An artistic dilemma–I would rather make fewer things that are awesome than make more things that are mediocre.

The trick, I think, is that to make more awesome things, one has to produce a lot of mediocre, if not downright shitty stuff before then. Nobody sits down at a keyboard, opens up a new file, says “I am going to write the greatest story that has ever been written by anyone,” and succeeds. Anyone who tries will likely end up paralyzed by fear. Art is as much about destruction as it is creation. This ranges from knowing that you really, really, really need to cut out that epic seventy page monologue because it slows the story down to a grinding halt, to cutting a single good paragraph out of your free-writing because you know–simply know–that it’s the only one that you can actually make something with.

A couple of years ago, my Internet Hero, Merlin Mann, wrote a profound piece called “Better”. I read it when it was originally posted, but a key point Merlin was making only hit me about ten minutes before I started writing the first draft of this piece. I thought it was more about focus, but it’s more about effort. It’s not the same point as I make in the above “artistic dilemma,” but it is related: how can I make better things? How do I become better? The perfect may be the enemy of the good, as Voltaire claims, but how can one reach perfect without at least churning out a lot of good, mediocre, or downright awful things? More to the point… how does one even know the difference?

I remember as a kid watching an episode of The Galloping Gourmet, wherein Graham Kerr, in an attempt to complete a full meal in the time alloted for a 30 minute program, ran out of space on the stove top and was forced to make pans share burners. When I look at my own set of projects, whether its state is active, stuck, not-yet-begun, or simply pie-in-the-sky, I’m left with a crippling sense of fear. “Good lord, I work two jobs just to barely stay in debt,” I shout, “and I expect myself to do all this other stuff in the limited amount of free time available to me, maintain the rudiments of a social life, and get the occasional good night’s sleep–and I want to do them even better than I do now? What is wrong with me?”

Then you come across things like The Cult of Done Mainfesto, where the point is that one should stop worrying about perfection and just get whatever project you’re on the hell done already and move on to the next thing. There’s different states of “done” in the worldview of this manifesto, and I’ll happily agree with it on a couple of points, namely: “11. Destruction is a variant of done.” and “13. Done is the engine of more.” Everything else, though, runs contrary to that aching desire to do better work. At the minimum, to do better work, I have to go through an editing stage.

Writing, like any other creative endeavor, is an iterative process. You pour the contents of your heart and mind on to the page, then you get a mop and clean it up, keeping the important bits. Part of why I don’t post on this site every week on the nose is that I’d rather what gets posted here be something really meaningful to me. ¹ It takes time, it takes effort, and it takes editing. Every morning, Ernest Hemingway wrote exactly 500 words per day, stopping in the middle of a sentence if he had to once his 500 words were up. The next day, he revised the 500 previous words, and wrote another 500. Lather, rinse, repeat. It worked, and he made some amazing works of literature. Hemingway had focus, he knew to throw down, stick to this project and only this project, and not keep his attention flitting between the pans on the stove top.

Some people can handle the stress of having a whole bunch of projects and things to do, and some people end up gibbering in the corner the minute a second task lands in their inbox before the first is done. I’m not the latter, but I envy the former–lucky bastards, with their ability to focus on all the things they possibly want to accomplish. For the rest of us, it looks like we face a serious quandary. Do you cull the weak projects from the herd (Point 11, Cult of Done Manifesto) or do you keep squeezing out crap in the hopes that something sticks to the wall? What good is being done with something if you can’t look at it and say that, “Yes, that was worth the effort. That was me doing my best. Now, let me try to do even better.”

Lately, I’ve been reading The Young Man’s Guide
by William Alcott, a 174 year old book aiming to teach young men “to be of the greatest possible usefulness.” The majority of its teachings hold up, even in the 21st Century. If there’s a regular theme in The Young Man’s Guide, it’s an attack on idleness. The emphasis is repeatedly on not wasting one’s time with trifles like sleeping late, eating and drinking to excess, and excessive time spent at leisure. ² One needs to just do the work–and do it well–and they shall reap rewards. What would a modern-day William Alcott say about The Cult of Done Manifesto?

