Anachostic

Whenever you go to an local art or music exhibition, there is a greater than normal chance you are going to be faced with disappointment.  Further, you may be slightly offended that such works of art are foisted upon the unsuspecting public.  And they have the audacity to proclaim themselves as art!  Whenever you encounter one of these events where you must provide your feedback and insight into the quality of the presented medium, there is a simple compliment that you can give that softens the blow.  The art/music is authentic.

I am one of those artists that will offend your finer sense of artistic quality (doing it right now!), but you cannot deny the artistic integrity on display.  And here is a point I want to make about how I approach art.  I create ignorant art.  That is, I do it using my own inherent skills and skills I am able to pick up organically.  In other words, I don’t want to be taught – or more accurately, told – how to do art.

I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year because, you know, I can write, and moreso¹ because AK is the great persuader.  What’s the first thing I get in my email when I sign up?  A bunch of help resources.  Thanks, but no thanks.  I’m going to succeed or fail on my own, you just watch.

And the help never seems to stop.  It’s kind of the same thing with music.  There’s a never-ending list of resources for how to do something.  It’s the case for anything creative, really.  Here’s how to be creative.  You know what?  You either have it or you don’t.  If you don’t have it and all you do is follow how-to’s, you are simply a clone of your teachers.

I’m not saying there’s no room to learn and grow.  I’m saying you can’t be taught how to be creative.  I know that no one can teach me how to have an eye for visual design.  It’s not an ingrained skill for me.  I could have sworn I’d written on this topic before, but I can’t find it.  My memory is a post about how my music compositional style is unique and that uniqueness owes itself to not being formally trained.  The memory also made a point that many musical icons had no training and became genre-defining because they broke the norm.

So, in that spirit, I am beginning a novel with only a plot concept and a couple of characters.  I have no idea how it’s going to end and what will happen between the beginning and end.  At a minimum, I expect it will cause me a lot of trouble with pacing, since I don’t know what will happen and when.  It would suck to unexpectedly get to the end of the story at 20k words.

But, as bad as it may potentially turn out, I can say that my work is authentic.  It will have no influence from “better, more knowledgeable” people whose writing credits are filled with how-to articles.

1. Moreso: from http://grammarist.com/usage/moreso – “…continues to appear despite the disapproval of usage authorities and of spell check.”  Yeah, fuck you, authorities, and you too, spell check.