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Experience Journaling – Day 8 – Economy of Motion

Day 8 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

So far I’ve drawn parallels between painting and writing.  It is also sometimes  like yoga. Or maybe it’s just my writer’s mind (or my lawyer’s mind?) that can’t stop drawing comparisons between things.

In yoga, ashtanga flow-type yoga, at least, your instructor will tell you to have good economy of motion. You can transition from mountain pose to plank in four steps, pausing to wipe sweat from your forehead, fix your shirt, and adjust your hair or glasses. Or you can ignore all of that and make one graceful sweeping motion between the poses. You practice doing less and less with your body, stripping down the movements and focusing on the poses not as stopping points in a connect-the-dots picture, but as freeze frames in a flowing arc.

To paint a leaf, you can make an outline of a leaf and color it in, like a child’s coloring book. It will be flat and lifeless. Or you can make the same shape by pressing your brush lightly for a thin stem, then firmly so that the bristles splay out and the leaf gets thicker, and then, with a little flourish, lightly again, for the tip of the leaf. You can do this twice, once for each side of the leaf, and leave a small sliver of white down the middle for a natural highlight (I’m still working on this). If you get good at it, the leaves roll from under your brush like little green tongues, seeming to sprout from the curving stems and branches you’ve drawn like real growing things.

You practice. Slow, steady, with economy of motion, and put down your brush. You may even feel the urge to bow your head and say “Namaste.”

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Experience Journaling – Day 7 – Color Theory

Hi writers! It’s been a busy week and I fell behind a bit. Here is yesterday’s post. If you are new to the site this month, it is not too late to join in our challenge: experience journaling. Pick something new to try (I chose watercolor painting), dive into it, and chronical your experience. Or choose from a list of new experiences to broaden your worldview and jumpstart your writing. Have fun!

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Day 7 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

I am sitting next to my mother, madly mixing colors, serenely applying them in little dots and swirls to the penciled grid on my page, not worrying if the colors are ugly, if they “match,” if my circles are a little bit messy. I have in mind the final effect and I know it is almost better if it isn’t perfect. My mom does her own, tentative version, very neat, very precise. “We’re supposed to fill the whole square?” she asks. “Isn’t it sort of ugly?” Yes. And yes. But it will be beautiful, when you’re all done and you step back. I assure her of this.

The first time I made Kandinsky circles I was a freshman in college, studying architecture, sitting in a studio class called Basic Design 2. Basic Design 1, the previous semester, had–indulge a big of exaggeration here–broken me.

My BD1 professor was a peer little woman named Gretchen, with a minimalist bowl of chestnut hair cut in an heavy fringe of bangs, squinting behind avant garde frames. She worshipped Frank Lloyd Wright as a personal deity. We were her protégés, conposing her atelier. She expected great things of us. And she set about teaching us tedious skills like hand lettering and the Goff method of rendering finely detailed three-dimensional perspectives of building interiors. We learned how to draw little dots and triangles to represent concrete and sand in cross section. (Actually, I liked that part.)

On the whole, it was difficult. It was not something I was good at. And as a, until thus far, straight-A student, this had the immediate effect of cracking my brain in half. I wasn’t good at this. I couldn’t do it. I became paralyzed. I procrastinated until, the night before my final set of drawings was due, I had hardly begun. I called my mother, sobbing. She came to me, assessed the situation, and said quite sensibly, “Just do the best you can. Between now and tomorrow morning. Just finish it. You can do better next time.”

I was thunderstruck. I sat myself down and took her advice. And I’ve realized, many times since then, that it was the most important thing I learned those four (okay five) years. And I learned it from my mother, in my living room, not from some credentialed professor with office hours and weird glasses. In the end, I got a C+. I was devastated. But I went into my second semester fueled by the fires of redemption.

My BD2 professor—also named Gretchen (I can’t make this up, folks)—was a former ballerina turned artist, following some mysterious injury. She was wistful and sad, with dark circles under her eyes. I wanted to please her. I took her class very seriously.

And one day we made Kandinsky circles. We used smelly opaque gouache, not watercolors, but the effect was much the same: colors, next to each other, speaking to each other, advancing, receding, evoking memories and associations in their particular combinations.

