Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Easy.

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been reading The Fire Starter Sessions, by Danielle LaPorte, as one of the potential competitors for Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.  It’s not really a competitor, but it is a very good “get off your butt and do what you love” kind of guide, so I’ve been reading it and journalling answers to the worksheet questions at the end of each chapter.

The worksheet for this last chapter, “The metrics of ease,” though, has me flummoxed.  Here are the questions:

  • What exactly needs to get done in your life and livelihood?
  • What’s your competency level for each activity?
  • Which of those activities actually makes you feel strengthened?
  • Which of those activities doesn’t really light your fire?
  • What can you do to develop these strengths and interests?
  • What three actions will you take this week to condition and nourish your true strengths?
  • What three actions will you take this week to decrease your time spent on activities that drag you down and don’t feed your true strengths?

Well.

I’m kind of reading this book to get a grip on how much I really want to be some kind of workshop leader/TED Talk sort of thing, and so this chapter stopped me cold.

What exactly needs to get done in my life and livelihood?  Empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, clean the litter box, cook some meals.  Honestly, that’s about it.  The rest of it—blogging, composing, writing, volunteering, Camping with the Hippies™—is completely optional.  If I stopped tomorrow,1 it would not make a sound in the forest.2

So then the rest of the questions become moot, don’t they?  Do they?  Should I forget that I literally have no obligations other than to wear pants and not smell in public and pretend that she’s asking about what I wish I were doing? (Or do I?)

Understand that I am not indulging in self-pity.  I am honestly at a loss as to how I should answer that first question in terms of planning my third career.

More work is required.

—————

1 I am not stopping tomorrow.

2 For those who are just joining us, I am retired, in the sense of “Governor Nathan Deal moved the Governor’s Honors Program from the Department of Education where it had been for literally 50 years to his own Office of Student Achievement and didn’t care to move the director of the program with it.”

Mousie Music

Posted on by Dale

The other day, the incomparable Berkely Breathed put up on his Facebook page the following strip:

His apology is directed to the equally incomparable B. Kliban:

This reminded me that years and years and years ago—the heyday of Kliban’s cat comics—a melody popped into my head for these lyrics.  It’s nothing like the cartoon would suggest, but it was catchy and enjoyed a certain vogue amongst the young people who hung about at the theatre in those days.

It has occurred to me that I ought to drag it out (of my head—it’s never been written down that I remember) and see if it would work for my “hero’s theme” for my Unidentified Music Project.  It’s certainly catchier than any of my ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS in the linked blogpost.  The trick will be to see how flexible it is for variations.  More work, as we say, is required.

Here:

“Love to Eat Them Mousies” | pdf |

P.S. To the estate of B. Kliban: I have no intention of using these lyrics in any way, so unsharpen your pencils and put your cease & desist letters away.  Your copyright is not threatened, at least no more than the intertubes has already threatened it.

About those goals…

Posted on by Dale

I’m using a piece of software called Scrivener to write Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and a very good piece of software it is, too.

One of the many tools it offers is the ability to project word count goals and to see how you’re doing in the current session.  If you tie your session goals to your putative finish date, it will tell you how many words you need to rip out in that session in order to stay on track.

Because of one Camping With the Hippies™ or another, I’ve been a bit slack in writing:

::sigh::

7,500 words for today in order to “finish” by tomorrow. That’s okay.  I have to reset my total word count goal upwards anyway: each chapter is working out to be around 2,000 words, and that’s before I go back and work in charming illustrative anecdotes from all the Lichtenbergians.

N.B.: I could too do it, if I wanted to.  So there.

 

Lichtenbergianism: Pitch perfect

Posted on by Dale

Today in our continuing book study of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [EGGYBP], we look at the pitch.

There are two kind of pitches: 1) the elevator pitch, which is over by the time the elevator gets to the next floor, and 2) your long-form pitch. [p.70]

I keep trying to come up with a snappy elevator pitch:

  • “Art & Fear only funny”?
  • “How to Write a Novel in 30 Days for slackers”?
  • “Twilight, but well-written. And no vampires”?

Perhaps, as the authors1 also suggest, my subtitle is the elevator pitch: “procrastination as a creative strategy, or how I stopped worrying  and learned to love doing it wrong.”

“The Mouse Whose Name Is Time,” by Robert Francis—click to read the whole amazing poem

The long-form pitch is no less simple.  It’s supposed to be a paragraph or two, but still under a minute.

How about:

In 2007 a small group of creative amateurs founded a society dedicated to celebrating their procrastination and found, to their amazement, that their productivity improved. Now they share the secret of their success with nine “precepts,” ways to re-organize your thinking about how you create and why.  Sometimes counter-intuitive and usually amusing, their strategies distill some of the most obvious secrets of the creative process to free you from your own mindblocks.

