Advice on Life, Creativity, and Making Meaning, from the Creator of Calvin and Hobbes

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not as well-versed in the iconic comic Calvin and Hobbes as I should be. What little I've seen of it has moved me, and I mean to read more, truly. Bill Watterson is a rare talent. And he gives some pretty inspiring advice, too, both for creatives and for everyone else:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3027095/4-tips-on-creativity-from-the-creator-of-calvin-hobbes

The four maxims Watterson presents are by no means comprehensive, but they do form a solid foundation for a creative life. And, even though it's clear from context that he uses "creative" to mean "artistic," I believe his advice holds true for any field involving passion and productivity, which is most of them.

Essentially, it boils down to: "Do something you love (no field is too small or esoteric), stay true to your vision, and give it 110%." Sensible for anyone, but especially for creatives who face a long, risky, uphill battle with no surety of success and with little but their own belief to light their way. It's true of artists, entrepreneurs, and innovators of all stripes -- one hopes to have the cultural impact Watterson did.

And then there's this, which was illustrated by Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/27/bill_watterson_s_cartoonist_s_advice_in_comic_form_by_zen_pencils_aka_gavin.html

In its narrowest reading, this graphic interpretation of Watterson's words vindicates stay-at-home parenting -- for either gender. While challenging normative views of masculinity and patriarchy is daring and important, it isn't quite innovative today. Rather, the broader readings of this comic are more interesting: in a society where status -- as defined by a widely accepted slate of value judgments -- is in part determined by income and prestige of employment, Watterson and Than assert that one can viably choose not to take part in that hierarchy (or at least, choose to ignore it). If your idea of meaning and fulfillment cannot be met within the traditional system, it's legitimate to create your own. You shouldn't let society influence or shame you into pursuing a traditional path towards conventional markers of success.

It's an almost Thoreauvian way of living -- not necessarily the most practical or accessible, but a worthy goal nonetheless.

I Am Very Real: Kurt Vonnegut's letter on censorship

This week is Banned Books Week, which I am celebrating by reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It's a book that has frequently been censored and banned for its critical treatment of religion (true), and, more laughably, for its misogyny and its depiction of polygamy and violence (these are all elements that the book portrays negatively). There are many writers who communicate eloquently on the subject of censorship, Atwood included, but I am particularly struck by the following letter, written in 1973 by Kurt Vonnegut to the man who burned his books:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html

We live, as Vonnegut points out, in a country that prizes and was indeed founded upon the ideal of freedom. Freedom of speech and of knowledge is enshrined in the very documents that form the fabric of our government. But true freedom only exists with unfettered access to information. It's horrible that teachers -- those who are responsible for the youngest, most impressionable members of our society -- would seek to restrict any child's learning.

Vonnegut rightly takes censorship as an insult -- to the writer, to the reader, and to the children who should be presumed intelligent and independent enough to read a work and think critically about it. A reader should be free to read -- and disagree with -- whatever she chooses. A reader who is never challenged by concepts that are difficult, disturbing, or opposed to her own perspective will never gain the rich education that reading offers, and will never learn to think for herself. No child should be denied that education on the whim of the adult at the front of the classroom.

And this is why Banned Books Week is important. It reminds us every year that this is an ongoing battle, that censorship still happens in this country, and that ignorance and bigotry must be fought at every juncture.

"Borges and I" by Jorge Luis Borges

I was just rereading one of my favorite short stories, and I wanted to share it with all of you. It's a very short piece called "Borges and I" by Jorges Luis Borges, and may be found here:
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/borg&i.htm

It's not precisely a story, and it's so short that it might qualify more as flash fiction or microfiction -- or perhaps not any sort of fiction at all. I first encountered it, that I can remember, in a philosophy of literature course at university. Even then, I was awed by the way the piece conveys all the meaning of an essay in just a few paragraphs. It's stayed with me, the idea of the human being as a vessel for the creative spirit, much like Athena in the skull of Zeus.

