. Maybe I don’t understand the main character’s motivations well enough. Maybe I don’t have a handle on the narrative voice. Maybe there needs to be more action/more funny/more angst. Maybe I need to slow down and stop pressuring myself so much. These instincts mean that I don’t often have to write huge chunks of manuscript before I realize they’re not working, saving me in both time and frustration, and my years of classes and craft books and writing exercises mean that I can usually find a good tool (a map, a brainstorm, a list of 10 things, etc.) to address the particular problem I’m having at any given moment. What’s cool is that experience and instinct work not just for the day-to-day practice of writing but for understanding my creative process as well. In the past year or so, I’ve noticed that it’s getting easier to listen to what my process is telling me. Now is the time to absorb rather than produce. Now is the time to plan. Now is the time to listen to music and take walks and jot down scattered notes that don’t connect right now but are in fact formative building blocks for the story I’ll later create. Now is the time to write the first words. Now is the time to read and revise. This understanding means that I don’t dive into a project before it’s ready to be written, or I let a book percolate for long enough that by the time I start on it, it’s dying to be written, or I collect enough research material that I’m not stymied by my own lack of world-building a quarter of the way into the novel. And these instincts, I think, will only get better the more experience I get. I found out the other day that if you cut a sprig of mint at a certain point and leave it in water (because perhaps you’re not ready to use it), it will send out roots, and you’ll be able to plant it again! It’s so exciting, because I feel like there are so many more things to learn and experience, both in gardening and in writing, and I’m so looking forward to discovering them. Next week: SIGNIFICANT CONCRETE DETAIL. I’m a descriptive writer by nature--I think because I as a writer have to understand exactly what a scene looks or smells or sounds like if I’m going to write about it. Otherwise I feel like I’m writing into nothing, trying to fill a void with a story rather than figure out the story that’s already going on in a particular environment. One of the first things I ever learned about craft, and indeed had practically drilled into my head while I was at UC Santa Cruz, was the importance of significant, concrete detail. Let’s rehash my college glory days next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Oh frabjous day! <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Spring is here. The little crabapple tree I’m trying to turn into a bonsai is leafing out. After I finally figured out that I needed to fertilize it, the spearmint that’s been struggling on my windowsill for two years is finally thriving. I’m starting forty-eight basil plants from seed in hopes that enough will survive so I can achieve my lifelong (okay, decades-long) dream of being able to periodically harvest my own basil for fresh pesto. All of a sudden, after a lifetime track record of killing every plant that’s ever had the misfortune of being under my care, I’ve somehow become a gardener.
This transformation didn’t happen overnight, of course. It started maybe six or seven years ago when I was given my first moth orchid, which, contrary to popular belief, has a care routine so regular and predictable that even I could keep it alive. (If you’re curious, see the end of the post for details!) Slowly, I acquired more orchids, then branched out into air plants, bonsai (or what will become bonsai in like 10-20 years, I hope), and indoor herbs. I like the creativity of gardening, particularly with the bonsai, which I’m trying to figure out how to train as well as grow, and I get to be a problem-solver, learning if it’s sun or water or fertilizer the plants need more or less of, trying to determine why the leaves are wilting like that, what the proper soil mixture is, where the plants are happiest during what times of the year. But I’ve had a lot of creative hobbies over the years (drawing, music, book-making, egg-painting), and while I still turn to them occasionally, it’s gardening that’s taken up more and more of my creative free time. And I think that it has to do with my career. Everyone’s experiences are different, of course, but for me, a strange thing happened when I started writing novels professionally. Writing, which had always been a fun creative outlet, a hobby, something I pursued not because it was my job but because I loved it, suddenly became the thing I did because I had to. Without a doubt, I still loved it (and still do), but it had also become an obligation, a responsibility, something I did not because I was inspired, necessarily, but because I wanted to get paid. Which was fine. I welcomed it. I had always wanted to do this work, and I was so grateful and fulfilled because I was actually getting to do it. What I didn’t expect and have been struggling with for a few years, though, was that becoming a professional author not only changed my relationship to my writing, but it also changed my relationship to all my other creative hobbies. For me, becoming a professional author didn’t just mean getting paid to write the books, but it also meant promoting the books, and that’s where things started to get weird for me. Perhaps the most difficult part of this job for me has been navigating social media. I’m naturally a private, introverted person, most comfortable talking one-on-one with someone and kind of super terrified of trying to engage with a lot of people at once, so figuring out how to be in public online has been a huge challenge for me. Of course, I think professional authors do this in various ways--some are brilliant at joining communities or engaging with their readers or building their brands and platforms, some are hardly on social media at all--but for me, who was a new author in 2015-2016 and who often feels like a new author today, I felt (and still feel) this huge pressure to do better with my online platforms. There’s always this low-key buzz of anxiety in the back of my brain, sometimes even when I’m doing the bulk of my job, which is writing the books. How can I get more followers? How can I attract more readers? How can I get more likes/retweets/comments/replies? What am I going to post on Instagram? Will anyone pay attention? Should I be on Twitter more? How do I increase my engagement? Am I failing? Why does it always feel like I’m failing? And in this strange and stressful whirlwind of insecurities, it feels like everything I do should be performative in some way. If I come across some