Writing life

Failure and Love

June 18, 2012 — 3 Comments

About eight years ago I decided to try gardening. There were raspberries growing in the back yard of our Minneapolis city lot, in a fenced-in area with a brick path down the center. (Previous owners of the house had done some quality landscaping.) On one side of the path where no raspberries were growing, I tilled the ground and planted rows of vegetables. The refreshing spring breeze, the earthy fragrance of the soil, my own enthusiasm and hopes of fresh food from my yard combined to skyrocket my mood into bliss.

Well, that season – and a few seasons afterwards – I was the very model of a “three-day monk.” It may have crossed my mind to water my seeds or pull up weeds, but after a few days, I mostly neglected my garden. My enthusiasm was sapped and I had no habits in place to keep me going.

Needless to say, I failed at gardening in those seasons. But I did learn a few things the first season – mainly, that a sunny spot is imperative for a vegetable garden (my spot was not sunny enough), and so is regular watering and weeding.

Each successive spring, fresh enthusiasm compelled me to plan and plant again; and each year, I had a bit more knowledge and experience and willingness to work at gardening. This spring, thanks to my work over the past few years, we have already been eating asparagus, black raspberries, currants, mulberries, rhubarb, peas, greens, and various fresh herbs from our yard, with plenty more to come throughout the growing season.

I tried and failed at something else once. I wanted to learn pottery. How cool to be able to create something beautiful yet functional! I loved the idea. I took one community education pottery class and made some decent pieces, but overall, I didn’t learn well (the teacher even lost patience with me for my failure to understand how to use the wheel!), and while I had loved the idea, I couldn’t really connect with the activity itself.

Like gardening, I could continue working at pottery, gaining knowledge and experience, until I have attained some basic mastery of the field. But taking that one class was enough for me to know that pottery was not for me.

What was the difference? Both gardening and pottery are creative and useful endeavors that must be learned and practiced to be mastered. I failed at both (actually, I failed more at my first attempt at gardening than my first attempt at pottery). And yet, I have kept gardening but never given pottery another serious thought.

The obvious but important answer is that I really want to garden – I really enjoy it – and I don’t enjoy pottery. In other words, for the love of the thing. Each growing season, I get excited to grow things! But I’ve never wanted to try pottery again.

I couldn’t be sure I loved gardening and not pottery until I had tried them both. When pottery was just an idea in my head, I loved it. When it became an experience I was actively learning and practicing, I couldn’t find any love for the actuality of pottery in my life. But although I mostly failed in my early attempts at learning and practicing gardening, I actually enjoyed the activity, and my love for it only grew.

I think these ideas are important as we think about who we are and what we want to do with our lives. We’ve heard that failure is useful for learning, and is actually necessary for ultimate success (I like this “Accidental Creative” podcast on the topic), but probably equally important is a basic drive, a fundamental love of the thing itself.

And I don’t think this love will always feel positive. Failure is real and sometimes devastating. By some measures, I have only ever “failed” as a singer/songwriter. For fifteen years, I’ve been writing songs, performing and recording them, trying to sell albums and get gigs. And for all that, my “harvest” feels a bit like my early gardening attempts – a handful of pea pods, maybe some undergrown spinach leaves, a couple raspberries.

But I keep doing it. Sometimes “the love of the thing” feels more like banging my head against a wall than gleefully chasing something I adore. But it’s love all the same. No matter the outcome, I must sing and I must write, if only just for my own emotional health and enjoyment.

As with my gardening experience, I am finding there is plenty more experience and skill to be gained as a singer/songwriter.

I’m also learning that my initial starry-eyed definitions of “success” have a way of changing as I work hard at any activity. With gardening, I envisioned myself growing and preserving most of my family’s food supply. As I have learned and worked, however, I’ve discovered this isn’t even something I want anymore. I’ve gained a reasonable understanding of my own capabilities as well as my own interest level and drive, and the place I want gardening to have in my life balanced with all my other commitments and activities.

The same is true of songwriting. I no longer hold vague dreams of stardom. The more I work at my craft, the more realistic I have become about my own capabilities and my own interest level. Through purposefully thinking about and working at this activity, I have better clarified a vision for “success” as it would look in my own real life.

