012: Art & Craft
Making a craft for your art
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I’ve been writing stories and making music for as long as I can remember.
When I first started making things, I channeled them from the center of the earth. As a child, I was innately creative, generative, curious, and open. I used to spend hours alone, wandering the perimeter of the backyard, picking hemlock cones and dandelions and brewing up potions that were as real to me as water and air. I’d stack an apple, a book, and a kaleidoscope on a paisley bandana and tied it to a leather belt I’d repurposed as a bandolier, then climbed into the tree by the swingset. I’d unwrap my treasures and spend the afternoon in the tree reading and spitting apple seeds. Sometimes I would lay back on a long branch and stare at the canopy above with the kaleidoscope pressed to my eye socket, letting the wind and the prisms turn the leaves into fractal gemscapes.
I made up songs all the time, and sang them with my full voice. I let my feelings show on my face. I moved in ways that felt good and expressed my mood – hunched and slithery and feeling delightfully witchy, or skipping, whimsical, swishing a dress-up skirt against my legs and imagining I was a famous ballerina. I sat at my little desk with a stack of hand-decorated stationery and a pencil, writing about the magical worlds that were so easy for me to access.
Of course, that all changed.
I’m not sure if it was a change in me, or a change in the world. Maybe it was both. At some point, I started to hear I’m not inspired. I don’t have any ideas. I don’t write songs. I don’t write poems. I don’t know how to do that. Dancing is embarrassing. I hate singing – I’m a bad singer. I don’t have any ideas. I don’t have any ideas. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any ideas.
The condition of being born is a perpetual experience of losing the things you came with and working to find them again – acceptance, creativity, openness, expressiveness, trust. Among other things. As we grow and begin to develop self-consciousness, often our innate creativity gets locked behind a bunch of barriers – whether we intend for that to happen or not.
When I started working towards a degree in creative writing, the hardest part of writing short fiction was coming up with the idea. I felt like the perfect idea could carry a story – not the writing, whoops – and I was constantly frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t think of anything that seemed good enough. I spent most of my high school and college writing time desperate for an idea that was Good Enough. I worked tirelessly to create inspiring practices and environments for myself. I carried a tiny notebook for ideas, tried to be more observant, read more books, and tried to open myself up to the muses.
But the muses really aren’t to be trusted.
If they’ve ever appeared to you, you know what I mean. A flash of inspiration strikes you, you write feverishly, and it’s a masterpiece! Amazing! And then the next time you need them, they’re gone. You light candles, beg them to return, but they won’t. When I was in school, I watched many talented writers burn out while waiting for the muses to return.
This is all just a long lead-up to me thinking about the craft of art.
I’m lucky enough to know many, many incredibly talented artists and creatives. By “talented,” I mean that they arrived on earth with an affinity for the thing they do, and it comes naturally to them. Everyone knows talented people – that person with the incredible voice in church, or the friend that writes these incredibly moving cards for your birthday, or the person who looks transcendent on a wedding reception dance floor.
I love to see people who have a natural connection to something creative, that lights them up, and lights up the rest of the world.
It all changes when you start to do it for money.
As someone who both loves writing & making music and does both for a living, running out of ideas isn’t really an option. It doesn’t matter how much natural talent I have if I can’t tap into it when I need to create something. As I built a life centered around creativity, I quickly realized that I needed to develop a craft in order to produce at a volume that supports the life I want.
Here’s how I approached it: I built a craft practice through a discipline practice – with varying levels of success.
What craft means to me
The notion of “craft” has been discussed widely across creative fields, but here’s how I think of it: craft, for me, is a set of skills (developed over time, through a disciplined practice) that allows me to access my creativity when I need it, and to feel confident in the quality of my output.
Building a disciplined practice has been the worst part, but I’ve found ways to make it work for my life. Everyone’s practice looks different, but here are a few types of disciplined creativity and art-making that have fit into my life at various times.
For writing:
Near-daily journaling: I’ve been doing this since I was in first grade.
Reading: sometimes I focus on reading things in the genre in which I’m writing, and other times I’m just reading to keep myself connected to the written word.
This Substack: having a weekly opportunity to share my thoughts in writing takes the pressure off of making something perfect – you get what you get every week and that’s that!
Section editing: I have a full-length book manuscript, and I work through the edits in a very structured way.
Music has always been harder for me to build a disciplined creative practice around, because I don’t feel as skilled in songwriting as I do in prose writing. Here are some ways I’ve tried to incorporate more structure into my songwriting and music-making work.
For music:
Daily speech therapy exercises to keep my voice healthy.
Dedicating 2 days a week to music-making, and switching between instruments whenever I get stuck in order to keep my creative flow.
Writing one song a week, whether it’s good or not.
Over time, I’ve found that I can now write a post/essay/song/set of lyrics as needed – I know how to get started when I’m not inspired, how to push through when I get stuck, and how to look at my work without connecting it back to my own self-worth. Every time I create something new, my craft gets a bit stronger, allowing me to produce work when and how I need to.
Not everything I make is great, or even good, but it exists, which is more than I could say back in the days of sitting and waiting for inspiration to strike.
I really believe in quantity over quality when it comes to creativity. I think if you make 100 things, maybe five or ten of them will be really amazing. But if you only make five things, the likelihood that one of them will be incredible is pretty low. Not everyone feels this way, but it’s the approach that’s worked for me.
For every essay that appears in my book, there are one or two that will never see the light of day. For every song I’ve released, there are several songs trapped in voice memo purgatory. Sometimes I’ll sift through these “failed” projects and harvest lyrics, lines, or concepts from them. It doesn’t feel like a waste of time (and as I’ve said before, I don’t believe in wasted time!!!) – it feels like an opportunity to build a web, or a matrix, or a forest of ideas, moments, sounds, rhythms, phrases that wink and glow in their own unexpected times, like leaves viewed through a kaleidoscope. All it takes is the shift of a breath, and suddenly things look different.
In what feels like an endless continuation of Unprecedented Times, creativity is more necessary than ever. Not only as a tool of self-expression and release, but also as a tool of connection and understanding – revealing part of yourself to someone and saying do you see me?
Many of us don’t have a regular creative practice, and not everyone reading this newsletter is interested in becoming an artist for money. And honestly, that’s the best case scenario (making art for money is silly and it turns out the money doesn’t really exist). But making space for daily creativity is possible for all of us. I’m gonna dump a bunch of random ideas below:
You could:
Write 2 lines that rhyme every day this week.
Try reading your favorite poem out loud, dramatically.
Sing the names of the people and pets in your family and make a little jingle.
Practice that one really hard chord on guitar every day this week.
Write 4 sentences to describe someone you love using the language of flowers.
Plan to set aside an hour this month to make something tiny with your hands.
There are so many things you can do, but the discipline part involves planning ahead and sticking to your plan. Make it tiny and manageable – I’m talking “write a haiku” and not “knit a scarf.” Make something at all. Make it at all costs. Make it happen and make it come alive.
Ok bye, love you!