The Fine Art Of Not Giving A Shit
original article @: http://inabsentia.bloodlettersink.com...
The sad fact is, we do care about what people think. If we didn't, we'd all be standing in the middle of our streets, wearing nothing but dirty underwear, drinking beer and belching. While there may be some of you doing that right at this moment, the sad fact is you probably have a group of friends doing the exact same thing, and thus, you aren't as socially edgy as you think, you've just conformed to the rules of a smellier group than those who use soap on a regular basis. We are, like it or not, just another piece of the machine in social conventions, be they part of a scrubbed executive elite or a fly swatting hobo gathering. There are few places to break free of these shackles, but for the sake of argument let's say the mind is the first haven for all things weird and wicked. Creativity need not have shackles, we've been told from infancy. What happens in nightmares is the stuff you draw inspiration from. It is sometimes a cold, dark cavern from which we draw all of our independent spark, a place where social conventions genuinely don't exist. You can snatch that creative spark up and burn your fingers on it, it's so powerful.
Just ask Henry Darger, one of the most infamous of the outsider art heroes. He wrote a 16,000 page opus dedicated to a story about little girls saving the world from evil blue meanies, and nobody was looking over his shoulder, his creativity had pure, terrifying free reign. He had subtitled it "In The Realms Of The Unreal" in case you didn't get the point the first time. Henry Darger didn't need anyone to give a shit to produce incredible works of art. What he created was made in the void placed between what others expect of you and what you can accomplish without external and internal critics.This was his imagination, completely unfettered, placed in collages and thick reams of paper. Some say he was crazy, but evidence doesn't necessarily point to that. Obsessive about his vision, maybe. He loved his work and he dove inside of it with a passion that, frankly, I find envious.
It's a passion that I find lacking in a lot of mass produced genre books these days. I've tried, but I have to say, writing for the masses is about as exciting as writing liner notes on a CD insleeve for Yawnie, master of the piccolo. Keeping an eye on 'trends' and following what the rote of What Other People Are Doing isn't truly a part of the creative process, in my opinion. Dumping your creative spirit into The Realm Of What Other People Think is like putting shackles on your words. It's easy to get blocked when your true voice is muffled. Let's face it, books written solely for the purpose of mass market happiness, devoid of inspiration, are just sad replicas of everything else. Standing out and talking about something with meaning takes balls. If you write for anyone other than yourself, no matter how brilliant it is, your balls are getting kicked by your own perceptions of that enigmatic group known as Other People. Giving Other People what they want isn't the same as giving them what they need. There's plenty of fluff that says absolutely nothing and leaves you with exactly that long after the words The End are typed. If that's cool by you, great. But if that legacy grates on every last shred of your nerves, going with the crowd isn't for you.
Thus, if going with the crowd isn't your style, then what would happen if you threw out the rulebook and made a WWDD? (What Would Darger Do?)bumper sticker out of black and green neon and placed it front and centre in your creative mind? In other words, what would you write if there were no repurcussions, no criticism, just you and a pen and a piece of paper and Hell boiling its way through your cranium? Admit it--you've done it more than once. There's that little scary piece you wrote hiding in the bottom of your desk drawer like a little moldy boil, the creepiness on its pages too much for Other People to bear. But you like it. You're confident it's the best thing you've ever written. It made your heart burst out in sinewy lines from your chest where the arteries snatched up the keyboard and tore off the keys. Imagine writing like that all the time. You'd have reams and reams of the stuff, you could bath in its inky blood and go mad with joy over it. People have. You'd write it because you don't give a shit and you could care less if Other People read it. Other People had nothing to do with it. They had no power over that work. There are two facts that need to be known--No one is going to like everything you do and secondly, writing doesn't cure cancer. What Other People think is flexible and mutable, as individual as every pimple. It just doesn't matter.
Take the elusive Them, the Other People, the Masses out of the equation of your creative process and free yourself to write authentically. Editing and critical thinking is what comes after you wake up from the dream and take a look at what it gave you. But there is no room for either of those things in the creation stage. Going for external inspiration when the process begins internally is killing your spirit. Get it out of the cage of other people's expectant gaze and set it free. Don't just stand in the middle of the street in your dirty underwear and drink beer and belch, stand there with an alien, Jesus and a fistfull of hogweed. There may be people who disagree with your methods, and certainly there will be some who don't like the point of this article, its font, or the meandering sentences.
Good for them. Myself, I'm practising what I preach. I don't give a shit.