In particular, there's the line "I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me." I find that over the past few years, I've appropriated that term, "justify," for my own use when thinking about creative output, human identity, and self-worth. It's a particularly powerful word in that it demands an answer. A person spends a lifetime striving for that answer -- especially artists, philosophers, creators, and others who feel the need to pursue goals greater than themselves.

It also introduces, in just a few turns of phrase, the dichotomy of solitary creation and human experience. Art is usually a form of commentary and a crystallization of ideas -- even if the artwork and the artist espouse no agenda nor any overt message. Good art requires some understanding of the themes and cadences of human existence, of living our lives on this planet. And yet so often, when an artist in the act is not experiencing anything new of the outside world; rather, he experiences himself in the act of creation. So, in one flesh and one mind, there must be some rub between the human being who lives and learns, and the artist who creates. Is it, then, the artist's fate to oscillate forever?

Just some food for thought, going into the new year. (The lunar New Year was this weekend.)

I Won NaNoWriMo!

I clocked in at 50,133 words with about two hours to spare. I fell behind a bit this month, so I ended up writing 5000 words today. And look what I got!

That's the winner banner from the NaNoWriMo website's secret (or not-so-secret) winners' page.

This project is really just about personal fulfillment, so I don't "win" anything more than glory, satisfaction, and 50,000 more words of fiction than I had before. But that's something, and it was such, such fun!

Same time next year, then. Can't wait!

Write Your Own Academic Sentence (or, the Problem with Academic Prose)

Academic writing is notorious for its opaque (sometimes unreadable) prose. This contributes greatly to the common perception that academia is irrelevant to the concerns of the general population, who don't care to puzzle through the stylistic challenges of academic papers to get at the often interesting ideas within. It's a tragedy, because our society would be so much richer if everyone -- not just specialists, not just the people with advanced degrees -- were engaged in the culture of ideas and had access to the latest developments across a variety of disciplines.

I recently found this amusing little program that parodies academic writing:

http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/write-sentence.htm

It's surprising how many of these randomly-generated declarative statements seem to make some semblance of sense. (Of course, the ones that don't are hilariously bad.) What's rather tragic is that a broad swath of society actually believes that all academic writing reads something like this -- and for the most part, they're not wrong.

Obviously, part of the opacity of any academic discipline is a product of the specialized vocabulary required to discuss said discipline -- they need words to describe concepts that might not even exist elsewhere. As the sum total of human knowledge has increased over the centuries, each discipline is now much more specialized than in the past. Newton, for example, could give public lectures about cutting-edge physics and expect to draw sizable crowds that included a diverse swath of of upper and middle class London, the vast majority without formal science training. Today, the equivalent would be a Brian Greene or Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture -- which seems to appeal to a more niche audience.

We're seeing something of a reversal of this trend with the online democratization of education (e.g. Coursera, Floating University, Crash Course, SciShow, &c.). So far, that hasn't gained much traction in the realm of written research (though who knows what academic journals will look like in a decade or two?). Given that the audience of said journals consists primarily of other academics, it's unlikely that they'll change drastically. Public outreach, on the other hand, has never looked more promising.

Written Kitten!

This one's for the intersection of "people doing NaNoWriMo" and "people who like kitten pictures." (Then again, who doesn't like kitten pictures?)

There's a website that I've started using this month which rewards you for meeting your writing quotas with pictures of kittens:

http://writtenkitten.net

I've started thinking of my daily wordcount numbers in terms of kittens -- i.e. if I set it for one kitten picture every 200 words, then 1600 words translates to eight kittens. It's actually quite helpful!

You can also set it to show you pictures of things other than kittens. For example, puppies:

http://writtenkitten.net/?search=puppy

That is all. Happy writing!

