Procrastinating....

Philip Norman

Work on the neverending book, The Disenchanted Wizard, has sludged to a halt again, though we're only inches (yards, metres?) from the finish line. I've been so busy with working on Opera Otago's production of Philip Norman's A Christmas Carol, that my brain is struggling to think about the book. Rehearsals every evening, and afternoons on the weekend as well, plus keyboard rehearsals - three so far, and two more to come - plus practice at home for the bits I can't play properly, plus being at home alone because my wife is in the UK attending to an unwell sister, and I'm having to do all the housework and feed myself. (No biggie, really. I do both of these regularly anyway! Just thought I'd throw that in.)

A note comes up on Gmail notifications regularly, telling me not to procrastinate on the book. But procrastinating is what I'm doing. Of course there's time to work on it; I'm just using all the above as excuses, because even though we're close to the finish line, there are some difficulties I have to deal with, and I'm not a person who's enthusiastic about difficulties.

There's only one way to overcome difficulties in writing, and that's to write. Deb Vanesse says, in her book, What Every Author Should Know: I hate saying this, out of fear of jinxing myself, but I’ve never suffered from writer’s block, which is in part a writer’s term for procrastination, often connected to your fears of vulnerability and failure. Once you call those fears out for what they are, you can write your way through pretty much any stuck point, and the bigger problem may become forging ahead with a project when you should have stopped to assess whether it was heading in the best possible direction.

And in a similar vein, Steven Pressfield, in his book, The War of Art, writes: Procrastination is the most common manifestation of Resistance because it's the easiest to rationalize. We don't tell ourselves "I'm never going to write my symphony." Instead we say "I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow." [He uses the word 'resistance' to signify all those things that appear to stand in the way of our producing good creative work.]

So there you go. Having been told off by Gmail, by Vanesse and Pressfield, I'll go off and....walk the dog.

Update, later the same day: After going on about procrastinating on the book earlier today, I must have prodded myself into gear, and by late afternoon, I'd done the revision work that was needed. And of course it wasn't nearly as difficult as I'd thought it would be. So Progress!

Souvenir

Last night, courtesy of the surprise gift of a friend, we went to see Souvenir, a play being performed at Dunedin's Fortune Theatre. Souvenir was written by Stephen Temperley, a musician, actor and playwright. It began life as a full-scale play (presumably with a large cast), was abandoned, was tried as a one-woman show, and finally morphed around 2003 into the two-hander that was performed last night. This is the first time the play has been produced in New Zealand, so good on you, Fortune, for doing it. Sadly the house was only half-full, which is a pity, because not only is the play good and worth seeing, it's immensely funny and is performed with huge energy by Angela Johnson and Michael Lee Porter.

Johnson plays the incredible widow, Mrs Florence Foster Jenkins, who is convinced that the perfect music she hears inside her head is what she produces for her audiences. She's sadly disillusioned about this, and yet audiences flocked to hear her in her later years when she began putting on charity concerts, first at the Ritz Hotel, and finally at Carnegie Hall. She even made some recordings. Johnson, who in real life looks nothing like the dumpy Mrs J, gives a performance of such warmth and delight that you realise how people were willing to suspend judgement on the woman's singing. In spite of the fact that we know that she sings absolutely awfully - Johnson gives us dozens of samples of this awful singing - she had such resilience and enthusiasm that it was hard to turn her down on her ideas. Johnson adopts something of the chortly tones of the famous TV character Mrs Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) in order to bring her character to life, and gives great emphasis to certain words and lines.

Porter plays the role of pianist Cosmé McMoon. (Yup, that was his name.) He also narrates the story to us, and is onstage the entire play. (Johnson gets brief patches offstage, but for most of those she's whipping out of one costume and into another.) Porter not only has to tell us the story in speech, but sometimes in song (accompanying himself on the grand piano that takes up a good deal of the space) and then has to become Cosmé as he was twenty or so years earlier. Porter is an accomplished pianist, has a pretty reasonable voice, and performs the complex and constantly switching role of appalled pianist, counsellor, comforter, and possibly even substitute son with aplomb. His role is more difficult, because he's the audience's confidante as well, and sometimes is expected to give us the nod and wink while being in the middle of a scene with Foster Jenkins.