Wassily Kandinsky was a lawyer in Russia who gave up that career to become one of the first abstract artists. He was a synesthete; colors were musical to him. “Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles,” was not meant as a finished piece. It was a small color study he made as part of his creative process. But it is perhaps his most well-known painting. For me, it is heavy with associations, symbolic of some early change in my personality. I sat down at that page all those years ago and painted my circles, not worrying too much if I was good at it or if they were perfect. I had an assignment and I did it. I just did it. And it turned out fine.

And with that, I leave you with a few quotations from Mr. Kandinsky:

” … lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?”

“Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street … Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.”

“Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.”

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Experience Journaling – Day 6 – Lemons

Day 6 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

I’m going to tell you the story of a lemon. At first glance, there is nothing too special about this lemon. It’s sitting on its long side, with another lemon, sliced, propped up against it. And there is a little leaf sticking out, as if the thing’s just been plucked from a tree in Sorrento. But then, if you look closely, you see the lemon’s a little “off.” The color is wrong, firstly–too brown–and, secondly, the shape–sunken and pointed where it should be round and firm. This lemon was left on the counter in the sun from the window, or it rolled beneath the refrigerator and was forgotten for a week or two. If you found it, you would toss it in the compost bin, not prop it up on a linen tablecloth and paint it.

And even if you decided that this tough old rhino-hided lemon carcass was a worthy subject of art–if you were one of those old Renaissance painters, say, with a penchant for pomegranates and figs, ripe to bursting, strewn amid peony blossoms expanding like little pink and white universes, shedding their heavy bruised petals like the damp pages of books–if such things appealed to you, then this lemon would be just the thing to complete your pornographic display of flyspecked decadent decay.

But even supposing this were the case, you would not paint it in this way. The sliced lemon, lacking any sort of depth, the shaded rind describing no three-dimensional object, but a warped and dented plane slipping mischievously between the second and third dimensions. And the shadow! Suspended beneath the lemon and leaf like Spanish moss from a live oak, telling us nothing about any real or imagined surface a piece of fruit might in fact be set upon.

It didn’t have to be this way. There was hope, in the beginning: a fairly proportioned pencil sketch, a wash of sunny yellow. And then, over the course of 30 minutes or so, you proceeded to work that lemon to death. Remember when you said about not trying to “fix” things? You tried to fix everything! And it didn’t work. Because of course it didn’t. Hmmpf. Let this lemon be a lesson to you.

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Experience Journaling – Day 5 – Second Art

Hi writers! I want to take a moment this morning to talk about some standard elements you can incorporate into your writing journal. You may keep lists like these already. If not, consider setting aside a few pages at the end of your notebook to collect some useful bits for your future writing.

  1. Things to write about. This is just a list of writing prompts or topics that occur to you as you go about your day. One of the warmup exercises for StoryADay May is to collect at least three “story sparks” per day. That’s basically what this is. Jot down just enough to spark your memory later. On my list right now: that cab ride in St. Louis; ghost bikes/roadside crosses/flowers in chain-link fences; Flipper and Ms. Norma; death as the Irish “twin place.” All ideas I got listening to podcasts, reading the news, or just going about my day. They don’t mean much to anyone but me.
  2. Words and phrases. These can either be ones you heard and were unfamiliar with and had to look up, or ones that just sound interesting. On my list right now: myclonic, chickenhawk, partita, modus vivendi, Manichaean, Downing Street memo, sharkskin suit, necrotic, purulent, blunder.
  3. Names for characters. It is nice to have a list of these handy or to collect ready-made lists. I once clipped out an article listing all of the new lawyers who were sworn in this year in Chicago. It was a lovely, diverse assortment of Millennial names! On my list right now: Holly, Parker, Val, Gabe, Annika.
  4. A list of places/settings. Here you can list places you’ve been or want to go to, that you could use as settings for stories. Also the names of stores, bars, and restaurants, real or imagined.
  5. Snippets. Lines from books or poems that you love. Like this first line of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, by Donald Antrim: “See a town stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish.”
  6. Recommendations. Books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, restaurants to try. All things you want to follow up on later.
  7. Writing classes, retreats, and conventions.
  8. Literary journals and writing competitions.