It's the Season for NaNoWriMo

It's that time of year again... NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, begins today. The challenge, in a nutshell, is to write 50,000 words of fiction -- roughly the length of a very short novel -- in one month. (It sounds mad, but this will be my sixth time doing NaNoWriMo, and hopefully my fifth time "winning.") You can track my progress via the little wordcount bar on the right.

Towards the end of November, my life might look something like this (which I consider a fine use of the Thanksgiving holiday, for the record):

So, friends (Romans, countrymen), forgive me for being a little antisocial and non-responsive for the next thirty days. I haven't fallen off a cliff, I promise.

Faulkner on Literature, Humanity, and Immortality

On Sunday, I had dinner with my friend Brett after an afternoon visit to the Met. I was telling him about an amazing, inspiring book talk I'd recently attended: it was a conversation between Adam Johnson, a Stanford English professor and this year's Pulitzer winner in fiction, and Fredrik Logevall, a Cornell history professor and the Pulitzer winner in nonfiction, moderated by their editor, David Ebershoff, of Random House.

Brett was reminded of (and sent me) this particular speech delivered by William Faulkner on the acceptance of his Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html

It's brilliant and quite worth reading (and not very long) -- so do actually read it! Faulkner's claim is, essentially, that literature -- the written word, storytelling, art -- is humanity's way of achieving some semblance of immortality. He writes not of the genetic "immortality" perpetuated by our biology, of course; I think one of the prerequisites of sentience is a consciousness of meaning greater than base instinct. Rather, Faulkner speaks to our legacy as a species -- the ideas, the intellectual and creative achievements by which humanity might define itself.

Literature is one such vehicle. I would hesitate to call it a record -- that term falls too much in the realm of historiography (which is itself an ambitious and meaningful endeavour, of course) -- but perhaps one might consider literature the pared-down essence of what it means to be human. In books, in art, we see reflected not only the best (and the worst) -- but also the deepest, truest, and most beautiful aspects of ourselves. In literature, we are immortal -- not only the writer, and sometimes not the writer at all (Homer is the example that comes to mind) -- but we, as a sentient species, are captured, burnished, chased in silver -- forever.

Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment centuries earlier:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
(Sonnet 18, lines 13-14)

Today

I performed at an open mic for the first time in a while. I went to the one at Pete's in Brooklyn, a cozy, non-judgmental venue I've played on occasion in the past. I had a new song to try out in front of an audience, and I don't think I have been this nervous about performing in quite a long time.

Art -- true art -- is terrifyingly honest, terrifyingly intimate. I would liken it to a flaying of the soul, so that complete strangers can see my bones and sinews, the colour of my blood and the ticking of my heart. It's the baring of the darkest and most vulnerable parts of oneself, the parts that make us most human. The fact that we can write about such things, can continue to sing about them and use them to fuel our greatest creative works, means that we are every day surviving them and weaving them into the fabric of our existence.

Part of what moves us to create, what drives us (or at least me) to write, is that it's an extension -- even a distillation -- of self. I've often heard writers say that there's a piece of themselves in every work of literature they produce. One's creation never quite lives up to the vision in one's mind, no matter how we strive for perfection, but seeing it actualized on the page fulfills in us a primal need to see ourselves (our thoughts, our dreams, our nightmares) reflected in the world around us -- the wonderful, frightening, and utterly strange place that it is.

So I sat on a barstool, under a spotlight in a dark room where I didn't know anybody, looking out into that small sea of upturned faces. I was there to play a song that I was in serious danger of not being able to finish -- I am still too close to the material. I had other pieces I could have performed instead and no one would have been the wiser -- and for a few heart-stopping moments I considered switching songs -- but I felt that I owed it to myself to bite down and see it through. The very nature of art, it occurred to me then, meant that -- if I was doing it right -- I would always be, in some capacity, too close to the material. It's not supposed to be safe or comfortable or without risk. It's meant to be honest, a reckoning you're never quite ready for.

