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Monthly Archives: November 2013

Writer’s Block and Root Canals

07 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by Jay Magidson in books, fiction, writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Castaway, fiction, meditation, root canal, tom hanks, Writer's block, Writing

Lately I have been somewhat stymied by writer’s block.  Not in all my writing, just with my fiction stuff.  It happens sometimes and I don’t take it too seriously.  I give it a break and work on other things.  And when I’m back, I’m usually better for the time off.

A few days ago, I had a third surgery on the same tooth in three years.  The patient refuses to get better or die quietly.  So the Oral Surgeon is using heroic measures to save it.  He is more tenacious than I would be.  All I can think of is that scene in “Castaway” where Tom Hanks uses an ice-skate for his dental work.  I should be grateful, right?  Swollen cheek and a rack of stitches in my gum is pretty minor compared to that.  But pain tends to focus the mind and good ideas are starting to come out again.  I’m ready to write.  Or more accurately, I am writing again.

Writer’s block is one of those strange events that happens to all writers, and in many forms.  For me, it is not so much not being able to write at all.  I’m always able to put words on paper, but the words that come out are trash and uninspired.  I read back over what I’ve written and cringe.  It just sucks.  I’m not really sure if it is actually that bad.  Maybe it’s just my perception of my own writing that sucks. Or I’m just being ultra-critical of my own work.  Anyway, I don’t like it, and I can’t keep writing, so I stop.  My real problem is that my objectivity is gone, my love of the work is on vacation.

I’ve learned not to push during these times, but also not to wait too long either.  A week is a break, two weeks is an extended vacation with nagging guilt about piled up work, a month is a layoff delivered from an angry boss, and anything over a month is just self-pity.  And nothing is as ugly as self-pity.  Work is always the solution to unemployment.

Ever try meditation?  It works wonders for anything involving self-fill-in-the-blank.  The ideas tend to come when they’re not forced.  Like playful kittens, run after them and you will never catch them, but dangle a string and they’ll grab on like the living Velcro strips that they are.  Meditation is dangling the string.  One’s goal is to stop thinking, to quiet the mind.  Of course the mind hates that and starts laying out all kinds of goodies at the altar.  Well, if you’re going to offer such treats, it would be rude not to taste a few.  So pretty soon I’m writing again and everything is good.

As for the tooth, I’ve almost forgotten it’s there.  Almost.

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From Art to Author

01 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by Jay Magidson in books, fiction, Sartre, writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

books, Bruegel, Falkner, fiction, Hugo, Kafka, Maugham, museums, on Writing, visual, Writing

I grew up with art, was surrounded by it, breathed it.  My father is an art dealer, so our house became an annex for his San Francisco art gallery.  At ten I took a book of Bruegel etchings from his bookshelf and began the laborious task of copying the images.  If you are not familiar with Brueghel, his works are similar to Hieronymus Bosch, lots of strange little characters with animal heads and creepy figures crawling out of eggs.  It is a child’s dream (nightmare) of strange creatures and imagination.  I still love his work.

It was then that I decided to be an artist, to draw great works.  Not painting, drawing, I loved the line and shading.  So I continued copying other artists and kept it up until high school.  By this time in my life I’d probably been to more museums and art galleries than all my classmates combined.  But something inside fizzled.  I didn’t want to be an artist anymore; the fire had burned itself out.

Don’t get me wrong, I still loved art, always will.  It’s like a second blood supply for me.  But the fire to create it had gone out.  During this same period, I had been reading, reading a lot, fiction and science fiction mostly.  There wasn’t really such a thing as young adult fiction at this time.  There were just books that were a little easier for teenagers to read.  I would find a writer that I liked, then consume every book he or she wrote.  Clark, Asimov, Heinlein, H. G. Wells, Bradbury, Maugham, Golding, Salinger, and many more.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but all those words sunk in, shaped my mind and eventually, my desire to create.

OfHumanBondage.jpg

Strangely enough, I studied business in college.  Oh it was tedious and awful as you would expect for an art lover.  To make it bearable, I took lots of literature classes, Shakespeare, poetry – no business students in there.  In my junior year, just as I was ready to drop out, I received a letter inviting me into the foreign exchange program.  I grabbed it like a life-preserver to a drowning student, and spent my final year studying in Copenhagen, Denmark, then traveling around Europe.  Wonderful experience, I recommend it to all students, drowning or not.

What a crazy thing life is, somehow everything comes around to be exactly what it was supposed to be from the beginning.  After college, I followed in my father’s steps, becoming an art dealer and later a gallery owner.  During this time, I wrote lots of things, mostly business related stuff, copy for ads and PR.  Then I tried my hand at essays.  I was invited by the editor of the Aspen Daily News to write a weekly column about art.  I was given plenty of rope with which to hang myself.

I have never studied writing, had only a general idea about journalism.  But why should that stop me.  Unafraid, I just wrote about what I thought would be interesting.  The articles were stupid sometimes, one was about art that had killed people (falling sculptures and poisonous paint), but sometimes it was very deep, a two part article about the Nazi plundering of artwork in Europe.  I got plenty of good feedback, people liked my stories and I kept it up for about two years.  Then the pressures of time and the demands of my art gallery forced me to quit.

But I didn’t stop writing.  Fiction has always been my love.  Sure, I love great science fiction, but my real love is 19th (and early 20th) Century literature, Dickens, Tolstoy, Melville, Falkner, Twain, Hugo, Kafka and dozens of other.  It is difficult sometimes, paragraphs that span pages, descriptions that go into minute detail, but they are always rich with meaning and discovery.  These giants could write.  Great literature is the equivalent of seeing a great painting.  That sigh that is released from your soul when you realize you are witnessing genius.

File:Ebcosette.jpg

So here I am, putting the two things together, art and writing.  Sure, I could write about art, I still do that, but that is not really what I mean.  Art has taught me how to see, how to imagine a scene, the characters, the situation unfolding in my mind.  When I write, I literally see everything happening in the story and just describe it on paper.  Many readers have commented how visual my writing is.  I don’t see how it could be otherwise, that’s where it comes from.

Like I said earlier, life has a way of putting us on the path meant for us.  I guess I should have gotten a degree in literature, studied writing, but it didn’t happen that way.  I learned to write by reading (still do) and how to see by viewing and making art.  Regrets are for the dead.  This is how it is and I’m grateful I get to do what I love.

Even if it took a few extra decades…

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