Routine and physical strength are as necessary as artistic sensitivity to create great work.5/9/2013
When he is writing a novel, Murakami wakes at 4:00 A.M. and works for five to six hours straight. In the afternoons he runs or swims (or does both), runs errands, reads, and listens to music; bedtime is 9:00. “I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey Murakami has said that maintaining this repetition for the time required to complete a novel takes more than mental discipline: “Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.” When he first hung out his shingle as a professional writer, in 1981, after several years running a small jazz club in Tokyo, he discovered that the sedentary lifestyle caused him to gain weight rapidly; he was also smoking as many as sixty cigarettes a day. He soon resolved to change his habits completely, moving with his wife to a rural area, quitting smoking, drinking less, and eating a diet of mostly vegetables and fish. He also started running daily, a habit he has kept up for more than a quarter century. The one drawback to this self-made schedule, Murakami admitted in a 2008 essay, is that it doesn’t allow for much of a social life. “People are offended when you repeatedly turn down their invitations,” he wrote. But he decided that the indispensable relationship in his life was with his readers. “My readers would welcome whatever life style I chose, as long as I made sure each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty—and my top priority—as a novelist?” Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey Trollope managed to produce forty-seven novels and sixteen other books by dint of an unvarying early-morning writing session. In his Autobiography, Trollope described his composition methods at Waltham Cross, England, where he lived for twelve years. For most of that time he was also employed as a civil servant at the General Post Office, a career he began in 1834 and did not resign until thirty-three years later, when he had already published more than two dozen books.
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey Trollope's daily ritual was; It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he never was once late with the coffee which it was his duty to bring me. I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had. By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast. All those I think who have lived as literary men,—working daily as literary labourers,—will agree with me that three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. But then, he should so have trained himself that he shall be able to work continuously during those three hours,—so have tutored his mind that it shall not be necessary for him to sit nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him, till he shall have found the words with which he wants to express his ideas. It had at this time become my custom,—and is still my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient of myself,—to write with my watch before me, and to require of myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. But my three hours were not devoted entirely to writing. I always began my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases.… This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year;—the precise amount which so greatly acerbated the publisher in Paternoster Row, and which must at any rate be felt to be quite as much as the novel-readers of the world can want from the hands of one man. If he completed a novel before his three hours were up, Trollope would take out a fresh sheet of paper and immediately begin the next one. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey The book’s title is Daily Rituals, but my focus in writing it was really people’s routines. The word connotes ordinariness and even a lack of thought; to follow a routine is to be on autopilot. But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices. In the right hands, it can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods. This was one of William James’s favorite subjects. He thought you wanted to put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, he said, we can “free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.”
Writing it, I often thought of a line from a letter Kafka sent to his beloved Felice Bauer in 1912. Frustrated by his cramped living situation and his deadening day job, he complained, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers.” Poor Kafka! But then who among us can expect to live a pleasant, straightforward life? “A modern stoic,” he observed, “knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.” Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey I can tell you that, despite what cultural pundits might say, creativity—as its been defined by our culture with its endless parade of formulaic novels, memoirs, and films—is the thing to flee from, not only as a member of the “creative class” but also as a member of the “artistic class.” Living when technology is changing the rules of the game in every aspect of our lives, it’s time to question and tear down such clichés and lay them out on the floor in front of us, then reconstruct these smoldering embers into something new, something contemporary, something—finally—relevant.
