works of wanderlust

Tag: practice makes perfect

  • writing: enough

    It’s all well and good to write about writing but at the end of the day you’ve really just got to sit down and do it.

    It’s mid-June and Father’s day is approaching. This is something of an anniversary for me because on the day after Father’s day, two years ago, I had a meeting with my then-boss and resigned from my job.

    I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I’ve been thinking about it because—as my kid told me just yesterday as she prepares to transition out of grade school and into adulthood—you kinda put on rose coloured glasses after you finish something, don’t you?

    I’ve spilled uncountable and unpublishable words on the reasons and follow-up of quitting a job and avoiding the perceptions of others that goes along with that: weakness, disloyalty, presumptions of cause, and all those things. Really, it was just an opportunity that I had and it was time to make a switch and take a break, and the stars aligned.

    Inside that opportunity was the notion that I was going to fill at least parts of my days putting words to paper. (Well—digital paper.) And heck, inside of these last two years I have typed out what has probably amounted to a quarter of a million of those aspirational words.

    I mean, along with writing, I’ve done a long list of other things. Frankly, I need to. Writing is as much as chore as any task. You get tired. Your brain needs breaks. I gave myself a modest daily goal and was persistently reluctant to push past those goals as a means and a method to avoid burning myself out on writing. SO I write for a bit each day and then do other things. Though, oddly enough, those things have varied, but the writing has kept pretty consistent.

    Yet here I am, almost at the two-year anniversary of that transition, casually poking at the pursuit of full-time work bear again, and looking back on what, if anything, I accomplished in the wordsmithery field that defined a big chunk of the last two years.

    Sure, a quarter million words including probably what amounts to a hundred mini-essays, the first 90% of a long novel, a string of blog posts, a small collection of short stories, and lots of vaguely reflective writing.

    Tiny goals, two years… big results.

    Just sitting down literally every day and writing… something.

    Is any of it worth anything?

    I mean, if you are judging my productivity in the context of publication and sales, then look: the world is fickle. I’ve written thousands of those words on the frustrations of commercially viable wordcraft. We live in a world where barely a fraction of the people read, and then when those people do read they are doing it as an escapism, and it seems from where I sit that most people are hoping to escape into romantic fantasy or comic book absurdity or political theatre or—well, heck if I knew maybe I would have gone viral and we wouldn’t be having this one-way conversation, would we?

    If, on the other hand, you are simply judging me by the fact that I write, say roughly, about 500 words per hour and have produced, again roughly, about a quarter million words, then this means that I have spent about 500 hours over the last two years writing. That’s a lot of practice… and a lot of personal value.

    Yet, at the same time, it doesn’t feel like enough.

    What even is enough?

    I don’t have a number, per se, but I feel like if I was to tell you that I am happy with my output despite the fact that a quarter of a million words and 500 hours of effort seems impressive, I would add to the end of that statement that I probably could write a bit more.

    Now, maybe you see the posts on this blog and you read some of it and wonder why I write on the topics that I write on. But heck, it’s all practice tho, isn’t it? Movie reviews, updates about my weekend, stories about my garden, meandering philosophical essays on the productivity of a Saturday afternoon. None of it’s breaking news, but writing enough is often about putting in the time and practice. That goes for anything. You don’t judge a runner for training multiple days per week for a race or begrudge a chef for prepping ten thousand meals before opening her own restaurant. Why point a questioning finger at a writer for just writing and writing and writing and then writing some more—even if the topic is blah or not of interest to you in particular?

    As such, my only advice on this topic was right there in the lede. I realize that even for myself I’ll only feel like I’ve done enough when I actually just done it. I just gotta sit here and keep writing, practicing, honing this craft, and perhaps amounting to something of that even I approve is enough.

  • Artist in Residence (but just at my own house)

    I have mentioned it a few times over the last year of posts, and I have even posted a few modest samples, but I have a slow burning fascination with sketching that has kindled into something more since I’ve been spending so much time at home longing to travel.