wildflowers, Instagram. If I have a funny thought about a TV show, Twitter. If I do my hair and makeup that day, selfie (or because I’m terrible at selfies, make someone else take a flattering photo of me, which almost invariably ends up being both time-consuming and an exercise in self-criticism). If I’m painting eggs, I can do designs inspired by book covers! If I’m baking, I can post cookies, cupcakes, muffins! We can bond over our shared love of baked goods, can’t we? If I’m drawing, I can post photos of my sketches! Look, everyone, I’m artistic! That’s a brand, right? Am I cool on the internet yet? In this weird, stressed-out brain of mine, not only had writing turned into a job, but so had all of the other fun, creative hobbies that I’d ever pursued, and that made them not fun anymore, not relaxing, not creative outlets that I wanted to keep doing but chores that I had to do because if I didn’t do them, I wasn’t doing the promotional part of my job, I was letting opportunities slide past, I was failing. And then I started gardening more. The trick, I found, is not being very good at it. I’m not a great photographer, and my plants are pretty ugly (because I’m not a great gardener either), so I’m never really tempted to share them or use them as social media content. My plants aren’t photo opportunities. They’re just my plants. This hobby isn’t an avenue for promotion. It’s just a hobby. And for me, at least, that’s been so freeing. My brain has something to chew on when it’s not actively working on a story. I can do something creative that I don’t feel the pressure to incorporate into my act. I don’t know if I’m the only one who feels this way, but for me, it’s nice to have a creative space where I don’t have to worry about reviews, judgments, comparisons, or competitions. I just work on it, and some plants live and some plants die and some plants flourish and some plants struggle, but I’m not stressed out over whether or not I’m failing or falling behind. I just keep doing it, and it’s relaxing and challenging and makes me content. This is something I’ve realized lately that I need. I love writing books and getting paid to do it, but I also think I need a protected creative space away from being the business of being an artist. Don’t get me wrong, the anxious churn of doubts and insecurities about my online presence (or lack thereof) is still there, and still frightening, and still distracting--having a creative hobby doesn’t help that. But having a creative hobby where I don’t feel the pressure to perform or to sell is nourishing to my creative spirit, which I need if I want to keep doing the main part of the job, writing. It will, I think (I hope), make this career more sustainable mentally and emotionally and artistically, so I can keep doing this thing that I love. Next week: KNOWING YOUR PROCESS. Next week I’d like to talk about artistic instincts--how we get them, how we can use them, what they tell us about our creative endeavors, how to listen to them. Join the party next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. BYO cheer. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings. How I Keep Moth (Phalaenopsis) Orchids Alive Light: I’ve kept my orchid in a west-facing alley window and an east-facing one, in northern California where the sun wasn’t super intense at either time of the day, but was still pretty consistent. Light’s never really been that big of an issue for my orchids, though. Mostly, I feel like they should be getting some light but not the kind that will fry them. You know that feeling like when you go outside in the afternoon and you’re just getting cooked? They don’t like that. If they’re getting enough light, their leaves will be a nice bright green (somewhere between the green crayon and the light green crayon colors). If the leaves start to turn more yellow or have brown spots, they’re getting too much light. If the leaves start to turn dark green, they’re not getting enough. Start by putting them somewhere with some light (near a window, for example) and they’ll tell you whether it’s too much, not enough, or just right. Water: Watering is a little trickier, but not much. It depends on what your orchid is potted in. A lot of orchids from the grocery store come packed with a bunch of sphagnum moss, which holds a lot of water. People will tell you to put an ice cube on the moss (never touching the plant) once a week, and I’ve kept orchids alive this way. (The thing is, orchids are tropical plants and don’t super like cold, so this isn’t my preferred method of watering them.) Usually, after the flowers fall off and the spike (stem) turns brown, I cut the spike at the base, then repot the orchid in bark and a plastic pot with quite a few drainage holes (I used Google to teach me how to repot). The orchid bark holds some water, which is good, but doesn’t keep the roots soaking, which is bad and can drown/kill the plant. With my orchids potted in bark, I soak them for 10 minutes once a week, let them drain in the sink, and then put them back near the window. The bark should dry out over the course of the week, but if the pot feels heavy, like it still has a bunch of water still in it, I skip the soak that week and wait until the pot feels lighter the next time. I know that’s a huge paragraph, but basically, it’s pot in bark, soak 10 minutes once a week and drain. That’s it! Temperature: Temperature should probably be considered, but I’ve never had a problem with it. I think whatever we’d generally consider comfortable temperatures is what these orchids like, somewhere around 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit, although dipping a little above or below every so often hasn’t hurt my plants yet!  Writing to deadlines is such a strange thing, I think because a deadline is one of those intersections between art and business. Art (often) requires time to step back, to reflect, to discover, to make one thing only to realize you were making an entirely different thing the whole time and only now do you see how to really make the thing you wanted to make from the beginning. Business (often) requires things to happen a lot faster. When it comes to revision, for example, I prefer to read something over, to revise it, to let it sit, to think about it, to forget the old versions of it from previous drafts, to see it again as what it is, with all the new flaws that have appeared in its most recent edits, with brand new things to change and polish. But, for better or for worse (and I think there’s a bit of both here), my creative process is not the boss of me. There are publishing deadlines to be met, editorial and sales and printing schedules to adhere to, other people who are depending on me to get this book done so we can put it out there into the world.
