I don’t entirely have a plan right now. Oftentimes I sit down and plan what I’m going to write before I write it. It’s a plan of attack, because make no mistake this is definitely a war. I take on the page with an intent to conquer it and stake my claim at whatever cost. When I’m shooting from the hip like I am today, I usually write by the sentence, maybe by the paragraph. So you can see why it tends to read a little stream of consciousness. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It stems from some advice I heard once that I have then gone on to give to countless other people (masquerading it as my own). Someone told me, during times of duress and panic, to only worry about the minutes. “If you only worry about the minutes,” he said, “then the hours will take care of themselves.”
And with that I’ve created a very sporadic approach to my art at times, which lets me pour as much as I can of myself into the segments in hope that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Which isn’t always the case, it’s often disjointed and erratic. But then we have a story or a script that comes together in a way I couldn’t have planned if I tried. It just clicks, it has a certain x factor that every creative person is striving for. Interesting, really, a quality found in almost every good story and yet it remains elusive to most. Even the good writers are in a zone only a small percentage of the time. The rest of the time we’re trying desperately to work ourselves into the zone, and feeling worthless and talentless. At least that’s what I’ve come to believe from the artists I’ve known. We paint to be happy, we write to be deep.
In the army of the creative, the writers are the commanding officers. We care about the overall struggle, we’re trying desperately to change the flow of the world around us and to move people and minds. Painters, at least the ones I’ve known, are much less concerned with redefining the status quo. They instead just want to take a trip inside their own mind and their own heart, to get it out physically in a way that words could never do. I once told a girl that I write because every S looks the same, I know how to make an S and what I can and cannot do with it. Using those limits I can stack letters to make words, words to make sentences and sentences to make structurally sound ideas hit the page. She didn’t say as much but I came to the conclusion that if I use letters for such a deliberate purpose, she must have a similar identification with painting. If I had to guess I’d say she uses inks because they seep where words can’t go, they can drip between the crevasses and get into places we thought were watertight.
