I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
Yesterday I published my first essay-and-painting pairing for my conceptual art and writing project Things Men Gave Me.
I am hesitating a little in telling people it’s out there because even though I don’t expect many people to read the first essay, it still feels momentous and weighty to move forward with sharing it.
Because it’s the first episode of the series, it has to do some heavy lifting. It must introduce the project and myself as a character. Ideally, it gives the reader/viewer an idea of my voice, my perspective, and what might be coming. It should make the reader/viewer hope to see more soon.
Poem and author Maggie Smith writes about beginnings in Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life:
The beginnings of our pieces are where we find our way. We’re still revving our engines without knowing where we’re going, let alone which route to take. Our early drafts may have some preamble to them which can be trimmed away or at least made more concise and arresting. Whether I’m writing a poem or a piece of prose, I want the opening to pull the reader in and propel them along. Sentence one should make you desire sentence two. Sentence two should make you hungry for sentence three.
I want my first essay to whet readers’ appetites for more. I need to re-read my essay and edit it ruthlessly with this in mind. Maybe I need to eliminate some preamble. Make I need to make my writing more concise and arresting.
I don’t consider any of the essays I publish final. I may edit them after getting feedback, or re-reading them, or learning more what I want to say once I have moved forward with later ones.
Smith continues:
I take the same approach with whole manuscripts. If you think of a book of poems as a poem in itself—a satisfying, cohesive whole—then the opening piece bears a lot of responsibility in the manuscript. It gives the reader a sense of what they’re in for. The same logic applies to a first chapter in a novel or memoir, the first essay or story in a collection, or the opening spread of a picture book.
So this essay really matters.
Paintings aren’t harder to edit than essays. You can’t just sit at a computer and edit your painting—fortunately, I think. To edit a painting requires deciding on a next step, filling an old yogurt container with water, squeezing out blobs of paint, choosing a brush, applying the paint (and sometimes taking it away, with a wet paper towel, if it was wrong), and standing back and looking at what you did. If you think of it, you should put your artist’s smock on before painting too so as not to get paint on your clothes. By contrast editing writing is easy.
That’s probably why it’s easier to get to “done” with a painting. The hurdle I’d have to leap to add more to a painting once I like it is so high. The hurdle to changing some words or sentences or paragraphs in an essay I already have written and stored somewhere online is very low.
I’m still working on my latest painting I Ruined: A Road Trip to Santa Fe though. It has almost reached completion a bunch of times, and yet I keep adding and taking away. I really love the concept behind this piece. And actually, I love the piece itself as aesthetic object too. The ruined version has progressed to the point that it’s much more interesting than the unruined.
The essay for the I Ruined painting is in progress. It will be the next essay I publish as chronologically it comes next. After that, I have one more essay in the chronological telling of what happened in 2014 before I will flashback to what happened before that. I hope at that point that anyone following along will be very curious about the backstory.
My Wednesday Website task for today: Update my artist’s statement to include a discussion of conceptual art and my identity as a conceptual artist, link to the Things Men Gave me site, and add a composite photo I made of myself with a painting overlaid on me.