On further thought...

Where, OMG, you're all just so inspiring.

this astronaut is inspired

I usually try to stick with a bi-weekly¹ schedule for these newsletters, but I’m barging in here a little early with a follow-up to last week’s inspiration topic. I went into that from a different direction than I often begin writing issues of Random Orbit. Usually, I feel like I want to write about something I know. The challenge then is to take that knowledge and get it down in a way that is clear, concise, and makes sense. It’s not usually to challenge my own take on whatever the subject is. For example, the four pieces I wrote about my collage practice. I know how and why I make collage, and while sometimes I might find some new metaphor or meaning in defining that practice and writing about it, generally the idea is that here is this thing, and, here, let me tell you about it.

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Writing about inspiration was different. In the podcast interview I did, the interviewer, Giuseppe, brought up inspiration and defined it in a way that sort of made sense, but also didn’t feel right to me. He connected it to procrastination and asserted that, in this light, one doesn’t need inspiration to be creative. I stewed on that for a few days and used this newsletter to try and figure out what about it felt off, and why. I found some things that made sense to me and answered some of my questions, mostly around the idea of the work. What keyed this was the idea that inspiration, the bad inspiration that according to Giuseppe, an artist cannot begin working without, had to be found. That one needed to go to a place, like an art museum, i.e. procrastinate, and get it. This was what felt off in my conversation with Giuseppe, and what I kept as the center of my ideas. I had notes about other ideas around inspiration, but as I like to keep this newsletter at 1500-1800 words, I more or less jettisoned these things that didn’t work into my explorations. Basically, I ignored them because they didn’t fit my narrative that the work (*cough cough*) will set you free. And not a day after posting that issue, I knew that might have been a mistake.

As I might have hinted at in the previous issue here, I don’t give inspiration a lot of thought. If anything, I kind of take it for granted. I don’t generate much sympathy for someone who complains about not having any ideas, or having writer's block. In exploring this, the silent exploring before I started writing, I realized that I work hard, behind the scenes, at “having inspiration.” A nice way to put this in my newsletter was connecting it to curiosity. If you are curious about the world around you, about the people and places and events and colors, inspiration will come, no matter your chosen field of creativity or medium, and you don’t have to do anything or go anywhere special to get it.

I believe this. If you are a composer, the rhythms and sounds in one’s daily life present themselves as source material. If you write stories, ideas sit next to you on the bus. If you draw pictures, look at that tree there and how the branches are all twisted and turned, isn’t that just amazing? And if you lack this curiosity? Well, too bad for you. Go back to playing Candy Crush or whatever it is you do with your time. If art and creativity can actually be taught, if it’s not reliant on some mysterious talent that one is or isn’t born with, then curiosity is a place from which this can happen, I think.

Not feeling inspired? You don’t need to go to an art museum. You need to get curious.

I focused on this idea of the work last week. The central focus being that one can’t just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Instead, one has to work at it. One has to begin making a thing to understand what it is one is making. It’s in pushing these pieces around, in a painting, in a drawing, in a story, on a piano, that The Ideas, the good ideas, show themselves. This “work” implies sitting at a typewriter or a drawing table or with a musical instrument, and that might be where I kind of got too narrow, as it were.

This narrow idea of the work was pointed out, indirectly, by several comments in last week’s newsletter.

Cecil Touchon

wrote that there are several ways to incorporate inspiration, and working is merely one of them. He mentions solving specific problems as a way to think of inspiration and uses walking through a museum as a way to approach that. How did this artist deal with that problem, and will that approach work for me? He’s right. Inspiration isn’t just some wild idea slammed into your brain out of thin air. It’s often just finding a way to solve something.

Emily Charlotte Powell

also reminds us that inspiration isn’t just through the work, as I describe it. It comes at funny and unexpected times as well. While folding laundry. While walking dogs, or taking a shower. And like Cecil, she’s 100% correct. The second of my insect stories appeared to me, nearly fully formed, while I was bicycling in the rain with some friends one day last Spring. Literally, it wasn't there one moment, then I turned a corner on my bike, and there it was. Was I sitting at the laptop or with a notebook? Not at all!²

Kimberly Gee

wrote that she doesn’t “get inspiration.” Rather, inspiration gets her. I think that this is something like what Emily was saying, and what leads to my expanding my view on it in general. If we are open and interested, and if we, as artists, are always “working,” not in the sitting-at-the-desk definition but the always-curious definition, then we are open to recognizing it when it appears. Whether it’s behind the towels in the laundry bin, or whether it’s on some country road in the rain, or whether it’s hanging on a wall in a gallery.