In her book 168 Hours, Laura Vanderkam encourages readers to make a “List of 100 Dreams,” sort-of a “bucket list” – things you want to do or try at some point in your life – and then start making plans to accomplish these dreams. She notes that the very act of trying something may be all you need to discover that you really don’t want to go any further with that activity after all. But if you’d never tried, you may always regret (needlessly) having never done it.

So, I’m glad I tried pottery, fine with failing at it, equally fine with discovering I had no real love for it and laying it aside forever. I’m also glad I tried gardening, fine having failed at it, grateful to discover I loved it and was willing to keep putting in the work – so that today, I can enjoy the fruits of my labors!

What have you learned from failure? Does “love of the thing” keep you going in spite of failure, and do you give yourself permission to quit when you discover you have no love for a certain activity?

“How to Live On 24 Hours a Day”

January 26, 2012 — 6 Comments

A couple weeks ago now-retired Minnesota public radio host Gary Eichten interviewed another public radio figure, Garrison Keillor, about his life and his advice for young writers. The entire interview delighted me, but I especially appreciated one word of advice Keillor gave to a caller. The caller identified himself as a freelance writer, and asked Keillor, if you don’t have a 9-5 day job, so that you have the flexibility to work when you want, how do you structure your day?

Keillor’s surprising answer was that he works from 4:00 am to noon on weekdays. He reasoned that early in the morning is the most distraction-free time to work, and typically afternoon is not a productive time of day.

This advice really connected with me, a long-avowed “night person” who now contends with kids and their school nights and – more to the point – their schoolday morning routines. For a period of time a couple years ago, when I felt there was no quiet time to be found in my life, I started getting up at 4:45 some mornings to go for a quick run and then enjoy a leisurely breakfast and watch the sunrise. I felt like I’d come upon buried treasure – I had discovered a secret time period in the day that I could have all to myself!

I also know exactly what Keillor’s talking about when he says the afternoon is a lost cause. Even when I did work a 9-5 job, afternoon was the hardest time to apply mental or creative energy to a task. Yet, for my own writing time, I had recently been attempting to carve out afternoon hours for writing – and mostly, I had failed to keep them.

So, last week I began waking at 5:00 am on weekdays, writing for a good 90 minutes each morning before dealing with household and children. No one calls or stops by the house at that time of day, and since it’s a limited chunk of time, I can muster the discipline to stay out of my email and off of Facebook! I only require a good cup of coffee and a listen to the daily Writer’s Almanac to get me started. Ninety minutes five days a week is only 7 1/2 hours of solid writing time, but then again, it’s 7 1/2 hours of solid writing time that I can count on, and the more I exercise those writing muscles, the stronger they will be for further work hours when I’m ready.

For a short, entertaining, mildly inspirational, highly dated/sexist/classist work on the use of time, I recommend this free e-book I read in about an hour yesterday – How to Live On 24 Hours a Day. I see it’s available in several paperback editions as well.

What sorts of tips and ideas have you found helpful in your own use of time, as it relates to creative work, or any other interest or task you want to pursue beyond the “must-do” activities of your life?

Astronauts and Butterflies

April 16, 2011 — 3 Comments

Today I’m on a writing retreat, working in solitude away from home all day, trying to give plenty of space and time to creativity. I thought that was exactly what I had accomplished when in the process of working on a new song, I heard this phrase, “astronauts and butterflies,” in my head.

Fantastic! Lots of likeness and mash-up difference in that little gem! And the rhythm is nice, and it’s alphabetized – this could go all sorts of ways.

Just out of curiosity, I googled the phrase. Oh, here it is already. Nice work, Transit Poetry. Really. Love that creative image, “astronauts and butterflies.”

Globalization and Google. Such powerful forces. Twenty years ago I would probably never have come across a German band who conjured this phrase not long before I did. We could have both written a song with the same central phrase and been blissfully ignorant of one another. But now, with the power and ease of the world-wide-web, I almost feel it is my artistic duty to check these things before I move on with them.

Does it drive me to write better, more original things? I don’t know. I could certainly write my own “astronauts and butterflies” song and make it original. But now that I’ve heard this other song, I’ve lost a bit of the “eureka!” moment when I first heard the phrase in my own head.