On that stage, fingering the first few notes on my ukulele, I realized that I couldn't make out a single face in the crowd -- that I wasn't playing for them at all. I wasn't thinking about whether they would enjoy it or what they would think of me. All I knew was that, in those five minutes, for all that it would leave me gutted and flayed, I had to get through the song for me. It was the most perfectly selfish thing -- and it was exactly what I needed.

I sang it with my eyes squeezed shut. I left out one or two chords in the middle of the piece. My voice cracked once -- I may have choked up at some point. But I remembered all of the words, and in the right order. It was not my best performance, but by god, it was art. 

And the moment of silence before the applause, when all I could hear was the buzz of the stage lights and the thundering of my own heartbeat in my ears -- that was a small victory in itself.

Another November, Another Novel

I won! 

That is, I produced, according to the official NaNoWriMo word counter, 50,023 words of fiction in the month of November. And this is a story I intend to keep and work on, that I'm not sick of after a month of staring at it nonstop, so I'm quite pleased.

Doing NaNoWriMo at home was quite a different experience from doing it in college. For one, Thanksgiving threw off my writing schedule more than I anticipated. At Stanford, Thanksgiving break was actually quite productive in terms of wordcount; there were no classes, little (pressing) homework, and most of the other students went home -- leaving me a few solid days of writing (and hanging out with the friends left on campus, when I was feeling burnt out). At home, I suddenly had all of these social engagements for the holiday, which left me very little time to write. You can see from my stats that I was on target, writing about 1667 words per day for the first two weeks of November. There's this horrible flatline period right around the holiday when I didn't get in any writing. And, in a bout of insanity, I somehow managed to produce a little over 10,000 words in the last twenty-four hours of NaNo.

Now that I've got a lot of raw material (much of which I will likely end up binning), I need to do all of the research I didn't do before November rolled around. This might end up changing the story some -- who knows? I'm really looking forward to hunkering down and reading up on English history over the next few months.

And I did end up meeting some cool people through NaNo write-ins and such. Huzzah for new friends!

A Dispatch from the Garret (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo 2012)

As most of you know -- and if you didn't before, you probably noticed the widget in the sidebar here -- I'm doing NaNoWriMo again this year.

This is my first time really doing NaNoWriMo in New York. My first two years of it were during high school, which I attended here in the City, but this is the first year in which I'm really participating in the community and its range of social activities (mostly meeting other writers and pounding away at our laptops in coffeeshops, which is actually social in a weird way). It's been a lot of fun -- I hope the community doesn't dissolve after November, which I'm told often happens. I hope to make some friends by the end of this.

I'm also quite excited about my novel. I'm trying something new this year. I've done a lot of fantasy novels of various stripes; this year's is historical fiction, which entails a lot of research. I didn't do nearly enough before the month started, as I realized by the second week or so; I expect to spend quite a bit of time the next few months reading up on the construction of early Gothic cathedrals, and British evacuees during the Blitzkrieg, and the inner workings of art museums. I can't wait! I've got this lovely old textbook on medieval English sculpture waiting on my desk.

And so, back to writing. (I'm already behind!)

Washington Post: Writers on Writing

A collection of interesting and occasionally enlightening thoughts on writing, from a diverse list of authors:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/2011/08/24/gIQAJoEUYK_story.html

Some of my favorites:
"The dream of becoming a writer as a young boy has been realized. I am so pleased I did not let my young self down." ~ Jack Cantos

"I once watched a 6-year-old laugh so hard at my book “Diary of a Worm” that milk shot out of his nose — and I mean projected out like a jet stream. Hilarious." ~ Harry Bliss

"My mother was a living “book” of poems for me — and I grew up swimming in the ocean of poems she knew by heart." ~ Carol Muske-Dukes

Why I'm Not Doing NaNoWriMo This Year

It's November, which means it's the time of year when thousands of writers around the world buckle down and write a novel. In a month.

I've done it four times, and I've won it three (see the sidebar). But this is not a been-there, done-that kind of post. In fact, I've been quite excited by the novel I have brewing in my head -- it's been living there for a few months, so real that I could almost touch it. (I wonder if it wiggles, like Jello?)