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Day 5 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

When I sit down to write about painting I am often drawn back to thinking about writing, and of all the ways in which the two inform each other. I ran across an article recently talking about how many famous writers either secretly practice or are devoted fans of a second art form. Nabakov was an avid lepidopterist, Henry James was a painter, EM Forster was passionate about music. Hemingway considered bullfighting an art, much as Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima felt about the art of samurai. For Willa Cather and George Sand it was the opera. Acting, rock music, film noir, ballet. What is it about a second art form that draws writers in? If nothing else, it is a wonderful excuse for procrastination! But there is something more to it that the author of the article seems to understand:

“We all have our shadow art, the one that isn’t ours, the one we might covet, feeling it knows something about us. Sometimes the novelist becomes a critic of that art and a very good one … but, most often, he or she will just imbibe it secretly, knowing that the novels could be enriched by the rules of other art forms.” Andrew O’Hagan, from “Writers in Love With Other Art Forms,” Financial Times, April 26, 2013.

So dive into your second art, writers. It’s all of a piece with your writing.

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Experience Journaling – Day 4 – Learning to Notice

Writing today’s journal entry reminded me of a quote by Henry James that is one of my favorites: “Be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.” Searching for the exact words I came upon a bit more of the article the quote is taken from:

“The power to guess the unseen from the seen , to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life, in general, so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it–this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town, and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe. Therefore, if I should certainly say to a novice, ‘Write from experience, and experience only,’ I should feel that this was a rather tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”

Henry James “The Art of Fiction,” 1884, in Longman’s Magazine

The lesson, writers? Take note of everything. It is all worthy of your art.

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Day 4 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

You may think, when you are learning to paint, that you are training your hand, your fingers, your whole arm, even, to make certain motions, to recreate certain effects: a wash, a fine line, a splatter. Lift here to avoid a smudge. Blot here to avoid a puddle. You may even think you are training your eyes to see. To know when the paint is dark enough, wet enough, when the blue needs some orange to temper it, how gray that is really purple differs from gray that is really green. All the while, in fact, it is your mind you are training, to notice things you once overlooked.

Taking a shortcut through an alley I notice weeds sprouting up, here and there, in unlikely places. I appreciate their leaf structure, the elegant curves of their stems, the dots of hidden color on the undersides of petals, showy little starbursts dancing on pollen-dusted filaments. I appreciate the groupings and massings, the clusters, and always, the odd ones out. The blossom creeping over a fencepost, the blade sprouting from a pavement crack.

I remember the day I sat, with my mother, filling pages with little soft watercolor sketches of buds and leaves. I wonder at the sheer variety of such things in the world and my ability to recognize even one small part of them and say: “Yes. I remember you. I know just how to press my brush–soft, then hard, then soft again–for a leaf, how to swipe it, without too much thought, for a thin stem. I can swish together a little bundle, sprouts, hedgerows of you and your friends, creep you and twine you, there in the corner of a blank white page.”

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Experience Journaling – Day 3 – Five Rules

Hey journalers! In my adventures in self-instruction I found a website with five rules for watercolor painting. I’ve come to think that they might apply equally to writing.

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Day 3 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