I don’t have the answers to any of the questions I’m raising here. The last six essays on this site have revolved around the same basic ideas: getting the work done, getting better, and getting better at getting the work done. I would like to close the book on that, at least for now, but it’s the biggest thing on my mind. What matters is doing the thing that inspires me, that makes me happy, that leaves me with a sense of pride, and that’s writing good stuff. I can’t short-circuit the process behind it. I’ve tried and gotten nowhere fast.

Until recently, I described myself online and in person as merely an “aspiring writer.” Oh, sure, I wrote–intermittently–but I applied the epithet “aspiring” to my title as I had yet to actually make it as a writer. After all, I hadn’t published a novel, sold a story ¹, or landed a gig writing for pay in any form. Until something along those lines happened, I felt unfit to actually call myself a writer, no matter how much or how little I wrote. Dropping the qualifier has gone a long way to make sure I actually live up to the title I assign myself.

There’s an interview with Kevin Smith, of Clerks fame, that says much the same thing.

See, I had this little experience with my sister. She was like, “What do you want to be?” I want to be a filmmaker. She’s like “Be a filmmaker.” And I was like oh, yeah, right. And she was like “No. In your mind become a filmmaker. You’re a filmmaker from this day forward. Do everything as a filmmaker would do.”

And it’s true. It works.

It’s the commitment–and thus the accomplishment–that made him a filmmaker. If Clerks didn’t succeed, if Kevin Smith had made, say Birdemic, instead of a cultural touchstone for a generation, he could still call himself a filmmaker–he made a film, after all. I commit myself to writing, ergo I am a writer. No matter how good my work is, no matter how many or how few read my work, it’s still writing. If I do everything a writer does, I’ll be a writer.

Here’s the tricky bit. You can call yourself something while you’re doing it, but once you stop, you have to apply a new qualifier to your title: “former.” All the best writers, so they say, write every goddamn day. I can’t say that I do that currently, but it’s a good point to make. When you do a thing each day, when you finish, and move on to the next thing, you get better, and you get to keep that badge. I mean, for God’s sake, you don’t need permission to be awesome. Start, finish, and start again. It works this way in any sort of art or practice–and make no mistake, writing is a practice. It’s a practice that I am still getting the hang of actually practicing regularly, though.

Natalie Goldberg in her excellent book, Writing Down the Bones compares writing to the practice of Zen meditation. She does both, daily, come what may. I wish I had that level of dedication to the craft. Some days I am a writer, some days I am not. Fortunately, the days I am a writer are becoming more and more frequent. I’ve been trying my damnedest to find the time to write–and use it properly. It’s not just Natalie Goldberg saying this; every book on writing, every book on art and creativity, makes the same point over and over again: Work on your art every day.

I’m not trying to put down the idea of aspirations. Aspirations are fine things: they guide us and give us something to work toward–but, you do have to work toward them. No amount of The Secret type positive thinking/law of attraction/affirmation bullshit will make a finished manuscript fall into your lap. As the aphorism says, “Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which piles up first.” Now, I’m done with wishing. ² If I want a finished manuscript in my lap, I’m going to have to write it. I am going to write it, because that’s what I do. I am a writer.

Recently, I had a conversation–pillow talk, really–with my girlfriend of many years, where I stated something that had been bouncing around in my head for some time about us. Well, actually, it was mostly about myself and her in contrast. I told her: “I’m a great big ball of id, and you’re my superego.” She agreed. A few weeks later, at a birthday dinner for a good friend, I made a similar observation about him and his relationship with his wife. Both of them were quite quick to agree.

For anyone not familiar with the concepts of id, ego, and superego, I will put forth the best explanation I have ever heard. It came via another good friend, the wonderful and hilarious Batya Wittenberg. It is very simple, is written in script form, and involves cheesecake.

