Date posted: September 22, 2008 - Monday
Title: Life, the Universe and Everything (with apologies to Douglas Adams)
Current mood: angsty
As Monty Python has said … "And now for something completely different."
A lot of my blogs turn into rants about things that upset me (read piss me off) and that seem to be stupidity intruding into a world that desperately needs sanity. This one may be a bit vaguer, but it talks about things I have pondered for most of my life. Feel free to move on if you get bored with my ramblings here.
I was watching a film on STARZ tonight. It was a documentary titled "My Kid Could Paint That." It was about a four year old girl (Marla Olmstead) who painted abstract art and had become famous; and fairly rich.
She became so well known that 60 Minutes did a piece on her. The piece, in the end, turned into a smear of the little girl's parents, an accusation her father was actually doing the paintings himself or at least "finishing" the paintings for her and an indictment of modern art in total. As I was watching the documentary I think I vaguely remember seeing the original broadcast of 60 Minutes.
The documentary was a little more balanced, but in the end you got the point the filmmaker also didn't believe the little girl had painted the canvases herself. But then he made his money off the film so what did it matter to him?
OK, so much for the background. What all of this stirred up in me are questions about art, 'fame', the creative process, critics and where I fit into all of it.
I have been writing since I was about 12; or so my fading memory tells me. I didn't really start to think about fiction in a major way until I reached high school. Even then it was just something I played with and not what I said I wanted to do. (For the curious that was be a chemistry teacher.)
It was in high school I first got started in journalism and actually in fiction as well through an English course. After high school I kept up with the journalism in courses, but pursued the path that would lead me to chemistry teaching. But when I left junior college I abandoned chemistry and went into journalism as a career course. It was also here where I decided to put more time into fiction writing. (OK, another cliché, the newspaper reporter with the unfinished novel in the bottom desk drawer.) But it was the writing courses that kept pulling on me and sparking dreams of doing something more than writing about city council meetings, school board meetings and the latest disaster to strike.
I graduated with a degree in journalism and a minor in English. And I was drafted within months of graduation and spent the next two years in the Army.
After that two-year interruption I returned to college to attend graduate school. I was pursuing a degree in Mass Communication (which got sidetracked into television and film) and taking English courses for my own pleasure. Most of those English courses involved writing.
I had met a teacher as an undergraduate that I really appreciated for her approach to teaching writing; Elizabeth Eileen "Betty" Chater. And I started taking every course she offered. I even exhausted the number of "special study" courses I could take working with Betty on my writing.
It was a writing assignment in one of Betty's classes that led to my first sale. ("Ageism" in Analog magazine July 1975 http://www.amazon.com/Analog-Science-Fiction-Fact-July/dp/B001A9PPPU) And another of the stories I started under Betty's tutelage which was resurrected and led to my second sale ten years later. ("Trading Run" in Analog magazine June 1985 http://www.shoporium.com/shops/SciFiBuys/view_item.php3?id=171063)
During that time of working with Betty I also started my journal. Betty liked to talk about BC writing (before coffee). She talked about the value of writing when you first woke up, before you did anything else because the mind was freer then before the plan for the day or the worries of your life had a chance to frame your outlook on things. It was also a kind of pun involving her own initials; BC -- Betty Chater.
I picked a wire bound 5" by 8" green paper notebook as my vehicle. I bought them by the handful every time I could afford them in the student bookstore. Eventually I had several boxes of them stored away so I would have a source to keep me going.
Over the years I was more faithful to the journal (having been a very poor contributor to it in the last couple of decades) I amassed some 80 notebooks that I had bound into red covers. They cover the years between 1973 and about somewhere in the 1980's where I became less reliable about my journal entries.
I still make sporadic entries in the journal every time I make another abortive attempt to get serious about my writing. There is a plastic bag I have readily at hand with years worth of scribbled notes I intended to enter into the journal; story ideas, title ideas, situations, musings about circumstances all manner of little tidbits that I intended to expand upon in the pages of the journal.
And where is all this leading you ask?
Over the years I have questioned all aspects of writing and the creative process. I had little confidence in my own abilities for a number of years. It was Betty's encouragement that brought out something in me that was finally worthy of publication. Before that when I got praise from an instructor I always thought I was pulling the wool over someone's eyes. I couldn't believe it was really any good and figured I was somehow fooling those who liked my work.
The publication helped me believe a little. At least enough I have been longing for a repeat of that success for a long time.
But along with the longing there is the fear. Fear that it was all a fluke. Fear that I had done the best I could a long time ago and there is nothing left now that I can write that anyone would want to read -- or pay me for.
This little documentary has revived a lot of the questions I have had over time. What is the nature of creativity? Who makes the 'rules' that say what is good and what is not? Are there really any objective standards that define what is good writing, or great writing?
And in the end, do I have any of the talents to actually meet the standards of being good -- or even great?
I have been my own worst critic over time. Things I put down on paper years ago seem so silly to me later. Other things I wrote a long time ago just scare the hell out of me when I read them again today. There are sparks there and a depth of thought I wonder if I can ever reach again.
And one of the things I read online when I was looking for more information on Marla Olmstead also struck me. "Can a work of art transcend the intentions of its maker?"
Yes, I think it can. My evidence for this is anecdotal, but it is there. I found it in a comment made about something I wrote one time. The person talked about what they interpreted from what I wrote. I had not intended to relay the thought this reader gained, but I realized it was there even so. It was not something I
