Before the sun came up, after her children were asleep, Toni Morrison got out of bed, walked over to her desk and began writing. Stephen King wrote on a child’s small desk in a trailer. In the basement of the Powell Library, Ray Bradbury inserted coins into a typewriter to write Fahrenheit 451. These routines have been used by many writers to set their daily routines. I have also been that writer. When I’m busy working on a long book, I give myself a stern pep talk every morning when the alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m.:
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“Toni Morrison didn’t become great because she slept. Stephen King would never have written salem’s lot If he doesn’t get out of bed. RL Stine hasn’t been publishing for decades because he likes the warmth under the covers. Octavia Butler…” And so on, listing writers I admire until I can pull myself up so I can write for a few hours.
It’s not just writers whose methods I emulate. In fact, I sometimes find routines for other types of artists more useful. At the very least, they feel less like I’m denigrating myself and more like I’m giving myself the freedom to create and experiment.
I spent a day wandering through the woods as Mozart, thinking about my work and the world. I’ve hacked my stories to see what weird creations they would become if I rearranged things – a bit like David Bowie. Exploring these new ways of creating has helped me maintain the creative fire inside dance. And on the days when my brain gets jammed and idle, they’ve helped me find my way back to my stories.
One artist who has influenced many people with the way he creates and presents his art is Prince. The prince was… well, the prince was everything. He was a songwriter behind his own and others’ hit songs (Nothing Compares 2U, Purple Rain, Manic Monday Just to name a few). In addition, he was a talented guitarist, drummer and keyboardist. Among songwriters, he is known as more than just a hit maker or musical genius but a powerhouse.
According to Susan Rogers, Prince’s longtime engineer, Prince spent long (18+) hours in the studio. He wanted to go with a song in his mind and go through with a complete recording. Prince had the hard-earned skill of knowing how to play multiple instruments, so he was able to move from singing to playing and then composing. However he often worked in a structured manner, laying down specific instrument tracks at a time before moving on to the next instrument.
It is believed that Prince used to write one song a day. To accomplish this output, he was not a perfectionist but a creator. He knew and trusted his methods and knowledge of music. Part of his genius was to allow himself to play and experiment. To come to a standstill. His talent and skills will take care of the rest.
As writers, we can translate his methodology by thinking not in word count goals or chapter count but in terms of our time. Each aspect of our stories creates a whole and the only way to reach that whole story is to build on the individual elements that make it up. The next time you sit down to write, target a specific element of the story you’re working on. Is it introducing a new character, setting the right atmosphere in a scene, or something else? Then layer what you need element by element – don’t focus on perfection, but on completeness.
Exploring these new ways of creating has helped me maintain the creative fire inside dance. And on the days when my brain gets jammed and idle, they’ve helped me find my way back to my stories.
Prince’s approach to completing a task in one work session may seem overwhelming to some people and that’s okay! You don’t have to do what he did. You can explore the world of design and building to find a way into your story and craft.
Are you an architect or a gardener? If you’ve never heard of this division, it’s like a plotter or a painter. Cook or cook. When it comes to writing, architects are those who plan and create their stories before they start writing. Gardeners, on the other hand, work by intuition. He doesn’t draw so much as plant trees and see what grows from his writings. Architect Zaha Hadid and gardener Gertrude Jekyll aren’t your typical architects or gardeners as they’ve drawn from other disciplines. Mainly, painting. This ability to allow other disciplines to influence his work is what sets him apart and what he can teach us even today.
Hadid was an Iranian painter and architect from Baghdad, whose buildings can be described as still-moving pieces of art. She was known as an abstract builder who believed that buildings could appear exactly as they impressed. To create her structures, Hadid surveyed the land, working to deeply know her subject’s landscape through analysis and mapping of the future project and its materials. After this analysis and pre-production, Hadid began her memorable, stunning sketches. Despite the data and analysis, Hadid’s sketches were abstract and thought in terms of how nature (wind, sand, a bird’s wing) bends around space and how buildings can do the same.