Rather, it's to do with this post. It's my last year here, with all of these wonderful people, and I don't want to spend a month locked in my room away from them. I have the rest of my life to do that. I want to have more pie nights, and attend lectures, and play midnight Catan. The novel can wait another year. Stanford won't -- it'll whoosh past if I'm not careful. (That, ironically, reminds me of this Douglas Adams quotation.)

So that's that.

If I Used Twitter

my random thought of the day would be:

I want to write a story entitled, "All My Imaginary Children, and Possibly Some Electric Eels".

That is all.

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog

One of my English professors held a Middle English workshop last week, and showed us this:
http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/

It's brilliant and hilarious in a really nerdy, English-major-y way. (Chaucer himself was quite funny, and the blog does him justice.) I've been reading it a bit obsessively the past week. Go have a gander -- I promise you'll laugh. (If you have trouble with the Middle English, there are some translation resources in the sidebar.)

Plot Device (No, Really)!

Funny, relevant, and very well-made:

Overheard in the Office #3

Not so much "overheard" as "was said in a meeting":

"I never know why people can't just write about a nice dismemberment."

Everyone here is lovely and (mostly) harmless, really.

Wall Street Journal: How to Undress a Victorian Lady in Your Next Historical Romance

I was directed to this article by a number of people, but I think Nicole sent it first (no, it's not adult content -- it's The Wall Street Journal, after all):

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304911104576443871615544338.html

I really appreciate the effort some authors expend to get the details right. Historical fiction has a lot in common with science fiction, where the technology ought to be theoretically plausible, and fantasy, where the imagined world ought to be internally consistent and realistic within its constraints -- which is why we have people like Asimov writing science fiction, people like Tolkien writing fantasy, and a bevy of actual historians writing historical fiction. It's hard to do these genres well if you don't have the background.

I have made my own period costumes, and sporadically partake in historical reenactment (and yes, I do own a corset). I do my research; Stanford's libraries are excellent for this purpose. And as I sometimes mention on this blog, I'm a history major -- but I'm still, compared to film industry costumers, an amateur. Inaccuracies in books, films, etc. bother me quite a bit, because I always find myself thinking, if I, as a hobbyist with limited resources, can get it right (or at least moreso than this film), why can't a professional crew? (Some of my friends apparently enjoy watching bad quasi-medieval action flicks with me just to watch me go off about all the things the studio got wrong. Not sure what that says about me -- or them, for that matter.)

Anyhow. A pet peeve of mine.

Adverbs, and the Killing Thereof

A humorous take on the not-so-funny problems with the way writing is taught in American grade schools:

http://www.therejectionist.com/2011/02/dear-superior-person_25.html

I remember, vaguely (it was a decade ago), the extremes to which grade school instructors went in instilling "show, don't tell" into the repertoires of their unsuspecting charges. It is, as with most rules, best applied in moderation. Fancy verbs and superfluous adverbs are annoying and frilly, and often make the text that much less readable. Beginner mistakes, to be sure, but ones that are utterly preventable -- and indeed, wouldn't crop up in the first place, if it weren't for these notions about grade school writing.

Mark Twain said it best: "If you see an adverb, kill it!"

Owl Hunts Invisible Prey

Speaking of birds, here's a cute video my sister showed me a few days ago:



I want one! I think a large component of my early enthusiasm for Harry Potter formed around the arresting idea of keeping a pet owl to carry my mail. It's a literal amalgamation of two things I love: owls and handwritten letters.

I have no idea what it thinks is on/behind that door, but I'm sure it makes perfect sense in its own little head. Its expression is wonderful -- but then again, I suppose that's not really its doing. It reminds me of kittens with ping pong balls. (My father likes telling stories about how kittens are adorably stupid -- they can keep on chasing a ping pong ball for ages not realizing that they're never going to catch it.)