  1. Leave some white paper, at least 1/4 of the page, on your first wash. In other words, leave lots of holes, to be filled in later by you or in the mind’s eye of your reader. Do not bombard your reader with an impenetrable slab of description. Consider, for a watercolor-y effect, not telling your reader that “James is the sort of person who does x, y, and z.” Have him engage in a little x in the foreground, hint at some z in the background, and let y exist somewhere off the page. Allow your reader to connect the dots.
  2. Avoid mixing too many colors. Limit yourself to three in a given wash before letting things dry. As I’ve noted here before–and indeed it may just be the theme of this website–constraints are our friends. Setting simple boundaries constructs a frame in which your writing can bloom, fresh and unmuddied. Having too many choices can be paralyzing. Having an assignment–committing to a genre, subject matter, or structural device, working hard to incorporate some random detail–is like selecting a limited palette. It is a challenge to your brain: here, make something of this! And your brain, seeing nothing but the few necessary tools at hand, gets right to work.
  3. Avoid too much detail at the beginning. Now this one, perhaps, does not apply so neatly to writing. The point is to start big, get the shapes and values right, then work in the details. We must do the same with writing, thinking about plot, backstory, character arcs, but, unlike painters, we can work in reverse if we like, from the inspiration of a small detail: a snippet of dialog, or the way a character ties his shoes. The point is to keep depth in mind, to always work forward and back between the broad strokes and the minute flourishes.
  4. Work all around your painting. “An isolated sketch is charming … but it’s not a finished painting. It never hurts to have a finished composition in mind and know where  you want to lead your reader, from this point, to this, to this, just as a painter thinks about how to draw a viewer’s eye from point to point around a painting. Challenges like NaPoWriMo and SToryADay are great for this because they give you practice thinking in terms of a finished product, accepting the results for what they are, and charging ahead to think of another finished product; a complete–perhaps flawed, but finished–composition.
  5. Clean your water! Change it with every wash. Water is the magical, essential element in watercolor painting. It’s what brings the hard little squares of pigment to life. It’s what lets them flow and mix, puddle and swirl. In writing, we paint with words. And the magical liquid substance that gets them all juicy and lubricated is … what, exactly? If only it were water! No, it is something much more mysterious, though perhaps no less elemental. But like water, it needs flushing. It needs to flow. We can’t dip our brushes into the dry little smears of last week’s paint and force out a new painting. We need a flow of fresh thoughts and experiences, and we need–through daily writing–to train that flow into a tributary leading directly to our pens and keyboards. We need to keep things nice and juicy.

Rules to live by, writers. Happy journaling!

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Experience Journaling – Day 2 – Acceptance

Hi fellow journalers! You’ve cracked the spine of your nice new notebook and begun to capture some experiences. How does it feel? New to the challenge? It’s not too late to start. Get all caught up here.

I recently picked up an old copy of Natalie Goldberg’s classic Writing Down the Bones at a used book sale. It is one of those iconic books on the craft of writing that I have somehow never managed to sit down and read. Don’t let the slim volume surprise you; it is packed with Zen wisdom and creative insight. In the preface alone Goldberg quotes a few of Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” which I think, given our monthly challenge, are quite apropos:

  • [Be s]ubmissive to everything, open, listening
  • [There is n]o fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  • Be in love with yr life

I would include one more:

  • Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

And with that I will leave you with the final words of Goldberg’s preface: “Now, please, go. Write your asses off.”

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Day 2 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

One of three things will happen the first time you paint with watercolors: (1) you will make a mistake and give up; (2) you will make a mistake and start over, repeat this process until you’ve wasted a lot of expensive paper, sigh in disgust, and then give up; or (3) you will learn acceptance.

You will accept that the beautiful blue color you’ve mixed on your palette looks dark and muddy on the page. You will paint a dark and muddy scene. You will accept that there is no remedy for the drips and drops of water that have just ruined your beautiful swishy-sherbet sunset wash. You will turn the drips and drops into a misshapen cloud and (okay, screw acceptance) hate that cloud with an intensity all out of proportion to the situation. You will accept that your attempts to “fix” things result in sodden, buckling paper, furred and clotted with little abused paper particles. There is no “fixing” things in watercolor painting. There is only acceptance. And moving forward. Or giving up.

If you choose acceptance, you may begin to notice some things. That muddy denim-blue-lavender color is the color of anything, anywhere, in shadow. The hidden crook of a plant, where leaf meets stem; the underbelly of a bonfire-bright goldfish; the silhouette of a mountain range in the mist; the thin, reaching shadow of a thorn thrown against a cactus paddle at sunset. And just imagine, you learned to mix that color–that indispensable, depth-giving color, you learned the secret recipe, Cobalt Blue with touches of Cadmium Orange and Amazonite–on your very first try.

You will notice that the ugly little misshapen cloud is the best thing you’ve painted all week. And the more you stare at it the more you’ll want to clip it from the poor, dull sunset scene you’ve placed it in and transport it somewhere cosmic and surreal–to an acid-green sunset on the surface of Venus. You’ll want to give it twelve hundred brothers–an armada of weird little clouds, and call it all the moment the rain stopped in Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.” You will never again try to “fix” a mistake in your painting, you will tell yourself. (But of course you will, you’re only human, and your great, lumbering human brain tramples where it likes.) You will instead wait patiently for the page to dry, for the alchemical changes of the evaporative process to take place. You will have faith in what is to come. You will practice acceptance.