Careers and canons won’t be established in traditional ways. I’m not so sure that we’ll still have careers in the same way we used to. Literary works might function the same way that memes do today on the Web, spreading like wildfire for a short period, often unsigned and unauthored, only to be supplanted by the next ripple. While the author won’t die, we might begin to view authorship in a more conceptual way: perhaps the best authors of the future will be ones who can write the best programs with which to manipulate, parse and distribute language-based practices. Even if, as Bök claims, poetry in the future will be written by machines for other machines to read, there will be, for the foreseeable future, someone behind the curtain inventing those drones; so that even if literature is reducible to mere code—an intriguing idea—the smartest minds behind them will be considered our greatest authors. With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. By that, I mean writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened to painting with the invention of photography, a technology so much better at replicating reality that, in order to survive, painting had to alter its course radically. While traditional notions of writing are primarily focused on “originality” and “creativity,” the digital environment fosters new skill sets that include “manipulation” and “management” of the heaps of already existent and ever-increasing language. What we take to be graphics, sounds, and motion in our screen world is merely a thin skin under which resides miles and miles of language. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age by Kenneth Goldsmith So, good news/bad news: good news that I’m progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long.2/20/2013
...I find myself feeling like I’m in a bit of a race to get down on paper the way I really feel about life—or the way it has presented to me. And because it has presented to me very beautifully, this is hard. It is technically very hard to show positive manifestations.
But I can look back at the way I thought and felt even as a little kid and there was a lot of wonder there, and openness to the many sides of life—the way that beauty and ugliness co-present, for example, or the way that tragedy might be enshrouded in something really funny, or vice versa—and I feel like I’ve only barely scratched the surface so far in what I’ve been able to write. And I have finally realized that, you know, it’s not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it—which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course. But it seems to me that there are certain thoughts and vignettes and attitudes that I have always had the desire to represent—but that I’m only now picking up the chops and/or confidence to pull off. So, good news/bad news: good news that I’m progressing; bad news that life is short and art is long. George Saunders Poke the Box by Seth Godin
"She wasn’t handed initiative, she took it." The book Poke by Seth Godin is a short and simple read that does what all good books should do it makes you think about your life and where you stand. Are you a cog, or do you make things happen? Seth Godin believe that great skills aren't enough any more, what matters is that you take action. "The challenge, it turns out, isn’t in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by. The challenge is getting into the habit of starting. No, the opportunity is bigger than that—it’s to see that all around you are platforms, opportunities, and entire organizations that will come to life once you are driven enough and brave enough to contribute the initiative they are missing. My thesis: All of the other elements are cheaper and easier to find than ever before. Which makes the motive force so critical." We have built the largest economic engine in history. All the tools are here, cheaper than ever before. The market is waiting, the capital is waiting, the factories are waiting, and yes, even the stores are waiting. They’re waiting for someone to say “go.” "Ownership doesn’t have to be equity or even control. Ownership comes from understanding and from having the power to make things happen." Too often we wait for others to give us permission, to give us the go to get the better position, to get the better job. Take ownership of your life, of your career. "I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure. These people have made two mistakes. First, they’ve assumed that risk is a bad thing, and second, they’ve confused risk and flux, and come to the conclusion that movement is a bad thing as well." "Like a rock in a flowing river, you might be standing still, but given the movement around you, collisions are inevitable.The irony for the person who prefers no movement is that there’s far less turbulence around the log floating down that same river. It’s moving, it’s changing, but compared to the river around it, it’s relatively calm." - This quote, this thought, literally made me see my world differently. "Steven Pressfield gives the voice of the lizard brain a name: he calls it the resistance. And the resistance is talking to you as you read this, urging you to compromise, to not be an troublemaker, to avoid rash moves. For many of us, the resistance is always chattering away, frequently sabotaging our best opportunities and ruining our best chance to do great work. Naming it helps you befriend it, and befriending it helps you ignore it." "Zig Ziglar taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don’t allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, “hey, maybe I should check my e-mail for a while, or you know, I could use a nap.” If you do that, the lizard brain will soon be trained to use that escape hatch again and again." "The difference is that the creative person is satisfied once he sees how it’s done. The initiator won’t rest until he does it." "Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself." - be your own team, make your own choices, define your own life. "Now, think about the newer organizations, the ones that are growing and making an impact. Think about Apple, Google, director James Cameron’s team, Ideo, Pixar, and Electronic Arts. These are project-centric organizations. Each