It's possible that people with some musical background might enjoy the piece more than those who don't have one, but it's certainly not necessary to know anything much about opera to appreciate the play. (There are a number of popular songs in the play too, mostly played and sung by McMoon.) The actors give every line great value, and milk every bit of comedy out of the script. It would be interesting to see a production of the play which wasn't played quite so much for laughs; I suspect it's possible to do it in an entirely different way. Here, of course, the laughs make the unfunny scenes all the more poignant: there are two strong scenes towards the end of each act in which Mrs Foster Jenkins has brief moments of insecurity about what she's doing. In the first McMoon loses his temper at her inability to see how she comes across to others, and is hurtful. Such is the way in which the script is written and performed that it's Foster Jenkins who we side with; McMoon is absolutely right in what he says, yet somehow we believe in the woman.

The play speaks to all artists, most of whom have an ongoing insecurity about what they're creating in the world. Is it of any real value, or will be forgotten as quickly as yesterday's news? Is the judgement of friends and family true, or does only the judgement of a wider audience count? And are we reading that judgement correctly, or are we interpreting it in the light of our own belief about what we're creating? Many great artists have been ignored in their lifetime and have only come into their own after they're dead. Many artists who seem to hold the stage at present will soon be forgotten forever. Actors in stage plays present something nightly for a week, or a month, or even years, and then nothing of it remains, except memories. Performance is perhaps one of the most ephemeral of the arts: a concert here, a play there, and next day it's as if it had never been. If an audience misses seeing or hearing it, there is no memory of it. And curiously, the videoing of live performances can often be disappointing: they're not big enough, they lack that buzz that the audience contributes.Things that the actors thought they were conveying seem to be flat and banal. Or they may seem so over-the-top that you wonder what the live audience actually thought.

There's no doubt that Foster Jenkins somehow missed hearing what was heard by others. Her recordings testify to this, and she has been hugely mocked and laughed at. But at the end of the play, when McMoon tells us that she died not long after her Carnegie Hall concert (not of a broken heart, as many claimed, but of natural causes), he speaks of the fact that inside her head she could hear the perfect music. And Johnson comes out on stage again at that point, in a dress that is lovely and not foolish (as many of her stage costumes were), and sings Ave Maria so beautifully that it makes your own heart break. Perhaps in heaven Mrs Foster Jenkins sings still, and now performs truthfully what she couldn't achieve in this life.

Making the most of the time

Just came across a long extract from William Barclay, on the subject of writing that I posted on one of my now-defunct blogs. There's some very good advice for writers in it, but one particular thing struck me afresh. He writes: My second rule is Keep Going. One of the greatest time-wasters, I find, is the habit we have of saying: 'I've only got twenty-five minutes. It's not worth starting.' But I find it is always worth starting. To return to John Wesley, he did most of his reading on horseback. It is amazing how much you can get done in the odd quarter-hour or half-hour. There is not one unit of time that cannot be used.

Wesley, according to Barclay, preached forty-two thousand sermons in fifty-three years, averaged four thousand five hundred miles per year in travel, and wrote or edited four hundred and fifty books.

I think this is something worth noting, that we don’t use those odd minutes well.  I used to be able to cope at a job in the Dunedin City Council where the phone would ring constantly, and you had to get on with your other work fitting around the phone calls. You learned to move from one thing to another without difficulty. It was somewhat the same at the bookshop: you’d be in the middle of something when a customer walked in.  Drop one thing, take up another, and then come back to the first. Yet I was very productive in those days.  In my last office job, it used to annoy me when the person senior to me would interrupt my work, especially if it meant putting something aside completely; but in fact it was no different a matter than in those other places. 