Why did I hear the phrase in my head in the first place?

I heard David Wilcox at a house concert last year, and I identified with his discussion of the songwriting process. He said sometimes a phrase will come to him and strike him as intriguing, and he doesn’t know what it’s about, but he assumes it comes from the future, from the song that will be when he is finished writing it. He follows that phrase, gives it a place in the song, lets it inform his work as he continues writing that song.

That’s how it often works for me. But in this case, I am mystified. I have no heart to go on writing a song about astronauts and butterflies, when a fine one has already been written.

Maybe I came across this song once without paying attention to it, but my subconscious picked it up. Or maybe the sound waves or psychic waves from Transit Poetry’s creation of this song traveled to me in some inexplicable way.

These things happen often enough, though. A famous example is that of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace arriving independently of one another at a theory of biological evolution by natural selection. Everyday examples are commonplace. A friend once saw peanut butter sold for baking use in measured, easily-cut sticks like margarine at the grocery store and exclaimed, “hey, that was my idea!”

My explanation is that no person is an island. Culture, ideas, language, dreams, interactions, experiences, and many more factors influence our minds and our creative processes. Sometimes we think alike, imagine the same thing. Google has just made it easier for us to discover these times.

I think verse 9 of Ecclesiastes chapter 1 is a nice sum-up:
“What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.”

Now, with that encouragement, back to songwriting I go!

On Hearing of Shirley’s Death

January 27, 2011 — 2 Comments

Old people in Rhode Island are dying. This matters to me because I knew them once, and once they knew me. But only for a time. I moved to Rhode Island when I was nearly five years old, and moved away when I was not as nearly six. I can still see the sun-drenched wood in the sanctuary of the village church where my dad pastored. I can smell it too – it is living and aged and clean, and conscientiously polished.

Robin’s mother Carol died a few years ago. Carol had soft brown eyes and was always kind to me. Her fisherman husband, Wayne, has phoned my parents every few years since we moved away thirty years ago. Last time Wayne called, when my dad asked, “how are you?” Wayne said simply, “Carol died.” He explained more, but that was beside the point. Carol died, and that’s how Wayne is. All your life together, you know it’s coming, you just don’t know which one of you will be first. Then you get a hint or two – a sickness that lingers, an irreversible fading – and now you know it’s coming, you know she will be first, but you can’t pinpoint the day or the hour. You eat together (if she can eat), you sleep (lightly), you go about your business the best you can, and then one day, one hour, she dies. And that is how you are, when people ask.

Last week Sharon’s mother Shirley died. After all these years, her laugh is still stored in my memory. So is her face, open and sturdy, with an elegant yet practical pile of curls atop her head. I maybe knew this as a child and forgot, but now, as I remember Shirley, I note a deep likeness with Wayne, and upon asking my parents, confirm that they were siblings.

Carol and Shirley knew me for a few months of my childhood. I wonder what they remembered about me? And where do those memories go when they die?

When we grieve the death of someone we knew, however much or little we knew them, are we partially grieving the death of our own footprints in that life? I imagine I’ll be experiencing this more in these years ahead, as I lose those with whom I’ve formed deeper bonds – grandparents already, someday parents, maybe lover, surely friends. Will I feel the breadth of my life, my being known in the world, shrink? Will I look back and see my trail overgrown and forgotten?

Of course, that’s why we write. We surely can’t rely on people to keep our memories alive. They simply won’t stick around. So we write or tell our stories in other ways, and pass them on to our children and their children – and we hope that in some way who we were and what we did will really mean something after all.

Robin and Wayne, and Shirley’s family John and Sharon, Duane, Ariane and J.B., and the others I don’t know who belong to them too, are grieving far more than any vague loss of self. I know this, and I honor their tears and heartache.

But I won’t call my thimblefuls of grief at the losses of Carol and Shirley narcissistic, though at face value that’s just what they seem. A tiny something of me stayed with each of those women, and even as they and those little memories have now died, so too the tiny memories I have of them live on in me. Of course I’ll die too, but I find this giving and taking, living and dying, between people widely separated by age and geography, who physically interacted for only a few months of a long lifetime, to be a talisman of hope on my journey.