    In particular #urbansketching has wrapped a watercoloured claw around my heart (and jabbed it with a few sharpened pencils for good measure) and I find myself looking for local subjects as much as flipping through old photography looking for buildings, scenes, architecture, and adventure moments to turn into ink and paint doodles.

    Urban sketching is the name of a subset of artistic pursuits usually narrowed to the specific time and attention given to capturing an object or space filled with people and buildings and life and city emotion. It is meant to be quick and rough and in the moment and replace the act of wandering through an urban space clicking countless snapshots into one’s phone with the deliberate action of pausing for long enough to draw a scene with pencil, ink, colour, or one’s medium of choice.

    I try. Frequently. I’m admittedly mediocre.

    But I am working and practicing and thinking the types of thoughts that I hope will come together into being much better.

    What do you want
    to learn in 2022?

    There is a short list of things I need to focus on over the next year as I improve my sketching skillset and move towards the next level of artistic expression. As I see it, these things are:

    1) Finding my own style.

    I actually kinda thought this would come to me as a simple act of rote practice, but not only has a style not found me in my numerous pages of scribbles and sketches, I think the lack of a style is starting to creep into what I have drawn as a kind of looming sloppiness.

    This is not self-depricating criticism. It’s just a trend I’ve noticed. That in the gaps where I don’t know what kind of deliberate line to draw to fill a space, I make something up. A personal style would inform that and steer me clear of the messy scribbles approach.

    Style is a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing, ineffible but simultanously it jumps off the page when it is done right.

    I need to find mine next year because it doesn’t seem to be looking for me.

    2) Working in partnership with the colours.

    My wife bought me a new set of twenty-four watercolours for my birthday last month and I dug in and was immediately slapping shades onto the page to see how things looked and worked and made the sketch pop with double the number of hues.

    I love the set, but I don’t think it has done me any favours. My sketches have just become a little bit more muddled. Why? Because I’m not painting with the colours that need, want, yearn to be part of the picture. Rather the literal science-technology nerd in me is transcribing the colors of the scene directly into the page.

    I’m neither good at that, nor is that art. It’s this photographer guy trying to replicate something in front of his eyes with a brush and a smattering of pigments.

    I recognize this as a flaw in my approach and that thinking about a cohesive palette that evokes a vibe of the scene or object is far more important that getting the right shade of green for that tree in the background.

    3) Seeing.

    Similarly to how I’ve tended to regard colour, I’ve always thought of myself as a reasonable photographer because I have a well-tuned sense of composition that has aided me in a way that has led to nice pictures.

    I have been working on changing my perspective already, but in 2022 I need to open my eyes a little wider and examine the world like a sketch artist, rather than a guy with a camera lens… at least when I’m attempting to draw that world.

    Composing a sketch on the page is a bit like framing a photograph in the viewfinder, but with a different set of tools and a completely different objective. The point of a photo is often to replicate an object or scene with clear focus, to represent it in a way that is true and clear. Alternatively, the point of sketch is often to create a model of an object or scene by use of abstraction, to use shapes and colour to trick the eye into seeing a re-creation of a simplified essence of that and to convey what the artist wanted to purposefully move from the reality of that object or scene into a feeling of the same upon the page.

    I’m still thinking too much like a photographer.

    4) Letting go of the literal.

    And while that overthinking photographer guy struggles to see the world as a sketchable space, looking for the lines and shapes of reality and unravelling it all, in that effort is also a search for the metaphor of the art.

    I’ve spent too much time enviously looking at “good” art that faithfully represents something, and while skill is a noble purpose and often a milestone towards achieving all these things I’m writing about, it is just one path.

    I don’t know what the alternative path is, but I think it is shaded by experimenting, practice, and dabbling in all these things I’ve been writing about. It’s a mash up of all these points: a style, evoking feelings through colours, and seeing what’s in the scene but also what is inside and through and beyond the scene yet needs to find a way onto the page.

    In 2022 I don’t expect to move from hobbiest suburban sketcher to epic, master artist, but I think I’m at the point in my drawing adventure where I need permission (if only from myself) to let go of the aspriration to draw anything but what makes me happy drawing it.

    Learning, after all, never really ends.