More entries for the 30-Day Drawing Challenge:
Eighteen: Just a doodle. I could have just scribbled and got away with it, but I thought “Nah, this is supposed to be practice.” So I drew a secretary squid (most rare). I guess it’s actually an octopus, though the distinction is lost on me (cf: clowns and mimes).
There’s a BBC series on right now about Africa, called””appropriately enough””Africa. They had a segment on octopi. Gosh, they’re a strange kind of creature, and far too intelligent to be battered, fried, and served in pubs.
Nineteen: Something new. Er, okay.
Twenty: Something orange. You can see the deep thought that went into this one:
I suppose I could have tried harder, but I’m feeling the pressure to get a lot done today (so I guess this is a good demonstration of how increased pressure leads to lesser results: I like the first drawing, but the other two were throwaways). I’m also trying to muster my creative gumption.
I’ve found lots of inspiration lately, but there’s a point where being inspired by other people’s work doesn’t get me any closer to doing my own. I either think “Gosh, they’re great,” and feel intimidated or set back (the Sufis say “Comparison is from the Devil”), or I get so caught up in researching and gathering that this activity replaces working.
There’s also a twitch-reflex that Twitter-use inspires, the constant spinning around from life to go say something snappy about it in 140 characters or fewer. I like to make people laugh, but there’s no laughter there. Sometimes there’s a retweet, but… I dunno. It’s feeling like all that effort spent in trying to appear clever is diffusing my creative energy in not particularly productive ways.
“Yes, but you get followers!” My experience is that followers seldom convert into readers or buyers, and those 1,300 strangers who tag along one by one don’t even say anything to me, so it’s not exactly a conversation, either. It’s a giant cocktail party where no one’s looking me in the eye except the friends I went in with.
So I’ve signed off Twitter for a few weeks to move away from the endless searching, or becoming an idle fan of the work that others show off. And there is a lot of showing off to Twitter. I find myself feeling beholden to people there, like I need to justify their following me by producing””what? Things to inspire them?
That leads to lots of little bursts of short-term work, things I know I can turn around quickly and add to my Twitter puppet show. I’ve been tiptoeing back into Lake Novel, filling out scene cards, consolidating my work, and reshaping the opening; that’s where I want to spend my time and energy””on projects like that.
(I’ve cut a bunch of “gradually getting them into it” scenes for two secondary characters, which I realised were going to bog the book down for the reader””and for me! Nobody likes “We have to do this first before start” chapters.)
My legs are still wobbly, though, and sometimes a stray thought sends the whole thing flying out the window. Cutting out some distractions and channeling my focus, though, is freeing up a lot of time and energy to do this work. It’s rewarding to do my own thing, yet it’s so easy to not risk it, to avoid it. What a weird principle of life.
Now it’s time to write an e-mail newsletter article. I know I can do that. That’s about practice: I do this all the time. So there’s another lesson for me about practice.
P.S. Yesterday I drove backwards. It was no biggie, just something I need to develop some more finesse at. It’s something you do slowly, versus all the high-speed dodge-’em forward driving stuff””though I did some of that, too, driving straight through town, across the roundabout and the busiest junction in town.
I recognise that these tasks would be laughable to any experienced driver, but they were nightmarishly intimidating to me before, and now they’re just something to do. I get nervous, and I’m wiped out after a lesson or practice, but I can do them.
P.P.S. Today is Craig’s birthday. I made him a couple of little things and I’m taking him out to dinner tonight. I wrestle with this feeling of what’s “enough”, but I tried to resist it, and when I did give in to the temptation to do more and give more, I made him things instead of buying things, except for his one ‘main’ gift: The one present he really wanted was a £5 lamp!
P.P.P.S. [EDIT] Busted: One of the books I’m reading is Eric Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within, in which, over lunch, I just read this line which rather nails what I’ve just done here: “…virtually any aspect of existence can be turned into a pair of (real or seemingly real) polar opposites. Sometimes we should be silent; sometimes we should speak; if we are not careful we can make one or the other into some kind of special virtue, simply because we want justification for keeping silent or for speaking up. We turn two aspects of existence into a duality and then call one nobler than the other to justify and excuse our behavior.”
Okay, so I did that, and it’s something I do often, talk in absolutes when it’s probably more realistic and gentle to say “This is something I’m doing for now.” I’ll be back on Twitter ’cause I like inspiration and community, even if they’re not always as real as they seem. But for now I need to strengthen my ability to do my own thing.