These days it's not a matter of interruption so much as of making the most of the odd minutes I do have (yes, retired people can be surprisingly busy in a day!) Some piece of creative work can be moved forward a paragraph or two in quarter of an hour - it's not the same as getting a sustained period of time,  but it's still of value. The thing is to do that rather than flitting through Facebook or Twitter or something else. Or writing blog posts about doing it!

John Wesley: Riding a Horse Whilst Reading a Book
by Richard Gilmore Douglas

PledgeMe up and running

I think I first came across the wonderful site, Kickstarter, earlier this year, when Taika Waititi was raising money to promote his marvellous movie, Boy, in the USA.   He had a goal of raising US$90,000 and exceeded that by over $20,000.  The donations came in from around the world. 

Kickstarter is a site where you can promote a creative work of any sort and give people the chance to invest in it by offering a sum of money, usually anything from $5 upwards.  You become part of the creative process, a kind of mini-producer/entrepreneur as it were.  Your reward can be nothing at all, if you wish, or you can take up one of the rewards that are offered, depending on the size of your donation.   (Check out some of the hilarious but actual 'rewards' Waititi offered in relation to Boy.) 

If the project doesn't reach the target mark, then you don't pay anything.  It's disappointing for the project initiator, but as the site states, it's better to have the full funding you requested than trying to complete the task on partial funding.   Kickstarter has an excellent site with plenty of information about how to go about presenting your project and what you need to know. 

The only bugbear about Kickstarter is that it's based in the US and only connects to US projects.  (Which is why Waititi had to be there to get his funding off the ground.)

Now New Zealand has its only equivalent.  It's called PledgeMe and it subtitles itself: New Zealand's first crowdfunding platform.  Things are small-scale, at this point, with the number of projects under a hundred, but the quality is good, and there are some very interesting projects available.  Some, remarkably, have had no investment at all (To Go Viking in Moesgard - pictured at right - for instance).  Some are doing very well (the Gone Curling movie, for exmaple. It's centred in Naseby).  Often a video accompanies the project's details, which helps to give a good idea of what's up for grabs.   And, as with Kickstarter, people offer rewards to the investors. 

Unfortunately it's probably a bit too late for us to try and get some funding for Grimhilda! - though if anyone wants to help fund it I won't object!

Procrastination

Next time you want to procrastinate over something important, like a deadline, or getting on with that novel, play, script, composition, play this video:



Someone asked, how many post-notes did it take? More to the point, how much patience?

Cleese on Creativity

I started out writing a post on here about the loss of my longstanding geocities site but shifted it to the more appropriate Webitz, which is where I tend to write about Net-related things. You'll also find some info about my new website (replacing geocities) at Jimdo.

Meanwhile, I've watched a John Cleese video on creativity twice now, and find it useful for just rethinking what I know about creativity. It isn't one of his humorous ones, but it does give some sensible advice about how to be creative - even if you're a businessperson, as most of the audience in the video are.

In it he talks about the amazing way our subconscious finds solutions when our conscious mind is short of them, the need for space if you're going to be creative (and space that is itself created, rather than just grabbed), the way in which having to rewrite something you've created (if you've lost the original, say) often gives you a better work than the one you had originally, and the way in which you need freedom from interruption if you're working on anything that requires the kind of multi-tasking that a script involves (particularly in relation to writing in the 'voices' of several characters).



It's about ten minutes long, so put your feet up, stop perusing the latest catalogue of truck accessories, and check out what this man has to say.

Spirituality of Creating and Anne Lamott

John Chandler has written a post about the Spirituality of Creating, which is worth reading. But in it he quotes Anne Lamott (it's from her book on writing, called Bird by Bird, one of the best books on writing around):

You are going to have to give and give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

There is no cosmic importance in getting something published, but there is cosmic importance in learning to be a giver. That's a statement to chew over during the day....

More on David Tammet

Just a little more on David Tammet and some thoughts on his ideas on creativity and autism. He quotes a professor of psychiatry called Michael Fitzgerald at one point. Fitzgerald, who has an autistic child, has a theory that such creative geniuses as Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Mendel 'may all have found their genius through autism.'

