Showing only Notes + Links tagged things that make me laughon creativity, art, & design

by Casey A. Gollan

My major praise for the exhibition is the extraordinary installation of highly aggressive works, each of which would probably prefer to be all alone in the room—if not in the universe.

Writers always envy artists, would trade places with them in a moment if they could. The painter’s life seems less ascetic, less monkish, less hunched. Instead of the austere mess of the desk there is the chaos of the studio: dirty coffee cups, paint-smudged cassette decks, drawings of the artist’s girlfriend, naked, on the walls … In the age of the computer the writer’s office or study will increasingly resemble the customer service desk of an ailing small business. The artist’s studio, though, is still what it has always been: an erotic space. For the writer the artist’s studio is, essentially, a place where women undress.

I’ve been banned for life from Pearl Paint for shoplifting, and I can’t complete my graduate degree without access to the store,” she explained breathlessly to Waters after the lecture. A long line of students waiting to get his signature behind her already seemed impatient. “Can you write me a letter explaining that I’m rehabilitated?” A slight pause…”Are you going to do it again?” asked Waters. “No,” she replied. “Sure.” He shrugged his shoulders and wrote his letter on the program press release.

This story sounded sus­pi­ciously wiki.” The obvi­ous col­lo­quial ana­logue would be “the story seemed fishy.” But note the dis­tinc­tion. A “fishy” story, like a “fish story,” is a far­fetched story that is prob­a­bly a lie or exag­ger­a­tion that in some way redounds to the teller’s ben­e­fit. A “wiki” story, on the other hand, is a story, per­haps far­fetched, that is prob­a­bly backed up by no author­ity other than a Wikipedia arti­cle, or per­haps just a ran­dom web site. The only advan­tage it yields to the user is that one appears knowl­edge­able while hav­ing done only the absolute min­i­mum amount of research.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper, because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go – but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.