Id: Hungry…
Ego: There’s some cheesecake in the fridge.
Id: Cheesecake…
Superego: We can’t have that cheesecake. It’s not ours.
Id: Cheesecake!
Ego: Well, we have money. We can buy some cheesecake.
Id: Cheesecake!
Superego: Cheesecake is not a healthy lunch!
Id: Cheesecake!
Ego: Cheesecake!
Superego: Fine… Cheesecake. Ya happy?

Essentially, the id is your base desires or the lizard brain [1], the superego is the conscience, and the ego sort of balances the two out. In the above example, it leans towards the id’s side of things, but that’s not a requirement.

So, to wrench this back from Freudian Psychology 101 to something more grounded, I describe myself as a “big ball of id” because it is true. When left to my own devices–and as an adult living alone, I am left to my own devices almost all the time–I will often choose the option that is best going to satisfy my id. When the alarm clock goes off in the morning, I hit the snooze button and curl back under the covers for a few more precious minutes. [2] If there’s a sink full of dirty dishes and I can’t make something for dinner, I order out. If I order out, I order a pizza instead of something moderately healthy. Instead of saving money, I sometimes make rash, impulse buys. [3]

I’m not exactly happy about this sort of thing–my own failures at self-control, not the external balance of my girlfriend as superego–and that is why I’ve been seeking to develop a superego in myself. This is a gradual process to be sure, like all forms of self-improvement. It’s also a process prone to failure. All it takes, one thinks, is one misstep, one moment of weakness, and you’ll have to start over from scratch–so why even bother? In other words: fear of imperfection leads to paralysis. The expectation of perfection is, in many ways, a built in escape clause. This quote from The Paleo Solution puts it succinctly.

When I’m faced with the understanding that my superego has failed me, I’ve taken to repeating a rather Buddhist statement: “The path is always there.” To go into Buddhism 101, The Path, aka The Noble Eightfold Path, is a series of life choices that will lead towards enlightenment. I’m no Buddhist, so I use “the path”–lower case intentional–in a more general sense, the execution of any sort of long-term, high-impact choice one makes in life. The path is always there. You can step off the path, you can go miles off, get hopelessly lost, and wander barefoot in the desert for forty years, but the path will remain, and you can always find your way back.

This is a hard, hard, hard concept to grasp. Failure is seen by many to be a permanent state. I blame report cards. That F you got in first quarter English goes on your Permanent Record, or so they say. [4] You failed, and therefore you shall be forever branded as “The Failure,” right? Guaranteed, inside of a decade, or less, nobody will remember your failure except you, much as nobody will remember you getting a boner when standing in front of Ms. Grundy’s classroom in 5th Grade. But, that path is still there. It’s always there, and what happens when you step off the path will affect the journey once you return. It can keep you from going off the path again, or at least from going off the path in the same way. [5] As long as you keep getting back on the path, you’ll find it easier and easier to stay on it, and staying on the path allows you to make it through The Gap.

Ira Glass, of This American Life fame, coined the term The Gap to describe the difference between an artist’s work, and the quality the artist wants it to be. Glass explains it a lot better himself. The only way to bridge the gap is to keep doing the work, until it really is good enough. There’s an excellent book I am reading called Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, which discusses the factors around success. One of the key factors is experience. The more time you spend doing a thing, eventually, the better you will be at the thing. Gladwell pegs the amount of time needed to become an expert at any particular thing at 10,000 hours. That is a lot of time. But, if you put the work in, and rack up those hours like so much Exp, you really can level up.

Ira Glass’s Gap, however, is often not bridged by the artist because they don’t put in the hours. They don’t put in the hours because they get frustrated at their lack of accomplishment. It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to see how that could happen. Artistry in anything is a skill, and skill acquisition works in a pretty standard way, expressed well via the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. The leap from Novice to Advanced Beginner doesn’t take much work. From Advanced Beginner to Competent is a bit more. To move further up, though, it’s going to take a lot of time investment and effort, and if you’re expecting immediate gratification, disappointment is inevitable–and the id wants immediate gratification. Which brings us back around to the superego. Without the superego, without that better self that inspires us to get back on the path and start walking the line again, we sink back into the mode of the id and the lizard brain, and we know where that leads.