Hm.  How about:

Sure, you can buy a book to help you cure your procrastination, but why would you? Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy frees you from the worry and the guilt—and shows you how to use your bad habits to become more productive in your creative life.  No matter whether you’re a writer, an artist, a composer, a programmer, a gardener, or any other creative type, the Nine Precepts of Lichtenbergianism will give you ways to rethink your creative habits and give yourself permission to succeed—by failing!

That’s better, and more in sync with the tone of the book.

Tomorrow is better!  That’s the motto of the Lichtenbergian Society, a group of creative men who bonded over their shared tendency to procrastinate and found that they became more productive because of it. Now Lichtenbergian chair Dale Lyles shows you how you, too, can stop worrying about your bad habits and learn to love your own creative process.  Whether you’re a frustrated writer, artist, composer, gardener, or programmer, you’ll find new ways to think about how you create and why, from Task Avoidance to Successive Approximation to Ritual to Abandonment—if you give yourself permission to fail, you give yourself permission to create.  It’s that simple!

One more:

Are you a creative genius?  No, only Mozart is a creative genius, and you are not him.  But you are creative—yes, you are, admit it—and you want to overcome your fears and your bad habits so that you can write that novel/paint that painting/compose that song/program that app.  Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy gives you nine Precepts, ways to restructure your thinking about how you create and why so that you can just get to work and create the work of your dreams. But not today.  Tomorrow is better.

And I’m spent.

—————

1 I keep saying “the authors” because it’s easier than typing out their names: Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry.

Lichtenbergianism: Titles? We don’t need no steenkin’ titles.

Posted on by Dale

From The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [EGGYBP]:

A common mistake authors make is choosing a title that has a particular meaning to them but that no one else understands.

Well.

I mean to say.  Lichtenbergianism.  What could go wrong?

I will admit to having been told already that the title sucks and won’t survive an agent/editor/publisher.  I will resist while I can, of course, because the whole core of the book is how the Lichtenbergians became more productive through the use of the Nine Precepts (although of course the Precepts are ex post facto developments).

The subtitle of the book, I would hope, makes the purpose of the book clear: Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.  My feeling is that the silliness of the main title becomes attractive when attached to the subtitle, i.e., the browser is distracted by the weird, incomprehensible title, then sees the subtitle and laughs, yeah, I need this book.

But I am not the expert, the authors of EGGYBP are, and they suggest a couple of strategies here.  The first is to create a “title pool” of words that could go into your title:

  • procrastinate, procrastination, procrastinating
  • create, creative, creativity
  • put off, hold off, postpone, protract
  • don’t start, tomorrow…
  • finish, finished, finishing

Then somehow you’re supposed to find that perfect title out of all those terms.  (They also suggest checking Google Adwords to see what will result in your book being found, but that involves creating an account which involves “budgets” and “payment” and all that stuff.)  Here are ten:

  1. Don’t Create, Procrastinate!
  2. Never Finish Today (what you can put off tomorrow)
  3. A [Poem]* Is Never Finished: *painting/song/novel/garden ( a riff on the Paul Valery quote)
  4. Be Creative… Some Day
  5. Be Creative… Tomorrow
  6. Hold That Thought! : a guide to creative procrastination
  7. Lord, Make Me Creative, But Not Yet (a riff on St. Augustine’s sly prayer about chastity)
  8. Tomorrow Is Better: procrastination as a creative strategy
  9. Back Burner Creativity, or Creativity on the Back Burner
  10. Moseying to the Finish Line: creativity is not a race

Okay, there are a few in there that I could tolerate were an agent to hold a book contract to my head.

Another strategy from EGGYBP is to “get lots and lots of opinions.”  I realize that anyone reading this blog has already had their brains infected by Lichtenbergianism, but try to forget that perfect title and give me your opinions in comments.  Who knows?  This could be that moment when Bugles Sang True finally became Gone With the Wind.

So now…

Posted on by Dale

This is one of those posts I do after I’ve been away for a while, either vacationing or Camping With The Hippies™, in which I don’t really have a lot to say because I have too much to say.

Needless to say, I am behind in nearly everything: Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, blogging about Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, the Carnegie summer reading Minecraft party, visualization of William Blake’s Inn, labyrinth maintenance, all musical projects, and a couple of new projects: the Artist Trading Card Gang and looking at scoring a web animation series called Medievilry.

Euphoria, which is what the spring burn is called, was everything I needed it to be.  The saying is that you get the burn you need, not the one you want, and that was particularly true this time.  I know that it’s hard to explain the atmosphere of the burn—it’s part revelry, part journeying, part art, part music—and it’s especially hard when to explain since I tend not to share details, but I spent the five days more journeying than reveling, and it was a good thing.  Burning is not for everyone—I tell people that I go and camp with people “who are not like you and me”—but I find that the experience enriches my life.