Which makes the meeting of a deadline a particularly strange thing. I recently turned in a revision of my Secret Project, so I’m still feeling the momentum of deadline work (that compulsion to amass word counts or knock down chapters or hammer out character arcs), but the project is no longer in front of me, and that compulsion to keep working has nowhere to go. There’s technically more I could do to improve this manuscript: a couple details to include here and there, a bit of nuance to add to a character, continuity and consistency to iron out. I could absolutely spend more time cutting and editing and adjusting… Or I could not. There are more revisions to come on this project, and they, too, are going to take place in a limited timeframe, which means that there are only a limited number of times I can read and reread the manuscript in a set amount of days or weeks before I am so deep in the bramble of my own words (old and new, revised and re-revised) that I lose sight of the story entirely, the original drafts muddled with the latest, the things I cut or added all mixed up in one incoherent jumble. Given an unlimited amount of time, I could take a month between revisions to get out of the tangle of the project, to see the shape of it from a distance, to understand what I’m really looking at. But when deadlines are involved, I need to find ways to shortcut this process. Hence this week’s topic, not-doing. Or I guess, more accurately, not-thinking. Or not-looking, maybe? To give myself the kind of time/space/distance I need to come back to my project again with fresh eyes and a rejuvenated mind, I do my best not to work on it, not to till it or weed it or even look directly at it. I don’t let myself dwell on the story. I don’t allow myself to think about how to fix its imperfections. I try not to actively think about the book at all, like there’s this distance I want to create, or maybe a space I want to protect. Maybe it’s that I want my creativity to lie fallow for a while, so that when I come back to it, it’ll flourish again. Is it odd to think of the not-doing as a sort of work? I’m not actively thinking about my project, but it feels like I’m thinking around it, if that makes sense. I’m reading for research. I’m reading things that inspire me to be a better writer. I’m going on research trips and gardening and taking the dogs for hikes and considering the sensation of walking over different kinds of earth. I’m jotting down revision notes as they come to me (if they come to me), but not trying to figure out how to execute them or what ripples they’ll cause later. And all of these things, while not exactly the frenetic, driving, forward momentum of being on deadline, are things, I hope, that will not only make this project better when I return to it again but will expedite my naturally leisurely creative process so when art and business come together at my next deadline, maybe the intersection will be a little less fraught. Next week: CREATIVE HOBBIES. Until a few years ago, I would accidentally kill every plant I brought into my home. Then I discovered orchids, whose regular watering needs really suited me, and I started to collect a few different varieties, then expanded into a spearmint plant, some bonsai (well, they’re hopefully going to be bonsai eventually), air plants, and twenty-four basil seedlings that I’m starting this year. Somehow, I’ve gone from a plant-killer to (dare I say it?) a gardener. And I actually think that has to do with publishing, in a weird, roundabout sort of way. Hobby it up with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Love and kindness. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  I listen to a daily five-minute podcast called The Slow Down, in which U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith talks about and reads a poem. (That’s it. That’s the podcast.) It’s a lovely little drink of poetry each day, and if you’re a podcast and/or a poetry person, I highly recommend checking it out. I don’t love all of the poems, and to be honest, because I don’t retain and process information auditorily as well as I do visually, usually couldn’t tell you what poem Smith read that day or what it was about, but there was this poem featured all the way back in January that I absolutely cannot stop thinking about. That poem is “Swatting Flies” by Austin Smith. Tracy K. Smith introduces this poem by saying, it “begins with the memory of swatting flies, but it covers ground quickly, darkening and shifting scales, so that by the time it’s over, it’s hard for me to go on thinking of any violence as small.” I love this introduction because it stuck with me, that mention of “shifting scales,” because it’s the exact same feeling I had when I first listened to the poem. That dizzying sense of size and perspective changing all of a sudden, kind of how I imagine Alice would have felt, eating or drinking in Wonderland. Over the past couple months, I’ve thought about the poem over and over, how (I feel, at least) it’s so successful, so efficient in delivering that gut-punch at the end, and I’d love to kind of feel my way into it today, with you. First, I think “Swatting Flies” is kind of brilliant in its building of images. Most writers do it, to some extent or another; we use words to create imagery, that is, descriptive sensory or figurative language, sometimes by including details that invoke the five senses (touch, sound, smell, sight, taste) or tools like metaphor, simile, alliteration, personification, hyperbole, or most often a combination of both. Again and again, Smith creates these images of fly-swatting: “light and nimble” (words that, in their suppleness, the quickness with which they flow off the tongue, demonstrate another way to use diction, as we talked about in the past three weeks, because the words themselves kind of feel swishy, if that makes sense, like the action of the fly-swatter itself), or “a square / Of blue plastic mesh, stippled / To let the air pass through” (a more concrete description of the fly-swatter). I especially like this chain of images: You even swatted your own bare calf, There’s the sensory description of the “red welt”, the simile (a comparison between two different things using “like” or “as”) likening the slow disappearance of the welt to the slow disappearance of a condensation ring left by a cold drink. These images are, to use a narrative term, low-stakes. The mistake of swatting himself doesn’t have any real or lasting repercussions. There’s no harm done. Look, the mark is disappearing already, as if it never happened. But this no-consequence scenario is almost immediately followed by the personification (the giving of human traits to non-human things) of the flies. These flies “who wrung their hands among / The breadcrumbs in the kitchen, / Begging you for mercy”, these flies “Making love on the windowsills / In the upstairs bedrooms / Where they had believed / Themselves safe.” These flies who are not human but who are engaged in relatable (some might say universal) human pursuits--prayer, sex. And so, I think, this combination of imagery, simile, and personification prepares us for the ending. The image and the turn. The last we see of the boy swatting flies is the fly-swatter itself, “clogged with the dead,” and the flies, feeling the movement of the air, fleeing. But with a metaphor (or more specifically, a simile, but they're both comparisons), the image shifts, spirals from this tiny summer scene of the boy and the flies and the fly-swatter, growing and growing huge, almost out of proportion, until they are not just flies but “Like people who flee a house / Moments before the drone strike.” Damn. I mean, what a wallop. What a blow. What a way to end a poem. And although I love this turn, the way the single word “like” separates the flies from the people, the swatter from the drone strike, I think part of what makes it so powerful is the way Smith has stacked these low-stakes images one on top of another throughout the poem, the boy with the swatter, the cold drink, the leisurely summer reading, until we get to the personified flies, the ones who are just trying to go about their lives the way we would, don’t you see?, and then it turns. Then the twist. Then the reveal. Then this meaning, these huge implications, these things to consider about ourselves and our violence. Next week: NOT-DOING. I once had a theory that there are four types of people in this world: people who define themselves by what they have, people who define themselves by what and whom they love, people who define themselves by who they are, and people who define themselves by what they do. At this point, it’s probably no surprise to you that I am a do-er. I love doing things. Accomplishing stuff. But I’m in a bit of a weird spot with my Secret Project, and it’s gotten me thinking about the value of not-doing, of sitting back, not even to reflect, just to… even avoid? And I’d like to explore that a bit more with you. Let’s not-do this thing next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Make it so. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  It’s funny, I knew as soon as I started writing my first post on diction that I eventually wanted to talk about how diction affects theme. But over the past few weeks, as I’ve discussed and pondered and discussed diction and character and diction, atmosphere, and tension, in the back of my mind I’ve always been struggling with how to approach diction and theme. How do I talk about this? What books or poems or themes could I discuss? Why can’t I remember for the life of me one single theme that’s evoked with word choice? I guess it’s because theme (what I used to describe to my students as “what a piece of art has to say about a topic”) is so huge, usually spanning an entire novel instead of just one easily isolated excerpt, and also, personally, unless I’m really specifically trying to pull out a theme for consideration or discussion, it also often goes so unsaid? Weirder still, I even had a hard time picking out a theme from my own work (and I knew I must have had many) that I could talk about with any clarity. Ultimately, though, I landed on a theme from The Reader Trilogy, something I think those books had to say about history and personal agency and hope. Although I don’t think this theme is explicated solely through diction, I remember using word choice pretty deliberately and pretty early on in order to build its foundations. Some spoilers ahead! To start, I think it’s important to talk about the magic system in The Reader Trilogy. It’s based on something called “the Illuminated world,” a shifting golden overlay that a magic user can perceive simultaneously with the physical world. Here, it’s described in The Reader: “the trajectory of the sword was outlined in rippling eddies of light. She could see them more clearly this time: each current was made up of thousands of tiny specks, all drifting and swirling” (p. 73) There are two layers to a magic user’s perception: the “real” physical world and this golden world of Illumination, which is composed of millions upon millions of ever-shifting motes. Note, though, the diction used to describe this world: “rippling,” “eddies,” “current,” “swirling.” These word choices evoke fluidity, liquidity. I’m describing magic here, something entirely made up, so it makes sense to provide readers with an analogy for how the magic looks, feels, and operates. But, and you’ll notice I do this sometimes, I could have used another metaphor entirely: a woven tapestry, a murmuration of swallows, dust in sunlight. Overwhelmingly, however, the Illuminated world is like water. And not just any water, but big water: “Sefia grasped for answers, her vision flooding into the darkest corners of his past, invading his history. She saw too many things to name; sights, sounds, smells washed over her again and again like cruel gold waves” (The Reader p. 182) Again and again, these water-words come up: “flooding,” “washed,” “waves.” The Illuminated world is overwhelming, even violent, as any large body of water can be. By this point, Sefia and the reader have discovered that the Illuminated world is something like time. In it, magic users can see the past, alter the present, and catch glimpses of the future. Like time, the Illuminated world is infinite, always moving, but time, in the world of The Reader Trilogy, does not move in one direction, forward and backward, but is always surrounding us, like an ocean: “Every second, it’s changing, the way the sea changes with rain or glacier runoff or the passage of a minnow” (The Storyteller p. 168-169). By the time we get to The Storyteller, Sefia and the reader have learned that time is not static, but a shifting thing. Time may be huge, and its movements nearly unfathomable, like a “sea”, and people may be small as drops of water, or “minnows,” but it’s still these seemingly infinitely small creatures, with their infinitely small actions, that have the power to make great changes in the currents of history. So even though Sefia is facing down this enormous, epic battle for the fate of the world, even though it seems like there isn’t much chance that she can make a difference, there is still this hope, which Galadriel so beautifully articulates in The Fellowship of the Ring (film edition): “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” This theme is built up over the course of three books, and diction is only one part of it, but I think it’s there, in the word choice, from the beginning, in the water imagery, the metaphor of the ocean. History is vast, and we are small, but we are the ones that create history. We are the ones that can still make a difference. Next week: IMAGERY & METAPHOR. I’ve been listening to The Slow Down podcast with U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, where each weekday, Smith talks about and reads a poem. It’s lovely and only five minutes per episode, and if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend taking a listen. Even though we’re halfway through April, though, and the show is on its 100th poem, I can’t stop thinking about this poem I heard all the way back in January, how striking it was, how much of a gut punch, how it turned so fast on imagery and metaphor, and I just want to share it and talk about it because it’s masterfully done. Slow down with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Welcome! Everything is fine. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Welcome back, fellow creators, to our second week of posts about diction a.k.a. word choice. If you’re just arriving, please feel free to check out last Sunday’s discussion of diction and character, although you can also just forge ahead into today’s topic as well: diction, atmosphere, and tension. To start, I’d love to talk about two diction-related concepts: denotation and connotation. Generally, I think of denotation as the actual dictionary definition of a word, precise, and important for conveying your primary meaning. For example, the word “dog” denotes a four-legged mammal of the genus Canis, domesticated by humans over tens of thousands of years. Denotation tends to be important and effective in its to-the-point-ness, but also, for our storytelling purposes, a little uninteresting. It’s connotation, I think, where things get fun. Connotation is the collection of the numerous other meanings, feelings, and associations that a word can evoke. I picture these meanings like a cloud, all hovering around the actual definition, all conjured every time you use the word. The word “dog,” therefore, can connote loyalty, or obedience, or unpleasantness. A character can be dogged in her pursuits if she’s particularly persistent. A character can dog a person’s heels if they’re following them