This idea comes from the point that autistic people appear to have less inhibitors between certain sections of the brain, inhibitors that appear more regularly in people who aren't geniuses. This lack of 'inhibition' gives the brain synapses in autistic people the means to make connections that would otherwise be forestalled. This would tend to suggest that most creative people have less inhibition between the sections of their brains, but I suspect that this isn't a case proven as yet. Perhaps what might be closer to the truth is the point that people in general are on a continuum from very dull brained people (for whatever reason) to ones whose brains perform fantastically - and creatively.

People are on continuums in all sorts of spheres: look at men and women in terms of their innate masculinity or femininity: the spectrum is enormous from men who are so male that any hint of emotion or softness seems unlikely, to men at the other extreme who are all softness and have almost feminine characteristics. The same applies to women, who range from females who seem to be almost masculine in their outlook on life and their body language to women who are the epitome of softness. These are very loose generalisations, of course.

Perhaps autism isn't quite the illness we've thought, but something closer to a kind of extreme ability to use the brain that most of us don't have. But then, autistic people, like 'ordinary' people range over a wide spectrum too.

Totally random quote

I just had to copy this passage when I read it, because of the delightful use of words...

After an 'unexpected' mid-life crisis, the author notes: Thus cognitively defocussed and emotionally defused for a number of months by the subsequent bit of deep-deep immersion, I realized I would never last the course of direct experience in the netherworld of love. I also recognized from that bit of dysserindipitous soul-spielunking that I should launch studies of physical attraction, such as studies of beautiful women, the ultimate winners (and losers, it turned out) in the great love selection game.

I'm not sure what 'deep-deep immersion' actually is, but it seems apt for the idea.

From the Preface to Creative Interviewing, by Jack D Douglas, published Sage 1985 (pg 13)

Growing Creativity

I'm indebted to Jurgen Wolff for alerting me to this delightful spoof film on creativity.

Chaos and creativity

I was interested in this paragraph from page 53 of The Making of Star Wars, by J W Rinzler, because it very much describes not just the creative process that artists go through, but similar creative processes other people have to work in, including the place where I'm working at the moment.

Industrial Light and Magic at its birth seemed to have the two elements necessary for creativity: a certain amount of chaos and a certain amount of money. After their first three weeks o existence in June, Lucas had already shelled out $87, 921. While those same two elements, in differing quantities, wold combine to create other situations, at the beginning everyone was enthusiastic. 'I thought that at some point, things have got to change – the people who have ideas to do thing should be allowed to do them,' Edlund says. 'It was providential to me that Star Wars came along, because it was the response to that dream. We all got together, in a highly unorthodox way, in this little warehouse out in Van Nuys.'

The Making of Star Wars - J W Rinzler

Madeleine L'Engle

I’ve just read that Madeleine L’Engle has died. When I first discovered her books, more than twenty years ago, I thought she was great, though rather odd. Her theology was definitely odd (and remained so).
Some of her books were absorbing, some I just couldn’t get into. I don’t know what the name of it was now, but one that concerned the Biblical period in history when there were giants in the land and they had possibly been brought into being by intercourse between angelic beings and human women I found way off the wall. There was another one I read recently that used L’Engle’s experiences in Antarctica - again I’ve forgotten the name. It struck me as just badly written.
But form and shape haven’t always been her strong points, I think. She’s almost at her best when she’s meandering, musing, thinking things through on the page, as she does in the book about writing and the creative arts, or the one about the death of her husband. You just have to go where she takes you, whether you agree or disagree with her.
Some of her novels have that feeling about them - even A Wrinkle in Time. It’s as if the story goes its own way, and L’Engle lets it, for better or worse. I’m sure she was a much better writer than that, and that the novels do have a shape and form that we don’t always perceive. But things about them can annoy as well as please.
There’s a very good article on her work still available on the Books and Culture website (ignore the book titles scattered throughout it - they must have been advertising that’s got caught up in the middle of the article).