Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Write, dammit!

Posted on by Dale

Tomorrow is the first day of National Novel Writing Month, aka NaNoWriMo. As an example of mass hysteria, it’s pretty hard to beat. You simply go to the website, register as an offender, and then strive to churn out 50,000 words in 30 days. Many people do this. I know a couple.

However, I am not one of them. I often wish I were, which I know is insane, but I have this secret desire to have written a novel. Notice that I did not say that I hanker actually to write a novel; I just would like to have done it.

I did it once, of course. Back in the Adolescent Lit course we all had to take, we were given a choice of either a) reading and reviewing 70 young adult novels, or b) writing one. Ptttt, I said, if S. E. Hinton can do it, I can do it.

So I did it. Every Sunday morning at church, during the sermon, I’d outline the next chapter, then write it during the week. I think it ended up being fifteen chapters (not counting the “suppressed chapter 13”) and followed the fortunes of some teen members of a community theatre. Go figure.

I still can’t tell whether it’s any good, of course. The kids at ECHS I let read it (not all involved in the theatre, thank you) enjoyed it and clamored for more. The one agent I sent sample chapters off too several years ago returned it with a snippy note saying it wasn’t “creative enough,” whatever that means.

So why not do it again? I had started a sequel. The first one was Twelfth Night, New Day; it balanced the main characters’ emotional lives against the lunacy in Shakespeare’s play. The next one was called I Love You in Earnest, and of course our gang was doing Oscar’s masterpiece. I had decided to see if I could write a teen novel using a quasi-Trollopian discursive style (this was the early 1980s; it’s been done since), and the focus was going to be on a newcomer who was openly gay and how this raised the whole question of who is/who isn’t. You can see how that would dovetail into the whole Wilde/Earnest thing.

I never finished it. Either I lost steam, lost interest, got too busy at the theatre/GHP/whatever. I seem to remember not being able to figure out what would drive the plot; I had used a false alarm over sex in the first one and didn’t want to repeat that gambit. I had some vague idea of our newcomer’s performing an act of perfidy, but I couldn’t pin that down. What on earth could he do that would deserve the name? I didn’t want to involve his sexuality; that was a separate theme.

Anyway, here we are at NaNoWriMo and I envy those people who are going to crank out 1700 words a day. So what’s stopping me from becoming one of them?

The main reason is time, naturally. I have to crank out a dozen more songs before Christmas for Moonlight, and I’m getting nowhere fast on that project. Adding another daily task would be madness. Of course, part of me suspects that I might find my creativity charged by the daily task. Stimulating the brain to knock out the 1700 words every day might carry over to writing of lyrics and/or music. It might.

I could even make it about a guy writing a musical. I could.

Another very real reason, however, is that I don’t really have anything to write about. I know, I could just start writing. No one really writes a novel in November. They just write 50,000 words, which I suppose they wrestle into shape in the months between this November and the next.

But I really don’t have anything to write about, not like the way I have things to compose about. I have ideas and urges for the symphony, for Maila’s trio, for Moonlight, that I just don’t have for characters, plot, theme, and dialog.

There’s also the problem, and it’s personal, that any thing that I write about that looks even half like my life, and what else would I write about other than schools and theatres without having to go research the whole thing, raises immediate suspicions about just how much my characters are me. I’m thinking of our author Z now.

Finally, there’s the problem that I am not really an acute observer of humans, not even myself. In War & Peace, young Nikolai Rostov is finally about to see action in battle. He’s had a run-in with a superior over another superior who stole from his friend Denisov, and sitting on his horse waiting for something to begin, he starts to fret about this superior’s being so near to him and yet ignoring him. Within one paragraph, his mind concocts four different reasons for the man’s behavior. That’s the kind of incisive understanding of how humans work with which Tolstoy fills 1200+ pages and I can’t even imagine.

So, anyone else going to do it?

I Would Never

Posted on by Dale

I worked on “I Would Never,” Groucho/Thurgood’s Act II novelty song, in which he sings (for seven verses and choruses) how he would never disparage a lady just because she had some hysterically funny thing wrong with her. I wrote the music for the verse, then started patching it together.

It still lacks an intro, in which he’ll introduce the concept (referring to Lydia and Egyptian Ella in the process), and it lacks the end, in which he lets loose with a long catalog of names. I’m also going to work in a Gilbert and Sullivan-esque chorus for him.