closely. In storytelling, if you choose your words carefully, you can use their connotations to create both atmosphere and tension in your narrative in an efficient way. Diction to Build Atmosphere When I was teaching English, I had my students define atmosphere as “mood,” and I’d like to expand on that a bit here. I think of atmosphere as the feeling a reader gets from a passage (eerie, exuberant, foreboding, menacing, relaxed, etc.) the same way you’d get a feeling from walking into any real life setting (a crumbling house, a sun-dappled glen, a field beneath the fireworks on Fourth of July). While you can absolutely spend paragraphs or even pages creating the atmosphere of a particular setting (with denotation), it’s often more expedient and effective to build it in a single sentence. As an example, let’s take this sentence from Roshani Chokshi’s YA fantasy, The Star-Touched Queen: “The archives were cut like honeycombs and golden light clung to them, dousing every tome, painting, treatise and poem the soft gold of ghee freshly skimmed from boiling butter” (p. 11). On the one hand, this is a description of hexagonal-shaped, sunlit rooms filled with books and paintings. That’s denotation. On the other, each of these words evokes a certain mood in addition to illustrating the archives and their contents. “Clung,” “dousing,” and “skimmed” are all words that connote a certain closeness, a certain feeling of contact with the skin. “Honey” has a similar tactile stickiness, and “butter” gives you that oily, coating sort of feeling. This is the connotation. The archives, then, are a warm and opulent (“golden,” “soft gold”) place, but close, too, almost oppressive, almost too much, almost cloying in their richness. With a few well-chosen words, Chokshi builds an atmosphere you can almost feel. Diction to Build Tension As with character and atmosphere, diction can also create tension. In a chapter of the Secret Project I was working on yesterday, a character uses the word “carmine” to describe another character’s traits: “his carmine eyes always darting back and forth between us.” This word choice gave me pause--it’s a curious word, I think, not a word I’d use myself, generally, and not a word I hear every day, and so it kind of calls attention to itself. Often, I want the language in my books to serve the story, to be invisible, in a way, noticeable only in how effective the story is, so “carmine” was, for me at least, an odd choice. But it’s also the one that fit. In definition, “carmine” is a fancy way of saying “red.” As per last week’s post on fancy vs. plain language, it follows that this character, who’s pretty well-read, would use a highfalutin word here, although there are a number of other words he could have used instead: garnet (evoking jewels, sharpness, sparkle), mahogany (evoking a more brownish hue, wood, richness), cinnamon (evoking spice, warmth), etc. “Carmine,” however, evokes something nastier. Carmine is a pigment made from grinding insects into powder, so it’s related to 1) death, 2) the act of crushing and pulverizing, and 3) creepy crawlies. (It’s also the name of a Batman villain, Carmine Falcone.) These associations all help to build tension between my point-of-view character and this man with the reddish-brown eyes. Although we’re just getting introduced to this guy, from this word alone, we can intuit that there’s something off about him, something unsettling and perhaps even dangerous. That’s why I love connotation. I think if it’s used well, then your diction can do double-duty: tell your reader’s what’s happening in the scene and build background elements like atmosphere and tension that are more felt than said, but are nonetheless integral to the telling of a good story. Next week: DICTION & THEME. Okay, one more week of word choice to go, and it’s about how word choice can build theme! Make a scene next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Huzzah! <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  I don’t think I’ve made any secret of my love of revision--I almost always prefer taking something I’ve got and making it better to making something from scratch. While I enjoy substantive revisions (I just “threw a grenade” on a couple chapters of my current work-in-progress, picked through the ruins, and built up something entirely new and wholly better), I’ve come to realize that I’m happiest doing line edits. All the big changes have been made. All the plots and subplots, character arcs, and conflicts are already there. And all that’s left are the tiny alterations, the fine stitching, the hand-sewn beadwork, the cutting or replacing of a word, a phrase, a sentence. I don’t think I’m this way because I’m obnoxiously attentive to detail (or at least, that’s not the only reason), but because I honestly believe that telling a story at its smallest level (the level of word, punctuation, space, phrase, clause) is as important as telling a story at the level of plot or character. For me, that’s because these little building blocks do as much work revealing character, building atmosphere or tension, or creating theme as any paragraph, page, or chapter. Which is why I’m so excited about the topic for the next few weeks: diction a.k.a. word choice. I think about diction a lot. My most-used tool in Microsoft Word is “Thesaurus.” Probably 50% of my Google searches are definitions and synonyms. I think the words a narrator or character uses can tell us so much about how we’re supposed to react to what’s happening on the page in a variety of ways we probably don’t even think about as we’re reading but certainly feel, in our bones. In fact, diction is such a huge topic for me that I’m going to split it across three posts: diction and character; diction, atmosphere, and tension; and diction and theme. Each week, I’ll delve a bit more into how diction influences these areas of storytelling, and, by the end of it, I hope you’ll have something new to think about or a new way to approach word-craft. Diction and Character A while back, I took a marvelous class on sentence writing with Nina Schuyler, author of The Translator and, most recently, How to Write Stunning Sentences, who classified English words into “high” and “low” registers according to their etymologies (Greek, Latin, Germanic, etc.). Nina explains this far better than I ever could, but the way I adapted it into my writing practice was this: Some words sound fancier, more highfalutin, if you will. For example: elongate, nefarious, grandiloquent. Some words sound plain, or more unrefined. See: grow, foul, overblown. In the extreme, fancy words can signal to readers that a character is educated, a gesture is affected, a setting is classy. Plainer words can let your readers know that a character isn’t well-read, a gesture is choppy, a setting is rough-and-tumble. But in practice, I think using diction to reveal character tends to be much more subtle. In The Reader Trilogy, for example, Captain Reed, an outlaw captain who prefers action to thought or a fistfight to a deep conversation, would call himself “scrappy,” whereas Tanin, the power-hungry leader of an organization dedicated to literacy, would accuse him of being “pugnacious.” But diction that reveals character doesn’t just apply to dialogue where the characters are talking about each other. The words a narrator uses to describe setting or action can also influence our perceptions of characters. For example, The Reader Trilogy is written in close third-person perspective, meaning that although the narrator is not a character in the story (and so tells the audience about the characters using third-person pronouns such as she, he, and they), the narrator does tell us about the world and events through the perspective of one character (or, sometimes, a different character every chapter). And the words that one character uses to filter their experience of the world can tell us