It's a fine art.
The sad fact is, we do care about what people think. If we didn't, we'd all be standing in the middle of our streets, wearing nothing but dirty underwear, drinking beer and belching. While there may be some of you doing that right at this moment, the sad fact is you probably have a group of friends doing the exact same thing, and thus, you aren't as socially edgy as you think, you've just conformed to the rules of a smellier group than those who use soap on a regular basis. We are, like it or not, just another piece of the machine in social conventions, be they part of a scrubbed executive elite or a fly swatting hobo gathering. There are few places to break free of these shackles, but for the sake of argument let's say the mind is the first haven for all things weird and wicked. Creativity need not have shackles, we've been told from infancy. What happens in nightmares is the stuff you draw inspiration from. It is sometimes a cold, dark cavern from which we draw all of our independent spark, a place where social conventions genuinely don't exist. You can snatch that creative spark up and burn your fingers on it, it's so powerful.
Just ask Henry Darger, one of the most infamous of the outsider art heroes. He wrote a 16,000 page opus dedicated to a story about little girls saving the world from evil blue meanies, and nobody was looking over his shoulder, his creativity had pure, terrifying free reign. He had subtitled it "In The Realms Of The Unreal" in case you didn't get the point the first time. Henry Darger didn't need anyone to give a shit to produce incredible works of art. What he created was made in the void placed between what others expect of you and what you can accomplish without external and internal critics.This was his imagination, completely unfettered, placed in collages and thick reams of paper. Some say he was crazy, but evidence doesn't necessarily point to that. Obsessive about his vision, maybe. He loved his work and he dove inside of it with a passion that, frankly, I find envious.
It's a passion that I find lacking in a lot of mass produced genre books these days. I've tried, but I have to say, writing for the masses is about as exciting as writing liner notes on a CD insleeve for Yawnie, master of the piccolo. Keeping an eye on 'trends' and following what the rote of What Other People Are Doing isn't truly a part of the creative process, in my opinion. Dumping your creative spirit into The Realm Of What Other People Think is like putting shackles on your words. It's easy to get blocked when your true voice is muffled. Let's face it, books written solely for the purpose of mass market happiness, devoid of inspiration, are just sad replicas of everything else. Standing out and talking about something with meaning takes balls. If you write for anyone other than yourself, no matter how brilliant it is, your balls are getting kicked by your own perceptions of that enigmatic group known as Other People. Giving Other People what they want isn't the same as giving them what they need. There's plenty of fluff that says absolutely nothing and leaves you with exactly that long after the words The End are typed. If that's cool by you, great. But if that legacy grates on every last shred of your nerves, going with the crowd isn't for you.
Thus, if going with the crowd isn't your style, then what would happen if you threw out the rulebook and made a WWDD? (What Would Darger Do?)bumper sticker out of black and green neon and placed it front and centre in your creative mind? In other words, what would you write if there were no repurcussions, no criticism, just you and a pen and a piece of paper and Hell boiling its way through your cranium? Admit it--you've done it more than once. There's that little scary piece you wrote hiding in the bottom of your desk drawer like a little moldy boil, the creepiness on its pages too much for Other People to bear. But you like it. You're confident it's the best thing you've ever written. It made your heart burst out in sinewy lines from your chest where the arteries snatched up the keyboard and tore off the keys. Imagine writing like that all the time. You'd have reams and reams of the stuff, you could bath in its inky blood and go mad with joy over it. People have. You'd write it because you don't give a shit and you could care less if Other People read it. Other People had nothing to do with it. They had no power over that work. There are two facts that need to be known--No one is going to like everything you do and secondly, writing doesn't cure cancer. What Other People think is flexible and mutable, as individual as every pimple. It just doesn't matter.
Take the elusive Them, the Other People, the Masses out of the equation of your creative process and free yourself to write authentically. Editing and critical thinking is what comes after you wake up from the dream and take a look at what it gave you. But there is no room for either of those things in the creation stage. Going for external inspiration when the process begins internally is killing your spirit. Get it out of the cage of other people's expectant gaze and set it free. Don't just stand in the middle of the street in your dirty underwear and drink beer and belch, stand there with an alien, Jesus and a fistfull of hogweed. There may be people who disagree with your methods, and certainly there will be some who don't like the point of this article, its font, or the meandering sentences.
Good for them. Myself, I'm practising what I preach. I don't give a shit.
It's a fine art.
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