November 1 is National Author’s Day. That means it is a great day to auth.
I don’t profess to be breaking new ground in the literary world, but I enjoy and respect the process of writing. If I have a writing story, it is of me standing next to mom usually while she finished putting on her make-up, a red pen in her hand, circling the mistakes on my school papers with little reverence to the time I had spent on them. Her top guideline for writing was to edit ruthlessly. On my essay attempts there were underlined misspellings, arrows arcing across the page indicating paragraphs that needed moving, and other corrections that made me fidget. Eventually, my mother would hand back my paper, smile and simply say, “Go try again.” She was not being punitive, or callous, pushy or discouraging. She was merely trying to instill in me an appreciation for a skill that I would be using a lot in the future. Every draft I brought back for her to edit resulted in writing that had more clarity than the copy before it, and by the end of the ordeal, I held in my hands something I was proud to turn in to my teachers at school.
When I wrote copy for newspapers years later, things got a little more serious. I had to get the who, what, where, and when in the first paragraph or the editor would toss the article back to me. I mean toss literarily as those were the days before we sent things via computers. If I had any grammatical mistakes the copy editor would hand the article back to me to correct. If there were any miscommunications, or the article was not going to help sell newspapers, the publisher would hand it back. By the time I had rewritten the article two or three times, I began to apply my mom’s second rule of writing. You can either do it right or do it over. So, I began to channel my inner mom by doing the article right the first time and editing ruthlessly.
The writing component of my career may come as a surprise to some of you looking at my artist website. Artists generally do not invest their time in writing but in the design of their art. Most visual artists simply do not want to spend time or have the time to develop the discipline and rhythm that writing requires. Many of the artists I knew in grad school paid someone else to write their thesis for them. Even still, their theses often went unfinished because the artists could not give their ghost writer enough words or ideas to work with. Writing is work and requires a lot of exhausting thinking, straining and sorting out.
I was recently reading the history of Paul McCartney’s creation of the song Eleanor Rigby. The inspiration for his song began initially when McCartney was playing around on the piano, but much of the tune came from other sources too. If you read the entire story of how the song came about you realize he was open to others’ input, and then used his own filter to decide which parts to put in and which to leave out. Words for the song jockeyed for position, verses switched here and there, a phone book came into play, and drop-by musicians added their two-cents worth. Many tiny decisions, and a ton of elbow grease later, Eleanor Rigby came into its own, having been filtered through various processes that made perfect sense to McCartney.
I have always considered the writing piece of my “person-cloud” as important as any other aspect of my artistic system. It polishes my brain in a way that the visual arts do not. While I spend considerable time freely moving back and forth amongst my artworks in progress, writing does not have the same fluidity for me. The process is more like a three day drizzle than a blizzard. Occasionally, when things are flowing easily, and the words are rolling off my fingers, the writing takes on a power all its own. In those moments I let the sky open and saturate the playing field.
But those times are few and far between, and so is National Author’s Day. It is a reminder not just to honor our great writers, but also to go out there and auth – put some words together even if they sound odd and clumsy. Maybe even send your favorite writer an encouraging card, or better yet, write something with an author and call it a holiday.