Work. Writing. Work. Writing. The Voice. Rinse and Repeat.
I did poke at the quilting a bit but I’ve been working at this big moment in my story and I had to keep working on that until it was right. Last night I got home from dinner with the family and I pulled out the computer and suddenly – well it all went dark – aka my eyelids closed and that was all it wrote… well, I didn’t write, because I was the one who was sleeping.
Meanwhile, all around me Spring is pushing out into the world. Flowers are early, the trees are taking their time. Guess they are more patient. Maybe they have better memories of early spring’s cold.
While commuting I’ve gone back to the Yale lecture series about modern poetry. Today started with the second lecture on Robert Frost and ended with the intro to W.B. Yeats. Makes my brain hurt a little but that’s ok. I enjoyed wrapping my brain around what Frost and Yeats were going for and how they did it.
Speaking of which – where will you be, and what will YOU be doing in April, National Poetry Month??? You still have a few days to come up with a plan. I like to have a plan, anyway. Something that I can use to push me into action everyday, a form or a theme or something to shape each day, whether or not “inspiration” sits on my shoulder. Sometimes you need to go out and FIND the work. SIGN UP PEOPLE!
Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good. — Chuck Close
and the long version:
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. — Chuck Close