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Experience Journaling – Day 1 – Supplies

Hi writers! If you’re new to the website, here is what we are doing this month: experience journaling. We’re trying something new (or maybe a bunch of new things) and writing about it. For my own challenge, I’ve decided to try my hand at watercolor painting. I’m going to paint a bit every day (or at least a few times a week) and write about the experience. It’s something pretty simple. It’s portable. It lends itself to self-instruction.

Remember writers, this is a choose-your-own-adventure challenge! Just make sure you choose something you don’t already know how to do. Or if a new hobby seems daunting (or too tame), choose some new experiences to embark on and write about (check out this list of examples). I’m going to do some of these on the weekends, just to break things up.

The point is to practice using a journal to record your experiences and expand the range of things you feel comfortable sitting down to a blank page and writing about.

Have fun!

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Day 1 – A Watercolorist’s Journal

I wound up with a little travel case, small enough to fit in a pocket, with a dozen Winsor & Newton half pans. The art supply store, the massive Dick Blick’s on State Street, was an overwhelming, two-story affair. Towering shelves of paints, brushes, papers, and canvases were set close together, so that you felt almost like King Kong set lose on a scale model of New York City. You had to press yourself close to the merchandise to let other King Kongs shuffle past. As I did so I read the names on the little tubes and blocks of paint, like the recipe for a chemical formula, or a list of ingredients to toss into a witch’s cauldron: Bismuth Yellow, Cadmium Orange, Scarlet Lake. There were a half-dozen rose-reds and pinks alone: Rose Madder-genuine (a color prone to counterfeit?) Opera Rose, Permanent Rose, Rose Dore, Potter’s Pink. I chose a little synthetic brush with a water reservoir, because it looked manageable, like a pen, and went off in search of paper.

Professional-grade watercolor paper feels like pebbled velvet butter. It is priced as if it were made from the bleached and pressed wings of rare Amazonian butterflies. I moved on to the student-grade section, where I considered tablets with tear-out sheets versus spiral-bound books. I decided on the latter–twelve large sheets of Strathmore acid-free cold press, “for mastering techniques with wet media.” I wanted to own the results of my month-long experiment, the good and failed attempts bound neatly together.

As I was leaving the art store I ran into someone I used to go to law school with. “What are you up to these days?” he asked. “Oh, you know, buying art supplies on my lunch hour,” I said, acknowledging that maybe this was a little unexpected. And he, a new father himself, said quite innocently, “hashtag mom life, huh?” I laughed, and we parted, and it didn’t register for another block. O yes, he assumed I had just bought art supplies for my children. At a fancy art supply store in the city, no less. Well, yes, that would make me quite a mom, wouldn’t it? But I hadn’t. I’d bought them for myself: a middle-aged woman, trained as a lawyer, working for a judge, with lots of busy lawyer friends and two small children, with a writing hobby I barely had time for already. It suddenly seemed ludicrous to me, in the face of all that, to begin something new.

But why not? Words beget words, if you only let them find the page. Why shouldn’t it be that hobbies beget hobbies? And so I walked back to work with the paper, brush, and paints knocking together in my bag–the little thump, thump, thump of something new.

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Playwriting Workshop – Recap

Take a bow playwrights. We did it! We learned the rudiments of writing a play, from generating raw material and adapting it for use in scenes, to using settings, character descriptions, and stage directions to frame and develop conflict. We learned how to format scenes and wrote the first and last scenes of a full play. I hope you all continue on to connect the dots between those opening and closing scenes and polish and refine your final product.

But tomorrow is the first day of a new month, and with it a new challenge. So dig out your notebooks, writers, and get ready to WRITE WORDS NOW!

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Playwriting Workshop – Days 29-30 – Curtainfall

We’re going to skip right to the ending now, playwrights. We know where we’re coming from and we know where we’re going. The rest should be a piece of cake, right?

Days 29-30 – Write your closing scene. This is the one that wraps everything up. How have your characters grown. Did your primary character get what he or she wanted? Was it worth it? Was the conflict resolved? Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

Remember that this is just a first draft of your final scene. Don’t get bogged down with revisions. Just get through the scene.