austinkleon:

ArtWork: Seeing Inside the Creative Process

Art Work reveals the artistic notetaking habits of an astonishing range of artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, and other creators by granting rare access to the journal pages and other visual materials they use to capture and foster their work.

From Sasha Frere-Jones’ forward:

As artists, we often prefer the note to the final product; it is an object that is ours alone, free of explanatory fuss and ornament. A mundane list next to three pages of earnestly revised text—shouldn’t we have published it just like that?

From Ivan Vartanian’s introduction, the distinction between journal and notebook:

Where the journal is meant to serve as a daily (or intermittent) record of observations and reflections on a life and its experiences, the notebook is meant as a place of work—for solving problems, jotting an idea, figuring a sequence, determining a position, shaping a phrase. Where the journal documents the life of its owner, the notebook documents the life of an artwork or artistic process.

Here’s Tony Kushner, talking about writing by hand:

Most of my best ideas have not been things that I knew I had in my head. I’ve been surprised by them…and it’s always the case that if you just start moving words around on a piece of paper…if you start limbering up your fingers and get going, you will find your way in.

And Richard Hell:

Notebooks, it seems to me sometimes, are the ultimate art form… Notebooks might be as good as art gets in our time.

(images via grain edit)

I’ve often dreamt of holding an exhibition that is all the notes, all the failed process on the way to the final artwork – but does not contain the final artwork.

If I had to name one of my biggest writing influences, it would have to be David Mamet, despite the fact he is little known as a prose writer, and much better known as a screenwriter and theatre director. It is his essays on writing, directing and acting that I find most inspirational, and when he is called ‘that rarest of things, a pure writer’, pure for me means he writes with the utmost clarity, never labouring the point and always delving to the heart of the matter. His early book On Directing Film is one of the main bases for my prose writing.

Of particular interest in his latest book, Theatre, is his take on the success of the Atlantic Theatre Company that he founded in 1985 with actor William H. Macy. By success he does not mean that the company produced a run of commercially-successful plays: he means that an above-average proportion of the members of the theatre went on to have lengthy artistic careers.

But how, then, to account for the healthy longevity of the Atlantic Theatre Company, and its members?

I think what Macy and I attempted to establish as an implement for the transmission of knowledge (the company culture) was the knowledge.

In other words the theatre company’s existence in itself provided the means by which the actors, stage managers, etc could work out for themselves how to progress their work, in the supportive environment of their peers. Not anything that Mamet or others tried to teach them.

Because anyone who does creative work needs a supportive environment, even if that is just others trying and failing in their own pursuits. To be surrounded by others is to feel that your efforts are not fruitless, that you are not an imposter. If you paint, rent a studio space. If you write, finding a community is harder. So talk to painters, musicians, anyone. Your creative peers are your best influence.

austinkleon:

My process:

1) Start with a clear, clean idea
2) Lose that idea by caking on notes and research
3) Hack away at the crud until the original idea emerges

(via)

‘What if Money Were No Object?’ – classic lecture from philosopher and writer Alan Watts, who had a big hand in popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West.

curiositycounts:

We live in an exciting and interesting time — one when some of our most commonly accepted ideas, traditions and principals are being challenged. This past week featured a fascinating read in the Wall Street Journal asking “Are Playgrounds Too Safe?”, making the case that “decades of dumbed-down playgrounds, fueled by fears of litigation, concerns about injury and worrywart helicopter parents, have led to cookie-cutter equipment that offers little thrill.” The result being children less compelled to play outside, potentially stunting emotional and physical development and exacerbating a nationwide epidemic of childhood obesity.

Recently Forbes featured an article smartly challenging things many of us grew up being taught and often adhere to still. But in today’s world, the rules of our parents’ past are ones we have to ask in all earnest and respect — do these rules still apply?

1. The people in charge have all the answers.
That’s why they are so wealthy and happy and healthy and powerful—ask any teacher. 

2. Learning ends when you leave the classroom. 
Your fort building, trail forging, frog catching, friend making, game playing, and drawing won’t earn you any extra credit. Just watch TV. 

3. The best and brightest follow all the rules.
You will be rewarded for your subordination, just not as much as your superiors, who, of course, have their own rules.