a lot about who that character is and what they value. In The Reader, for example, chapters from Reed’s point of view are told in simple, straightforward language: “Sometimes when the Current was in port, he’d climb the mainmast and stand in the crow’s nest while the sun sank, and as the waters turned golden and dark, he’d listen to the sea. They said the water spoke to him. He knew all the natural harbors, the swiftest currents, how to avoid a squall even when it seemed intent on destroying him. Some people even said he could look at the pattern of the waves and tell you where they’d come from, where they were going” (p. 55). Most of the words are short and plain: “sank,” “golden,” “dark,” “squall,” “look,” etc. I think the longest word in this paragraph is “destroying.” There’s little fanciness to the words the narrator uses to describe Reed or his world, because there’s little fanciness to Reed. He’s a character with rough hands and a rough manner. He considers himself a simple man, and he values forthrightness, people who speak plainly, and things he can see and touch with his own senses. The diction in this paragraph helps to convey all of that about him without the narrator having to spell it out for us. In contrast, check out this excerpt from Renée Ahdieh’s YA fantasy, The Wrath and the Dawn, wherein Ahdieh reveals the nature of one of her main characters, Shahrzad, through her masterful use of word choice: “‘I’m sorry--so very sorry,’ [Shahrzad] whispered to [Jahandar] before striding across the threshold to follow the contingent of guards leading the processional. Jahandar slid to his knees and sobbed as Shahrzad turned the corner and disappeared. A few chapters after this, we learn that Shahrzad is a clever and well-educated character of her kingdom’s upper class. Her father, Jahandar, is a former high official, a “curator of ancient texts” (p. 45), and a current librarian, but I’d argue that we can infer much of her background here, from her diction. Notice the higher register language: “contingent,” “processional,” “resounding,” “cavernous,” and “voluminous.” In the clause “Shahrzad’s feet refused to carry her,” Ahdieh uses “refuse,” of Latin origin, over something like “Shahrzad’s feet wouldn’t carry her,” which conveys the same meaning, except “would” is a lower register word of Old English origin. To put it another way, “refuse” is fancier, so Shahrzad herself is fancier. Before we even learn of her background, we see her exercising an extensive vocabulary, choosing ornate words over plain ones, which already tells us so much about who she is and where she comes from. In short, I think words convey big storytelling things like plot and action, but I love that being intentional with your diction can add so much extra depth to your characterization (and without taking up more space on the page!). Next week: DICTION, ATMOSPHERE & TENSION. More words! I think the words you choose can not only reveal the nature and values of your characters, as we talked about today, but also build atmosphere and tension in a scene. Keep this going with me next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Words matter. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  I think writing can be a lonely process. It’s just you and the computer. You and the page. You and the fictional universe you carry inside you at all times.
Or: you and your own mind, your insecurities, your dreadful voices, your fears, and your failures. It’s easy, I think, to feel like you’re the only one who’s going through this, the only one who’s struggling or suffering. And, I think, being an artist, it’s also easy to feel like you can’t reach out, can’t share your negative thoughts and feelings about yourself/your art/your career, because art is a privilege, a luxury, and complaining about it means that you don’t love it enough, you don’t really deserve to do it, and so-and-so would so much rather be in your shoes and so-and-so would be grateful (unlike you), or whatever. It’s easy to think this way, when you’re isolated, to tell yourself these stories about how you’re not good enough, you’re a failure, you’re alone. Which is why I think fellowship, connecting, really connecting, with other writers, is so important for the health of your creative process. I’m on deadline right now, which means that, in general, I don’t do much more than work, sleep, eat, shower (sometimes), work, research, and work. (This isn’t the most healthy practice, and it’s something I’m working on, but for now, it is what it is.) But in the middle of this month of self-imposed relative isolation, I flew to Seattle last weekend for Emerald City Comic Con. If you’ve never been to a comic convention, let me tell you, it is the most glorious, hustle-bustle extravaganza of creators, fans, geeks, and geek-related things. It’s long lines and long days and aching feet and not-great-food and communities of people coming together for something they love with other people who love it. One of my favorite parts of these conventions now, however, is that I get to hang out with fellow writers, many of whom are friends, and many of whom I haven’t seen in a year or more, and we get to talk about our current projects, our anxieties, our aspirations, our fears, our doubts, sharing industry specific things without having to explain them, using this comforting, companionable shorthand. “I’m on deadline.” “OH GOD. YOU CAN DO IT.” There’s something about being around people who know what you’re going through without you having to describe it. Or: being around people who have already been through what you are going through right now (and who can tell you that you’ll make it through relatively unscathed), understanding your titanic struggle with your revision, or your insecurities about the stability of your career in the arts. Or: being around people who, when you tell them something that sounds so petty, so small, because it’s only fiction, after all, it’s only your perception of your readers’ perceptions of you, it’s only your fear that you’ll quickly dwindle into insignificance if you don’t put out another book next year, they never make you feel petty or small. They listen. They get it. They’ve been there. What a gift that is! To know you’re not the only one going through this. To know that it’s normal to be afraid, or to feel like you’re doing it wrong (even though you’re doing just fine). To know that there are people with you, even when they’re not with you, and they’re only a convention, or a phone call, or an email away. I am always reminded of these things, and I am always grateful. You are not alone. Your fears are not unreasonable. Your doubts cannot actually stop you. Your victories are worth celebrating. Your work has value, and so do you. Next week: DICTION. When I was in high school, I learned about diction (word choice) and syntax (word order), and I’ve found that the more I’ve studied craft, the more I think about them. What’s in your narrator’s or character’s vocabulary? What words do they gravitate toward? Do they speak plainly, or do they obfuscate? How do you make them sound educated? Blunt? Colloquial? Pull up a dictionary next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. I believe in you. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  Sometimes at events, I get asked what I do when I have writer’s block, and I tell them I have two answers: one helpful and one totally unhelpful. The unhelpful answer is that I don’t get writer’s block anymore, or at least I haven’t gotten it in the past five to ten years. The helpful answer, however, is that one of the reasons I don’t get writer’s block anymore is because I’ve accumulated so many tips and tricks over the years I’ve been studying writing that whenever I’m faced with the blank page, I have a tool to help me deal with whatever is stymying me at the time. An exercise. A map. A craft book. Something.