I can share a couple of images, of course.

First, the labyrinth:

3 Old Men had a primo spot.  It is so prime that other theme camps did not bother to hide their jealousy of our cool arboreal arcade entrance, our shade, and our space.  I have told everyone that if I’m found dead in an alley, then the police should start with a list of TCOs1 as prime suspects.

Me, wearing a cool t-shirt:

This t-shirt is from a young friend, Brett Felty, for a movie he made called The World is Big and Scary.  (His production company’s website doesn’t seem to exist anymore.)  I bought the t-shirt as part of his Kickstarter project; I was struck by the monster’s resemblance to the Wilder Mann creatures—he has since told me that he had never seen the book or heard of the creatures.  I knew immediately that it would be one of my burn shirts, and so I took a photo to send to Brett.

I also got some work done.  I needed to get ahead of the production curve for this new Artist Trading Card Gang, and so I cranked out a handful of ATCs in my “Indeterminate Object” series.  Here is Indeterminate Object No. 4:

I liked this one so much that I decided to place it on the altar in the center of the labyrinth, where the hippies can take and leave gifts.  When no one had taken it before the Effigy burn on Saturday, I retrieved it for myself.

And yes, the Effigy burned:

Now, back to my regularly scheduled life.

—————

1 Theme Camp Organizers

Task Avoidance: Artist Trading Cards

Posted on by Dale

I am trying to sketch a visualization of William Blake’s Inn nearly every day, but what that means is that I’ve been staring at a collection of raw materials on my drafting table every day, and today I was forced—forced, I tell you—to create an Artist Trading Card [ATC].

Here’s the main idea, from a post I wrote several years ago.  (tl;dr: 2-½ x 3-½ cards, decorated and labeled, then traded or given away.)

I doodled with some a couple of years ago:

These were labeled as Destructive Series; there were more, but I’ve given them away.  The concept for these was to splash out some kind of Abortive Attempt onto the card, then “destroy” the image by blanking part of it out with glued-on paper.  (The third one turned out so nicely that I didn’t destroy it.)

Today I started a series called Indeterminate Objects:

So, a great way to waste a half hour while avoiding work on Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy—or greatest way to waste a half hour while avoiding work on Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy?

Lichtenbergianism: Building the online empire

Posted on by Dale

Back to work.

When last we looked in on Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, I was reading through The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [EGGYBP] and working on all the advice contained therein.  Chapter 2 deals with one’s online presence and how to capitalize on that.

Okay, I’ve read the chapter a couple of times and I have to admit I’m kind of stuck in a little mental eddy.  I know what they’re talking about, of course, and I’ve seen all of the strategies and platforms in action, but where I’m stuck is figuring out how best to proceed.

There are a couple of stumbling blocks.  The first is deciding on who I want to be in this endeavor.  I already have this blog, and accounts with Twitter, Tumblr, Imgr, and Instagram, not that I use them (because I don’t have to.)

But I think it’s wise—and smart—to split Dale Lyles from Lichtenbergianism.  I can post my liberal rants or muse on the aspects of ritual in the 3 Old Men or post my music and William Blake’s Inn sketches—but that’s muddying the waters when it comes to attracting a “permission base” to Lichtenbergianism.  Anyone who heads to the intertubes looking for Lichtenbergianism ought to be able to be immersed in it.

That means a separate website/internet presence based completely on the book and any services/goods I might be offering.  (What, you don’t want to buy a Lichtenbergian brand Waste Book? Or a Cras melior est hoodie?)

So there’s the first stumbling block.  Do I want to go to the trouble of establishing lichtenbergianism.com and @TheLichtenbergian and all that before anyone shows any interest in the book, or do I need to do that in order to attract interest in the book?  Ugh.  Around and around I go.

The second stumbling block is the incredible amount of time/work it takes to establish that permission base of online followers.  I’m going to be posting about the different strategies in Chapter 2, but a lot of them deal with joining one’s online community.

Who, exactly, is that?  I work in a vacuum here in Newnan, and of course that’s my own fault for not looking for my “community” online, but which community is that?  Writers?  Painters?  Gardeners?  Efficiency experts? Creativity gurus?  All of the above?

Thinking that I have to spend hours a day checking on these communities and establishing a presence there just gives me the fantods.

Oh well.  Excelsior.

WBI: 04/20/2016

Posted on by Dale

More imagery of what my song cycle William Blake’s Inn might look like if some enterprising theatre company decided to stage it:

I’m thinking that at their first appearance, the Tiger and the King of Cats should probably be in their puppet avatar.  The denizens of the Inn would move forward, perhaps; at any rate, they would “come to life.”

Musicallyspeakingwise, this is from 0:30–1:00.