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most especially (hidden) point number 9: the purpose of your education is your future career…

Early on in school: pass those exams so you can go to university.

In university: get a good degree so that you can get a good job.

In your ‘good’ job: stick with us and you’ll be happy.

Yet most of the happiest adults I know are not the ones with nine-to-five careers – they are the ones carving out some kind of income that supports their real, important work, for little or no money, that is the real source of self-esteem in their life

Christopher Shevlin, a self-published novelist who has logged in immensely useful detail the logistics of self-publishing, blogged recently about success. Namely questioning what he considered success to be for his venture of publishing his novel. As he says, his definition changes over time. Currently it stands at selling 750 copies.

It reminded me of a news story some years ago about Laura Spence, a student who had managed five ‘A’s at A level, yet had been denied a place at Oxford University – the suggestion being because she was from a working class background. At the time Charlotte Raven wrote in the Guardian about our strange definition of success, that going to Oxford then into some high-flying job was what it meant to be successful.

If you have to be slightly mad to get a million starred As at A-level, you’d have to be barking to think that a “top job” is really a sign of success as a human being. Yet believe it they do, turning up for their 18-hour days with the same dogged single-mindedness they once applied to their studies.

The article has stayed with me ever since, and was possibly the first time I thought about work and careers and if those top jobs really were the ones that made you happiest. Now that I’ve had the displeasure of working in places with these high flyers, I know it to be true.

What kind of success is a stressful forty-plus-hour week, with no time for friends and family, regardless of how much money and status this gives you? The careers advice we give no kind of alternative suggests no kind of alternative. Yet the happiest adults I know are those with less money who have the time to do the work they really want to do, whether paid or unpaid.

This is my careers advice to any current 18-year-old: find yourself some work you do not care about, but gives you the time that you need to investigate what really interests you. Fit your work-for-money around your own work, not the other way round. Learn to live cheaply. Ignore careers advice. Ignore careers. They are not a reliable source of self-esteem.

I’m a die-hard Raiders of the Lost Ark fan – for me a more perfect example of classic storytelling than Star Wars or any other film series, despite the dip in quality of the second instalment. So my initial response to discovering there was a transcript of an early stage story conference for the as-then unnamed Raiders was to dash off an email to my girlfriend titled ‘this might be the single most exciting thing I have ever seen on the internet’.

What’s so fascinating for anyone interested in writing is howthe early stages of the story are so uncrafted, in comparison to the film we end up watching. The Indy character begins as an immoral antiques plunderer just out for the money, and is supposed to have had an affair with the Karen Allen character when she was eleven(!) which probably wouldn’t have even got to private discussion stage in 2013.

Then there’s the name:

Laurence Kasdan – Do you have a name for this person?

George Lucas – I do for our leader.

Steven Spielberg – I hate this, but go ahead.

G – Indiana Smith. It has to be unique. It’s a character. Very Americana square. He was born in Indiana.

L – what does she call him, Indy?

G – that’s what I was thinking. Or Jones.

It seems inconceivable that Indy could have been Indiana Smith. But perhaps that just goes to show how a name becomes an icon, maybe Indiana Smith would have had the same cache if the decision had gone the other way.

Also of interest for writers is how many ideas are suggested but never used. There’s a whole sequence in Shanghai that they discuss for ages that never made the script. A heavily-discussed idea where the Ark of the Covenant explodes a German submarine base that perhaps changes the history of WWII that never makes it in. There’s detailed discussion of a mine shaft chase and Indy jumping from an aeroplane in a life raft that we know didn’t make it into Raiders but went in the second film instead.

And the length of time they spend discussing minor plot details is fascinating: the method by which Indy discovers the location of the Ark with the staff and the pendant is pored over for pages, because they know that it needs to be beliveable but not over-complicated.

In an ideal writing world, all stories, film and book would have story conferences. For what this transcript shows me more than anything is that our ideas and storytelling abilities are at their best when we bounce ideas off each other, and are forced to make them work for other people before they get anywhere near a piece of paper or computer file.

Because we are much more natural oral storytellers than writers – when we tell a story in the pub about something that has happened to us, we know just the level of backstory to include, just the right details to make the climax feel right. Yet writing is such a solitary process. Let’s talk our stories more…