Hadid’s process and way of looking at the world challenged what we knew about how materials could work together. Hadid’s work challenges us as writers to think about what we can do with story and narrative. What if our settings were sounds only? Our plot banishes shape-shifting characters from the page? What creative doors does that kind of thinking open for our work?
While Hadid worked by combining nature’s structures with artificial materials, Gerturde Jekyll created her landscape designs by thinking about colors and the changes of the seasons. Jekyll was interested in the play of light and color in his garden designs. It evolved from his early life as a painter. He used his skills of composition to view gardens as more than landscapes but as living art, which was unprecedented at the time. he wrote a book Color Schemes for Flower Garden It teaches gardeners how to design their beds and landscapes using an amazing range of colors and borders, creating landscapes that change as you move.
Before becoming a gardener, Jekyll was a painter and traveled with artists to study and learn their art. His work as a painter included performing the artist’s copywork version and repeatedly painting Joseph Mallord William Turner’s ‘The Fighting Temeraire’, learning its brilliant use of color and movement. This understanding of color and how it works together allowed Jekyll to see how plants could do the same to create a picture from a landscape.
As writers, we can learn from Jekyll the power of elements working together by studying the elements in front of us. Copywork is a long-standing writing practice that many writers use to closely study how great works are put together word by word. An exercise to try: Choose a piece of writing that is doing what you want to do in your work, not what you believe you can or will never achieve and write it – either longhand or on the keyboard. Study each line. Question how this leads to the next. How do the paragraphs flow from one to the next? The emotions it evokes. Then translate what you’ve learned into your work.
Georgia O’Keeffe is another artist whose process I have sometimes tried to translate into writing. O’Keeffe remained committed to her daily routine, which changed throughout her life. In New Mexico, she was an early riser and spent the first hour of the day walking through the desert to get closer to the subjects of her paintings. Because she painted so many landscapes and portraits of the natural or artificial world around her, O’Keeffe allowed the world around her, its lines and compositions, to romance her and inspire her. Walking. Watching. suppose. And then he recreated to the best of his ability what he saw and how it made him feel.
O’Keeffe was so dedicated to the task of visualizing and conveying those scenes and emotions that she would zoom in on series or paintings based on photographs, such as her series “Jack-in-the-Pulpit.” This commitment to performance is not new to writers. We work tirelessly to create experiences and images in the minds of our readers.
Taking a page from O’Keeffe’s faithful routine and process, try writing a scene or excerpt from your story in a series, and get close to the heart and emotions of the scene. O’Keeffe did not mind working at a slow pace and focused on her intention for her painting. canvas size. The brush she used to create almost invisible finite strokes. It was all an intention and choice on his part. More and more, under the falling weight of capitalism, writers are forgetting intention and trading it for publication – what sells, what’s popular, what’s trending. We rush toward the shrinking finish line instead of taking a breath, stopping, and stepping back to look at our work and what we’re really trying to convey to our readers. Then slowly, deliberately doing it not for anyone else but the reader and yourself.
The final artist I want to consider is one I’ve only learned about in the last year: Jerrod Impeachhatchaha’ Tate. Tate is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and a classical musician, known for combining classical composition with indigenous storytelling, language structure and musicality to create a distinctive style of indigenous classical music.
Tate’s process is one of community. He often reaches out to family members, friends and people from other tribes to hear their stories and talk with them about the themes addressed through the piece. Tate seeks to communicate his work not only with other musical pieces, but with the communities he is speaking to and interacting with. Tate then dives into the construction and logistics of the piece. Who is he composing for and what instruments are available to him?
One of the most powerful things that Tate’s process has shown me is a way of writing stories that doesn’t exclude people but welcomes them in. I, like many writers, write for myself, but when it comes time to publish, I don’t want my stories to alienate, gatekeep, or push out readers as anything other than myself. The next time you’re about to start a new story or are stuck, instead of closing the door and shutting out the world, pick up the phone, leave your house, and let the world in.
Tate and the other artists here can teach us to listen, to slow down, to look with our hearts, and to create in the same way, fully and passionately. This way, perhaps, we can reach someone in this noise and suffering.
