Art

Jackson Pollock's "Eyes in the Heat"

I've long struggled with why the medium for my voice isn't painting, or drawing, or sculpting, or whatever–ANYTHING but writing.

I believe, probably erroneously, that creating just about anything is easier than what I'm doing.  I mean, for goodness sake, look at what passes for art these days.  All someone has to do is splash paint on a canvas, and, assuming someone influential, usually with lots and lots of cash, catches onto it (that is, buys lots of it), then it becomes art.  Jackson Pollock, I'm talking to you (even though he's been long dead, and I think his work is kind of cool).

Yesterday, in my reading, I came upon this, in Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to staying Out of the Rejection Pile, and it sort of all made sense to me why I'm struggling so hard right now to make something of Chapter One of my novel:

Other art forms, such as music and painting, force the artist to jump right in and create, but writing has a sly ability to allow its practitioners to dodge the artistic.  This may be because writing has so many inartistic (or less artistic) manifestations, from legal writing to business writing to official memos to textbooks, where the main priority is not artistic expression but the conveyance of facts.  Of course, everything has its place: if it were your responsibility to write down the minutes of your weekly business meetings and as the writer you chose to dramatize these minutes, filling them with emotion, you'd probably get fired [p. 121].

So Lukeman draws a distinction between different types of writing, between writing that would be considered practical, and writing that would be considered art.

I don't know about you, but, in the writing of my novel, I'm aiming for more than the "conveyance of facts."  I'm aiming for art.  I can't aim for anything less.  I may fall short–in fact, I know I will, in relation to any writer who's considered an artist at what he or she does–but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try.

If I'm going to sit down every writing day, and put in all the hours and effort I do, I won't settle for everyday, practical, inartistic writing.  My life is worth more than that.  I will do everything I can to produce something to the best of my ability, something I'm proud of.

And, even if not one other person sees it or thinks I've created something worthwhile, I will know I have.  In the creation of any art, that's all that matters.  That's all we can hope for.