Kyran Pittman, author of the recent momoir, Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life, recently wrote about the art and craft of writing. I thought it would be perfect fodder for a conversation today. Please take your time to read through it and then read on to my further thoughts at the end.
I thought I’d establish my authority as a communications professional with a day-in-the-life snapshot from my forthcoming memoir, Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life. First, picture, if you will, the proto-typical author’s study: the polished oaken desk, the tufted leather chair, the towering, slip-covered edition of the OED, the hushed atmosphere of a sanctuary that is consecrated solely to one’s craft and art.
Now, picture this:
I have a desk, but my “office” is generally the end of the dining room table.
According to the amount of e-mail spam I get, advertising work-at-home opportunities for moms, I’m living the dream. It’s not unlike the dream where you sit down for an exam and realize you have no pants on. Only the exam is a magazine deadline, and there’s a chance that I really don’t have any pants on. Every day is casual day at Work-at-Home-Mom Inc. Also, it’s always bring-your-kid-to-work day, because my office hours don’t neatly correspond with the ringing of the school bell. The kids come home around the same time of day that New York editors usually approach the bottom of their to-do lists, where my name and number sometimes happens to be.
The first time one of my essays was picked up for publication, I had to leave a voice mail for one of those editors, a person I aspired to work with again and upon whom I wished to impress a certain air of decorum and professionalism. That whole neurotic, hapless, flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, Wendy-Among-the-Lost-Boys thing? Ha-ha! Merely my literary persona, my dear. I can turn it on or off at will.
I left my message, and closed with this: “I have to go now. The baby is naked, and he has a hammer.”
It could have been worse. On any other day that week, I could have instead closed with:
“I have to go. The baby is locked in the dog crate.”
“I have to go. They are making a contest of jumping over the pee on the floor.”
“I have to go. They just lassoed the ceiling fan.”
I decided I needed the proverbial “room of one’s own,” so I claimed a utility room at the back of the house, which had previously been designated as an arts and crafts space for the kids, a place where mess-making was allowed. Of course they weren’t the slightest bit interested in it until I moved a desk, a chair, and my laptop in, and declared it off-limits.
I might as well have baited it with candy. A few weeks later, in the middle of a project, I walked into my sanctuary to find it completely trashed. A cupboard full of art and school supplies had been pillaged. Paint was splattered on the floor, my file folders and copy paper strewn across it, a fine dusting of craft glitter sprinkled over everything. I went looking for the perpetrators, half-tempted to rub their noses in the spilled glitter, wondering if I ought not to have revised my position on spanking along with everything else.
I apprehended the vandals in the driveway, making mud pies on an industrial scale from a batter of dirt, water, poster paints, and school glue. They stared at me like raccoons caught in headlights on the rim of a Dumpster.
“For the love of God,” I implored them, “go watch television.”
That is my reality. The sanctuary is sheer fantasy. At least in my world it is. Who, I ask, loudly and rhetorically, several times a week, could possibly write under these conditions? Well, apparently me. Those are the very same conditions under which I’ve written feature-length magazine articles, personal essays, innumerable blog posts, and a memoir. I also maintain satellite offices at various coffee and wine establishments around town, where I sometimes go when the kids are at school and the house is too quiet.
That’s right, I said “too quiet.” Because a hushed atmosphere doesn’t really work for me. It puts my brain to sleep. I need a certain amount of ambient noise and energy in order to focus. To quote the unapologetically off-key Neil Young, “That’s my style, man.”
But for years I bought into the fantasy–or as it may be, some other writer’s reality. Real writers, I thought, require (and crave) solitude. Real writers have serious offices. Real writers put in X number of hours every day, and produce X number of words, no matter what. It said so in their biographies and how-to books. It didn’t occur to me that the vast majority of my literary heroes had wives who saw to it that the study door was kept shut. Since I couldn’t seem to adapt to their model, I must not be cut out for the job.
I finally accepted that I am a real writer about the same time the IRS did. Getting paid confers a certain legitimacy. But the truth is, I’m a real writer because I write, not because I get published, and not because I use a particular set of tools or techniques. And while this may seem obvious to you, it took me nearly forty years to separate the cultural myth from my creative reality.
Even if you don’t labor under that particular illusion, I’m willing to bet there are other cultural myths about creative work that come between you and your own potential. Our society tends to regard creativity as a kind of sixth sense – a mysterious gift that is magical, rare, and a little suspect. “Oh, I’m not creative at all,” people often spontaneously confess to me upon learning what it is I do. I can almost hear the afterthought: not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The irony is that it’s always an obviously false claim, belied by the speaker’s passion for funky accessories, or gardening, or cooking, or tinkering with cars. Putting stuff together to make new stuff is human. It’s what we do.
The myth that creative risk-taking necessarily comes at great cost and severe hardship is instilled in us from childhood.
An example: my fourth grader came home one day asking me –in a rather worried tone– if it was true that authors don’t make any money, since that’s what he’d been told by a visiting writer at his school. Though I’ve had days myself where I would vigorously dissuade anyone in their rational mind from writing books, I’m sure that’s not what the visitor intended his audience to come away with. But that’s what my kid heard. I wonder how many students scratched “author” off the “What I Want to Be When I Grow Up” list that day.
We are an anxious species, living in anxious times. We crave certainties. We like infographics. We need Global Satellite Positioning. We have to know where we are, where we’re going, and what time we’ll get there. We want measureable inputs and outputs. We need to know the rules.
But there are no rules in creativity, no grids of longitude and latitude, no X+Y=Z. We can’t map a place we’ve never been, and though we can learn from the experiences of other innovators, our own creative ventures will be always be Terra Nova –uniquely ours to discover. Though that doesn’t stop people from trying to tell you the lay of the land. At various points in my career I’ve read or been told, according to conventional wisdom:
“No one is publishing personal essays anymore.”
“Memoirs about mothering are over.”
“Blogs are over.”
And my favorite,
“Putting your writing on your blog and hoping to get published is like putting your resume on your doorstep and hoping to get hired.”
Every one of those unequivocal statements was put forth by a respected expert in my field. People with far more experience in publishing than me. And in my case, every single one proved 100 per cent false. Conclusion: the phrase conventional wisdom is an oxymoron.
I know this is a topic that has come up before – but it's something I feel like I myself am constantly struggling with. Am I a better writer if I'm paid and commissioned? Or am I a better writer when I'm staying true to my heart and writing what I want when I want? For that reason, I just love what she's saying here and it reflects so clearly on my own experience and learning curve – writing for writing's sake and not just to get published. That's one key message. The other is to have faith and be creative and don't listen to the naysayers. How do you keep the faith? What naysaying have you heard recently that's affected you and/or your writing? How do you overcome the negativity? What are you doing in your writing life these days? Time for questions and answers!