I do think writer’s block is real, and I don’t think it necessarily has to do with how many tips and tricks you have or how long you’ve been doing this or how skilled you are, but perhaps with any number of other factors, including emotional, psychological, or situational ones. But as I haven't experienced this for a very long time, I don't think I'm quite the right person or in quite the right place to discuss it here. I can, however, share some of the tricks I use when I’m stuck on a scene, or a chapter, or a character, when I’m having trouble figuring out what comes next, what turn to take, or how to approach something. I wish I could remember where I discovered this tool so I could credit it properly, but if anyone knows, please let me know (I’m on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook) so I can edit this post! This is one of those easy tricks. No need for charts or graphs. Just a blank space and something to write with. And when you’re stuck, just make a list of 10 things. 10 things your character could do in this situation. 10 things they could be feeling. 10 motivations they might have. 10 potential sources of conflict. 10 places this scene could go. Start with whatever comes to mind. Usually, these are the most obvious answers and the easiest ones to come up with. Let’s say your character needs to get into a locked building. How are they going to do it? They could: 1) bribe someone to open it for them, 2) steal the keys, 3) break a window… But once you’ve exhausted the obvious, it gets more difficult… and more interesting. They could: 4) come in through the sewer, 5) jam the door while someone else is opening it, 6) fake a heart attack to distract the guard, allowing their compatriots to enter… And by the time you’re near the end, you start to really stretch your imagination, coming up with wild or even irrational possibilities. They could: 7) buy the building and demolish one of its walls, 8) impersonate a guard or other person who has access to the building, 9) hire a lockpick who might very well double-cross them… The goal of this exercise is to exhaust the boring, uninspired possibilities of a particular problem and to challenge yourself to come up with something unexpected or nuanced or compelling that you wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. Not all of your answers have to be workable. In general, 1-3 will be unimaginative, and 8-10 will be preposterous, but this is, I think, a good thing. Because giving yourself the freedom to write down all the outlandish things that could happen allows you to stumble inadvertently upon the things that are believable or interesting or surprising, often somewhere between 4-7, that will help you get unstuck. I use this trick all the time. It’s great for when I’m not sure what would happen next, or when I’m unclear about what a character is feeling at a pivotal moment, or how to clamber over some narrative obstacle I’ve set up for myself. It gets me out of my own head, and it gets me thinking beyond things that have to make sense to things that could feel right or true for the story. And whenever I’m done with my list, I always have something new to try, and even if I don’t end up going with one of my 10 things, I’ve started writing again, and that’s a win. Next week: FELLOWSHIP. I had such a blast at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend, meeting readers and hanging out with fellow writers, and I can't stop thinking about the importance of friendship! Let’s be in this together next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Enjoy yourself. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings.  When I’m on deadline, I have a tendency to work myself into the ground. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that my process is naturally slow. From that two-year percolation period before I ever write a word to the half hour I will spend writing and rewriting and rewriting a single paragraph because it needs to have the exact right rhythm, it just… takes… time. So when I have a deadline to meet, I am almost constantly worried that I won’t get my manuscript done in time (I often lose sleep over it, which is the opposite of helpful). Do you know that high-pitched ringing, that eeeeeeee, that you sometimes hear when there’s some kind of electronic malfunction going on somewhere? Well, that’s my brain on deadline.