Here’s the piano score, and here’s the mp3. This is a long song.

The question on the floor

Posted on by Dale

The question we failed to answer at last night’s colloquium: “Z*/Tolstoy: Do we have a choice?” continues to bug me.

I hope everyone felt that the topic was asking not only the flippant surface question, “What should we choose to read?” but also challenging us as creators: “Do we have control over our own creative output?”

This is a question with some girth. Clearly, the works of Z and Tolstoy are at opposite ends of the scale, and without a doubt our works are somewhere in between. It would hard indeed to create something beyond Z’s work, even deliberately; that is his special gift. But where do our works fall and how much control do we have over that?

I don’t think I’m talking here about posterity’s evaluation of our works. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there is at base a level of quality that I will dare to call objective. In other words, I think we can posit that each work has a base line of quality from which posterity will not stray very far in its assessment.

Our two goalposts can illustrate that point. No one is ever going to proclaim Z’s two novels as anything other than what they are, which is one human being’s noble attempt to fulfill that inborn urge to create. Likewise, Tolstoy’s War & Peace is not likely to fall very far from its current heavyweight status. The fact that there cannot be any serious argument about placing these works at opposite ends of any scale you want to devise is further evidence for my argument.

My not so secret fear then is that the stuff I produce will fall into Z’s range. I know the songs I’m writing for Moonlight, for example, are not really going to be that bad, but I am afraid that they will be at best insipid and at worst banal. And I am wounded by the knowledge that they will never approach the other end of the scale, either.

And here’s our question again: Do we have a choice? I know enough to keep my stuff from being bad, but is my inability to create a work of genius dependent on my knowledge? Was Tolstoy’s work a direct result of his artistic control, or is there something else going on?

This is getting into Tolstoy’s “man of destiny” territory, and it would be ironic indeed if his creative output is as great as it is simply because of the dictates of his own will. For those of us stranded below, it makes more sense, and is certainly more comforting to think, that there was some happenstance, some inborn-genius-thing that he could not control, and which we do not possess, that made War & Peace the staggering work of art that it is.

So, do we have a choice?

We’ve mentioned before the idea that a creative work is “abandoned not completed,” and nowhere is this more true than in the last five or six chapters of Z’s latest novel. There were misspellings, typos, repeated paragraphs/sentences, and an overall sloppiness that was actually distracting instead of just being a part of the delightful mise en scene. I don’t understand that. It cannot have been the case that his publishers were breathing down his neck like J. K. Rowling’s were for Goblet of Fire, causing her to slip up in the crucial graveyard duel scene. I cannot imagine that he was being rushed in any way to complete the thing.

At any rate, I finally put my finger on what is wrong with much of the dialog in this book. Almost all of it consists of the characters stating what they’re doing, have done, or are going to do. It is pretty much the way 8-11-year-olds play: “Come on, we have to fight the Balrog.” “You can’t defeat us, Balrog, we have Gandalf on our side.” “Oh no, Gandalf has joined forces with the Balrog.” “We have to run away.”

The rest of the dialog is made up of flat descriptions of the characters’ emotional status: “I’m so happy/scared/worried/in love.” Or agreements: “You are so right.”

It’s entertaining something awful.

—-

*Names changed to shelter the innocent

Nostalgia for the Motherland

Posted on by Dale

In Chapter 6 of Part II (we’re talking War & Peace here), we see Kutuzov and the Russian army falling back towards Vienna. (Kutuzov does a lot of falling back in this novel.) It’s October 23 (!), and the army is crossing the Enns River at Enns.

The day was warm, autumnal, and rainy. The vast prospect that opened out from the height where the Russian batteries stood, defending the bridge, was now suddenly covered by a muslin curtain of slanting rain, then suddenly widened out, and in the sunlight objects became visible and clear in the distance, as if freshly varnished. At one’s feet one could see the little town with its white houses and red roofs, the cathedral, and the bridge, on both sides of which streamed crowding masses of Russian troops. At the bend of the Danube one could see boats and an island, and a castle with a park, surrounded by the waters of the Enns falling into the Danube; one could see the left bank of the Danube, rocky and covered with pine forest, with a mysterious distance of green treetops and bluish gorges. One could see the towers of a convent looming up from the pine forest with its wild and untouched look…

This is, of course, the southernmost corner of Hofvonstein.