As an artist, and as a person stuggling for self-improvement, it’s important to take my mistakes, my failures in context. Those five simple words: “The path is always there,” are grounding, refocusing, and put my mind back on the task at hand–I think the technical term for this is “centering”. What is best about those words is that they’re non-judgmental. There’s no anger behind it. “Hey! Dumbass! The path is back that way!” wouldn’t quite have the same effect, after all. Why be angry? Why rage at the inevitable? With this, I can pick myself up, set myself to rights, and get on my way back down the path, strengthening my nacent superego as I go.

At work, there’s been a thought that keeps popping up in my mind like a bubble under a sheet of poorly-applied wallpaper: “I need to spend less time at work and more time on the work.” This is not to say I haven’t been spending time on the work–it’s what I’m doing right now. The problem is that various factors and obligations have forced me to work in little fits and starts whenever there is a moment or two of free time–lunch breaks, weekends, et cetera–and with whatever tools are at hand. In recent weeks, this has ranged from my computer and keyboard, to my iPhones, to pen and Post-It notes just to have something written down. Naturally, this leads to having bits of project scattered all willy-nilly between notebooks, text files, scraps of paper, and cards in Scrivener…

It’s sub-optimal to be sure, but at least I am doing the work, and the last couple weeks have been more productive than the last year. Beyond posting on SansPoint, I’ve churned out five articles for Kittysneezes, have a sixth in progress, and thrown my hat in the ring to write for Popshifter. It’s a burst of productivity that’s unusual for me. To give you a rough idea, I’ve written nearly 7,000 words in the last two weeks. Meanwhile, in three years of work on my novel, I’ve only just hit the 30,000 word mark. And it’s not enough. If I had more time not allocated to those things which pay my bills, I could devote more time to the work.

As it is, I’ve developed a slightly idiosyncratic workflow to my writing. The majority of it is based around nvALT, a super-neat little app that provides a database of plain text files. Anything I think of ends up (presumably) in nvALT, either transcribed from a notebook, or created directly. I can add and modify those documents on my iPhone via Dropbox and a whole holy host of text editing apps. I’ve taken to using Notesy, but I’ve cast eyes at a few others lately. I don’t need to sing the praises of plain text, as others have done it so much better. While I haven’t suffered the compatibility issues of a gigantic archive of documents in proprietary formats, I have lost work, and thank the gods for Dropbox, and the ability to have everything automatically saved in the cloud.

As I primarily write for the web, I use a variant of Markdown, specifically MultiMarkdown–exclusively for its support for footnotes. [1] I use Markdown/MultiMarkdown for its easy exportability to HTML, but the potential is there for me to turn it into any format needed, whether it’s a Word document, LaTeX… thing… or some other thing to make the text look pretty. I’ve even taken to writing the novel in Markdown–and my handwritten notes. My brain simply formats in it. Once you start, you’ll never go back..

The gist of making my writing method work is based around a card from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: “Not building a wall; making a brick”. It’s a handy way to think about writing projects, especially in conjunction with Scrivener and nvALT. If I’m working on the novel, for example, I can bang out anything from a full scene to a short snippet or phrase that could spawn something larger. In nvALT, I have novel-related files as small as 21 words, and as long as 700. [2] These will go into Scrivener and worked into the larger structure, or even become chapters of their own, depending on length.

Even for shorter works, like blog posts and articles, the “making a brick” approach works well. I am free to jump around and work on sections as the inspiration comes to me. I don’t necessarily write linearly, and being able to dash off a clever sentence, short paragraph, or even just jot down an idea for a future, well, anything, is helpful beyond belief. For those shorter works, I generally don’t use Scrivener, but compose text in a combination of nvALT, TextMate, and/or Notesy, depending on location, level of concentration, etc. When I’m just working on little pieces of things at my machine, nvALT is where I do the writing, while TextMate is used for when I’m working on something more deeply.