Anyway, this is on top of the fact that I’m also kind of obsessed with work. I was that kid who got straight As in high school (and one B+ in college that haunts me to this day). I love discipline and determination and chipping away at something day after day until it’s done. It makes me feel accomplished and fulfilled, and when I’ve got a task to do at a job I love, I can’t seem to stop myself. All of this to say that when I’m on deadline, I’m stressed out and I work all the time and even though writing occupies this space in my soul that cannot be filled by anything else, I am pretty miserable most of the time. Which brings me, finally, to the topic of this week’s Work and Process: art and suffering. Art is difficult. It’s hard trying to make something new or true or that contributes something to the world. It’s hard holding an entire world in your heart. It’s hard taking some of yourself and packing it into three hundred pages or a sculpture or a song and sending it out the door for strangers to review and critique and judge. It’s hard putting a dollar amount on something that, to you, is invaluable, because it comes out of years of experience and thought and joy and maybe pain. Art is hard. (But I think it would be a mistake to say it’s harder than other work. There are all sorts of demands on people in other professions, and the demands of being an artist aren’t by their nature more important or more intense or more anything than the demands of any other job. I’m just not super interested in romanticizing or elevating the role and the pains of the artist over the roles and pains of other careers.) Still. It is hard. Maybe because there’s no objective rubric for success as an artist? You could make a lot of money, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good artist. Conversely, you could be making something really and truly beautiful or transcendent or paradigm-shifting, and you might not be able to keep the lights on because no one’s buying your work. Maybe we talk about how hard we work or how much our art costs us because we equate hard work and pain with value. If it takes so long or so much to do something, then it must be worthwhile, right? Maybe we cling to and display our suffering because if we hurt so much, then it must be for a good reason. Right? I was watching the second season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, an award-winning original series on Amazon, a couple months ago. I have criticisms of the show, but in general, I do find the banter captivating and the acting compelling and the costume design totally enthralling. But there was this one storyline in Season 2 that made me want to throw a chair. It plays out in a number of ways, but here’s a telling example of how it shows up: In Episode 7, the titular character, Mrs. Maisel, charms her way into the studio of a very fancy, often inebriated, notably secretive artist, Declan Howell, who is rumored to have painted something so beautiful, he never shows it to anyone. Quite taken with Mrs. Maisel, however, he invites her behind a hidden door where, voila!, this most beautiful piece of art is displayed. He calls it “perfect” and “the greatest thing I’ve ever made in my lifetime.” We, the audience, never get to see the art, which I think is a great choice, actually, but we are treated to this story about both the art and the artist: DH: This was going to hang in my home. When I had a home. And a family. I had that life. This was… this was going to go there. But that was then. And this is now. I will never have that life. MM: Now wait… DH: I’m not trying to spin a melodrama. I’m being very realistic. The chance for that life is gone. MM: That’s ridiculous. DH: It’ll never happen because everything I have, I put into that [painting]. Nothing left. MM: I think that’s very sad. DH: Well, that’s the way it is. If you… if you want to do something great, if you want to take something as far as it’ll go, you… you can’t have everything. You lose family. A sense of home. But then… look at what exists. In other words, he sacrificed everything to create this exquisite, magnificently beautiful piece of art. No family. No home. No friends (I’m assuming). No joy. That, he is saying, is the tradeoff. That is the cost of art. THe chance at a well-rounded, fulfilling life. Later in the season, there are a couple other events that present this choice between art and happiness, and they all say the same thing: You can be great, but you have to do it alone. You can make great art, but you cannot live a satisfying life while doing it. To make great art, the show seems to say, you have to suffer. Where did this idea come from? This trope of the tortured artist? This cultural narrative we tell over and over again, that art must come at the expense of joy? That genius is the work of pain? Was it Hemingway and his drinking habits? Plath, who died by suicide? Was it Van Gogh (Even though I’ve read that he wouldn’t work when he was ill? Couldn’t produce the works of art we so admire and revere?), who famously cut off his own ear? Why, for something to be good or worthwhile, does someone have to be in pain? I find myself buying into this narrative, this myth, too, to varying extents. Look at how hard I work! Look at how much sleep I lose! Look at how miserable I am! That means I’m doing something important! But as much as I want to be acknowledged (by myself, I think, as much as others) for my hard work, this equation of suffering → art is one that I want to resist. Suffering can be a part of art, sure. I think there’s too much suffering in life (and human history) for it not to be. Huge parts of The Reader Trilogy are concerned with loss, pain, trauma, grief, and I think these aspects of suffering are integral to the project. But suffering should not be the price we pay for our creativity. Something beautiful or valuable or genius should not have to come at the cost of our happiness, health, and general well-being. Art should not always have to be borne of pain or misery. Rather, I would like to lean in to the idea that art can come out of balance, safety, security. Virginia Woolf (who, like Plath and many others, also died by suicide) wrote that in order to make art, a woman requires five hundred pounds and a room of her own, or, the space to create and the ability to pay the bills for that space. She doesn’t require agony. She requires security and a place to work without being interrupted. Similarly, I’ve found that I do my best work, I am at my most productive and my most creative, not when I can’t sleep or when I’m sad, or isolated, or anxious, or unwell, but when I’m functioning, and my basic needs are taken care of, and I have healthy relationships with myself and with other people. I don’t think my creative muse actually wants me hurting or incapacitated. She wants me to show up every day with a clear mind and a healthy body, ready to work. Hardship may be unavoidable--we do live in the world, after all, with other people--and I think it can or perhaps even should, to some degree, influence what we create, but I don’t want to believe that it has to be part of the creative process. I don’t want to believe that suffering is this cost, this toll, this price, that artists must pay in order to make something great. I want to stop glorifying the trope of the tortured artist, because I don’t want our artists and our geniuses and our creative people to have to be in pain for us to reap the rewards of their creativity. I want to continue working on changing the way I think about myself and my work and my process, so that I can have a healthier relationship to my art and develop more sustainable practices, because this is something I love, and I want to keep doing it for as long as I can. Next week: 10 THINGS. I very rarely get completely stuck on a scene, chapter, or project, and that’s probably for a number of reasons, including my stupid ambition or my belief in revision, but it’s also because a few years ago I stumbled upon this one trick that helps me get through most of my everyday quandaries. Lemme tell you about it next Sunday at tracichee.com and/or post your own responses with the hashtag #workandprocess. Stay gold. <3 Work and Process is a year-long journey of exploring and reflecting on the artistic process, craft, and working in a creative field. Each Sunday, I’ll post some thoughts, wonderings, explanations, and explorations on writing and creativity, and by the end of it, I hope to have 52 musings, examinations, meanderings, discoveries, bits of joy or inquisitiveness or knowledge to share. In each post, I’ll also include a topic for the following week, so if you happen to be inspired to question/wonder at/consider your own work and process, you’re welcome to join me. We’ll be using the #workandprocess hashtag across all social media platforms, and I hope we find each other to learn and connect and transform on our creative wanderings. |
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May 2019
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