one of these organizations consists of groups of committed people who ship projects. No projects, no organization. Coasting isn’t an option because projects don’t last forever. The people stick around, the posture persists, but the projects need to be refreshed. After a project is shipped, there’s no useful work until someone starts a new project. As organizations have begun to coalesce around projects, they’ve made a startling discovery: the starting part is harder than it looks." "Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing. Please stop waiting for a map. We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them." "The alternative is to relentlessly and consistently be starting something (and finishing it). Poking doesn’t mean right. It means action." - there is no done, there is no you, there is just next. "Starting means you’re going to finish. If it doesn’t ship, you’ve failed." - always remember until it ships, until it happens, until you do, it is nothing but an idea, and ideas are cheap. Execution matters. "The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work. But if you succeed often enough to be given the privilege of failing next time, then you’re on the road to a series of failures. Fail, succeed, fail, fail, fail, succeed—you get the idea. Starting isn’t like that. Starting something is not an event; it’s a series of events" "There will be other jobs, better jobs, bosses more willing to create growth. The only way you will find those jobs and those bosses, though, is to have a personal standard that demands failure, not one that guarantees success. Intellectual integrity goes beyond being clever—it requires that you put your ideas into the world." - it is amazing how hard we try to stay in one place, amazing and sad. Break free, understand new is good. "If you can’t fail, it doesn’t count." "There are other organisms with other reproductive strategies. Take the dandelion: a single dandelion may produce 2,000 seeds per year, indiscriminately firing them off into the sky at the slightest breeze, without any care for where the seeds are heading and whether they’ll get an hospitable reception when they touch down. And indeed, most of those thousands of seeds will likely fall on hard, unyielding pavement, there to lie fallow and unconsummated, a failure in the genetic race to survive and copy. But the disposition of each—or even most—of the seeds [isn’t] the important thing, from a dandelion’s point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions." Be everywhere, learn the new, understand that the scary part isn't the unknown, it is being the same next year as your are today. D KESEY
I’ve listened to the tapes from the bus trip and reread his letters and autobiography—The First Third—for years. I’ve tried to distill his teachings as best I can. The most important lesson is also the most ironic: most of what is important cannot be taught except by experience. His most powerful lesson behind the rap was not to dwell on mistakes. He used the metaphor of driving. He believed that you got into trouble by overcorrecting. A certain sloth, he thought, lets you veer into a ditch on the right side of the road. Then you overcorrect and hit a car to your left. Cassady believed you had to be correcting every instant. The longer you let things go, the longer you stayed comfortable, the more likely the case that you would have to overcorrect. Then you would have created a big error. The virtue of continual, engaged experience—an endless and relentless argument with the self—that was his lesson. Ken Kesey, The Art of Fiction No. 136 Paris Review Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. - Henry Miller7/11/2012
From Henry Miller on Writing:
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished. 2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.” 3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. 4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time! 5. When you can’t create you can work. 6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers. 7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it. 8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only. 9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude. 10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. 11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards. The best advice is not to write what you know, it’s to write what you like. Write the kind of story you like best—write the story you want to read. The same principle applies to your life and your career: Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, “What would make a better story?
The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use—do the work you want to see done. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon I once had a Professor in college who told me that he remembered the time when he first heard the Beatle's Sargent Pepper album when it was played at a party that he was at.
Music was playing, people were dancing, and the music set the background tone. Then someone put on the Sargent Pepper album, and the dancing literally stopped. People sat down, got very quiet, and listened to the lyrics and music and the sounds of the album. No one had heard anything like that before. I play music constantly, and my headphones are often on my head as I work, and today I learned how to know when you are in the presence of art. I was listening to the new Fiona Apple album called; The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do. I was working and very focused and then slowly the album moved from the background in my mind to the front, and I started listening intently to the lyrics. I had to sit down and really listen to the words, so I stopped working and listened. I got up to find the case, i had to find the case, to get the booklet with the lyrics, and I looked at each of the lyrics and read the individual lines, and then studied the drawings, and then listened again harder to the phrasing, to the slant rhymes, and the interesting word choices. I stopped what I was doing and just listened to the whole album. The whole world stopped. When done, I then had to tell someone, so I wrote this. That is art. D |
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