The last piece of my workflow is something I only recently started doing. I am not sure where I actually got the idea from, but I think it was Episode 23 of Hypercritical. [3] When I am done the draft of a piece, I will preview the final Markdown text, and run it though OS X’s built in text-to-speech processor. Hearing my writing read aloud allows me to catch a lot of simple errors that will blow past my eyes, as well as get an idea of how the text flows. In the short time I’ve used it, it’s saved me from posting something with a grievous error multiple times.

This is all just what works for me. I would love to be able to work in a more focused manner, keeping everything centralized and not live in four or five different modes of writing–but as long as the writing gets done, it doesn’t make a lick of difference in the end. Looking back at the work done in such a short frame of time makes me happy to know it has been done. I look forward to doing more and making more. Starting is great, but every day you have to start again.

I have no depth perception.[1] Well, next to none. I know if something is far away, if it’s near, or somewhere in between, but don’t ask for anything more exact than that. When turning corners, there’s a 50% chance I will bump the wall if it’s a tight turn. I have walked into parking meters, though that is more likely to be from my own obliviousness then ocular issues. The reason I have no depth perception is because my left eye may as well be vestigial. If I close it, I lose some peripheral vision, but the position of objects does not change. I remember being stymied by an experiment on Mr. Wizard where a girl was asked to close one eye, and then the other, and say where an object was. My eyes didn’t work like that!

Doctors call(ed) it a lazy eye. [2] From first through third grade I had to wear an eyepatch over my right eye in the hopes of correcting it. It didn’t work. I ended up being “the kid with the eye patch”. First they had me wear adhesive eye patches, the kind that looked like giant Band-Aids. I wore those through most of first and second grade. Eventually, they gave me a proper eyepatch, black on the outside, green felt on the inside. In my patch, and Catholic school uniform of a canary yellow shirt, navy blue tie and pants, and dress shoes, I looked like the world’s lamest pirate. To top all of this off, I also suffer from pretty atrocious nearsightedness in my right eye, the eye I primarily see out of. My near-useless left eye is farsighted. Mix all of this up with some serious astigmatism, and you have my eyesight in all of its messed up glory.

With my lack of depth perception, making eye contact is extraordinarily difficult. If you were to see what I see, you would see 90% of my field of vision from my right eye. If I’m looking directly at you, odds are it looks as if I’m looking slightly to the left of your head. I really think this unnerves people. It takes a conscious effort to adjust the position of my head so that I’m centered up with yours, and it will slip. I could extrapolate from this a number of things related to my difficulty in face-to-face social interactions and so forth, but it’s probably not so simple.

Having vision this simply messed up denies you things. Sports were never a skill of mine, and especially anything that involved catching, throwing, or hitting things. I was a chronic whiffer in stickball, missed every shot in basketball, and failed to catch any passes in football. The only sport I excelled in my youth was dodgeball–largely because I did my damnedest to get far out of the way when the ball came anywhere in my vicinity. I also had a slight affinity for street hockey [3] as a defenseman–largely because I was large and could throw my weight into people. However, it was clear from early on that playing sports–at least the team sports, or the kind that involved small objects in motion–was not going to be a large part of my future. Other doors have been closed. I will never be a fighter pilot, or an astronaut, or indeed follow any sort of career path that will require (near) perfect vision.

That said, these things don’t bother me. Limitations are something everyone has to work with and work around to some degree. No one is capable of everything. If pressed to draw a lesson from this musing about vision and limitations, I think it would be just that. Don’t worry about the things that you can’t do because of an external limitation, and don’t even worry about the limitation if it’s out of your control. Worry about those things you can control and can change. The tricky bit is knowing which is which. [4] The trickier bit is actually making the changes you can.