It was almost exactly at this time that Carl IV died under the usual Hofvonsteinian circumstances. Evidence points to Queen Mother Therese, Carl’s stepmother and lover, as being somehow responsible. His half-brother Georg took the throne as Georg II.

This is a rather obscure portion of our nation’s history, but perhaps my readers will remember Georg II’s son, Maximilian II. It was Maximilian’s assassination in 1879 that set off his son Leopold III’s liberal reformist tendencies, as well as his grandson Maximilian’s reactionary ones, culminating in that awful night in Vienna, December 31, 1899.

The castle in the Enns, in fact, was property of Karl Magnus von Ludwighof, Leopold’s prime minister and eventually king himself.

I know that there are still some who thrill at hearing this.

A little work

Posted on by Dale

I got a tiny little bit done this evening on Moonlight, just a couple of lyrics and some accompaniment for “Dream Land.” I’m in one of those phases where nothing’s coming and I don’t have the focus to make it happen.

In other news, I am extremely disappointed that David Wilson’s new play, John Wallace and the Vampires, is not being performed this Friday night after all. It’s only being performed on Saturday night, and I have a social engagement for then. Dang it.

On the other hand, I now own autographed copies of Curse of the Vampire and Wrath of the Vampire. I went to Scott’s Bookstore this afternoon and had the author all to myself. We chatted about Mrs. Marjorie Hatchett, our drama teacher in high school and a tremendous inspiration to us all, albeit clearly in different ways. David was ebullient and chatted freely about the issues the Grantville Playmakers have been encountering in their creative journey. Shame on the Grantville City Council! And shame on those no-loads who commit to a production with the GPers and then back out at the last minute. I cannot imagine such shoddy behavior.

I have read the first page or two of Wrath of the Vampire, and all I will say is that this roman à clef is living up to its predecessor right off the bat. It is everything you think it might be.

My reading of Tolstoy may be interrupted for a while.

Dream Land

Posted on by Dale

Lest you think that all I’m doing these days is summarizing Proust Tolstoy, I did work last night. I plugged my lyrics for “Dream Land” into a simple little schottische, which will at least give me something to work against.

It’s funny that Jeff should proffer a verse about tooling around in a car, since one of the skeletal verses in my notebook is exactly that. He missed one of the subtleties of my rhyme scheme, which is OK since I personally find it difficult to understand lyrics on the page in terms of what music lies underneath them, unless they’re totally strophic.

So far, I’m not overly happy with these songs. They’re just filler, which I know is all they are anyway, but I’d like them to be a little better quality than just styrofoam pellets. The melodies are not resounding with me yet. I will persevere.

Some work

Posted on by Dale

Spent some time getting Day in the Moonlight back in my head, and then I buckled down to write something, anything.

I played with a melody that I thought might work better for the opening of “Sheer Poetry,” but I decided to stick with the old one.

Then I worked on a bridge passage for “Sheer Poetry,” but that ended up not fitting that song, so I turned my attention to the other projected numbers. The phrase I had written sounded like a ballad, but at the moment there don’t seem be any ballads in the lineup. This is a serious flaw that Mike needs to fix ASAP, I’m tellin’ ya.

At any rate, I ended up writing the lyrics for a couple of verses for what used to be called “We’ll Run Away” but is now entitled “Dream Land.” The gist of it is that when Garrison and Elizabeth elope, their married life is going to be absolutely perfect… in Dream Land.

GARRISON:
In Dream Land I will wake you up
with a cup
of coffee or two
Then I’ll head off to my den to write
a great new play for you to star in

ELIZABETH:
In Dream Land I will keep the house
as a spouse
is delighted to do
Then I’ll head off to learn my lines
in that great new play by you I star in

CHORUS:
Life’s good
as it should be,
Everything’s peaches and cream,
xxx
xxx in
Dream Land.

Now off to read my Tolstoy. B&N still doesn’t have the new translation. They have fourteen copies “on order.” Feh.

Another birthday

Posted on by Dale

It’s dear Oscar’s birthday! One feels the need for champagne (or Champagne, as the NYT would have it.) Perhaps later, when I get home from school. The stuff they stock at the Crossing is so appallingly cheap.

Favorite quote time:

“I think it shows an extremely low moral standard to be so easily shocked.”

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”