And

Barbara Schildkrout

, a neuropsychiatrist who writes about this sort of thing here on Substack, writes, “All that time your brain is working on the problem, whatever that ‘problem’ might be. And at some point, it spits out ‘the answer’ — the idea for a book cover, the solution to a math problem, the ideal come-back for your dialogue.” There it is! Science!

Thanks for the insight on this, and for caring enough to leave comments.

And, since we’re revisiting old topics today, I’d like to write a short update on my 500-words exercise. Around the time I wrote that issue of Random Orbit, I was beginning work on a third insect story, which is about a beetle musician. Over a few days, I really struggled with the first chapter of this story, where we’re introduced to our beetle and the struggles that lead him to get booted from his ensemble, with whom he has played for a long, long time, and inspiring/forcing him to set out into the world and find a new direction.

The worst sort of writing for me is when I know a chapter or a paragraph, whatever I am struggling with, has the potential to be something really good, really clever. But for whatever reason I am lacking the patience or attention (or maybe the talent) to give it what it needs. I can see it there, I can imagine it, but I can’t put it together. It’s sloppy and confusing and full of weeds, and I can’t find a way out of it. I think of the inventive writers I read, and I know that they could do this. They could pull it off so effortlessly, probably without a second draft. But not me. I need to walk away from it.

In the meantime, while I didn’t do any writing on this piece, I did do some work. I wrote to an old high school friend Lisa, who is a flautist in Boston, and I asked her questions. I explained some of the things I was trying to do and some of the problems. One of these problems was that I was using the music that the beetle ensemble was playing as the structure for the chapter. As the music plays, we follow along, and our beetle also follows along. But I am no composer, and while one might think that the music being imaginary would allow me to do whatever I want with it that fits the story, it made the whole thing feel like a blob with no structure.

As she read this ridiculously long email I’d sent her, Lisa realized that the imaginary piece I was writing about really existed, and excitedly emailed me to tell me about Franz Schubert’s Piano Quintet in A Major, affectionately called The Trout Quintet. Specifically, she wanted me to listen to the fourth movement.

I’ve been listening to this fourth movement for two weeks now, and understanding the ins and the outs and the ups and downs of this piece, and it’s provided the scaffolding on which my story, or at least this chapter, can hang. I woke up this morning with a new opening paragraph in my brain (there it is, that inspiration, floating around in the dark, not at the notebook or in the word processor!) and managed about 750 words. Following my own advice, I wrote until it felt like it was right, then I started a new sentence and before finishing it, I shut it all down, giving me an easy place to begin tomorrow.

The work, and some curiosity, and some sleep, and a friend who happens to be an expert at whatever it is you’re writing about, will set you free.

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I’ve been drawing a lot of astronauts these last few weeks. I’ve started the nascent early parts of a new project about an astronaut, and as I wrote last summer, figuring out how my characters look helps me write them. Some of the astronauts I’ve drawn have been in actual pen-and-ink on actual paper, and others have been in Procreate on the iPad. I’m pretty agnostic about my materials and methods. Of the last four books I’ve illustrated, two were drawn 100% digitally, and two were 100% with traditional supplies. It comes down to what is giving me what I want at the time. In this case, pen and ink gives me the process that I want, and the iPad gives me the control. So I’m stuck. The astronaut at the top of this newsletter was drawn very, very small, on very nice paper, in ink. Then it was scanned and edited in Procreate. It’s my favorite so far. Here are some more. You can probably figure out what is what. (PS: all of my drawings eventually go digital via scanning and editing — it’s how it starts which is what makes it what it is.)

three of these were drawn digitally, and three were drawn with a pen on paper. All were colored digitally.

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Speaking of books, the next issue of Random Orbit will be all about a new book, and halloween. Can’t wait!

1. Is it bi-weekly or semi-weekly? Does anyone know the difference? I don’t feel like googling right now.

2. But I’m glad I had my notebook with me — I scribbled it all down an hour later, at lunch at a pub.