The Thursday! Newsletter 1-41: What's in Your Artistic Calzone?
Volume 1, Issue 41
I think of creative people as cooks.
Does that sound weird? I admit it looks odd sitting there on the screen. Of course, cooks are creative people, though they work in a medium that swings wildly from art to science depending on who is doing the work. I'm not disparaging any cooks out there, so please do put the sharp kitchen implements away. What I'm suggesting is a creative work comes together very much like a recipe. Making art -- and here I'll deal mostly with writing because, as you should have figured out by now, that's what I do -- requires ingredients, preparation, mixing, and a little heat and/or pressure. How you get those is up to you. You can, if you like, work to a formula. Or not.
What you can't do is skimp on your ingredients. And that's what I want to talk about this week.
Lately, I've taken to writing poetry more "seriously"; that is, I'm looking at more than rhyme and meter to structure what I write. Thanks to a recent Billy Collins Masterclass and some reading of my own, my poems are looking and sounding different. They rhyme, but in different places. The lines flow differently and their rhythms beat different times. The imagery is sometimes less "on the nose". That's not to say my poems are all serious business. They're not. One I wrote last week that I have tucked away for later involves gifts from a certain hornball Greek God. I'm changing the forms of my poetry, at least for a while, to be a better poet.
In cooking terms, I've set stews aside in favor of soufflés and delicate desserts...or something else. We'll get to that.
That doesn't mean I've changed the essential "me"-ness of what I write. The sound and feel of my poems should sound and feel like my stories because I'm using the same ingredients. I take things I see or things I feel or scraps of conversation I've heard or bits of a song and I...prepare them. I cut and season things. I mash things. I scald things or freeze them or dredge them in something else entirely. Sometimes I even toss them in raw (see, as an example, my poem about August, linked in the next section). This is how every creative person makes what they make. They take the things available to them, slice and dice them, mix them with other things, cook them in the fires of their imagination, then serve them up to hungry and interested people. How they get from the taking to the serving is up to them. You use whatever formula (or recipe) you want.
Your ingredients, though, have to be good. They have to be real. If you want to bring anger to a work, you need to have some of that at hand. You have to get it from somewhere, not matter how far into your past you have to go. If you want me to love a character, you need to make that character lovable. I won't love a puppet or construct. I'll only love a person. Your character needs to be a person, real and harvested from your experiences -- someone you saw or heard or knew or were. All the things you add to a story, even if they're based on other people or places you've met or loved or hated or just read about, are best when they also come with some part of you.
Quality ingredients, right? Don't cheap out. Act like a top-notch chef at a top-notch restaurant and look for the best ingredients for your work. Keep your ears and eyes open. Jot down notes. Take pictures. Repeat a conversation you heard into the voice recording app of your phone. Make a sketch. Write down that raw feeling you had before you have time to smooth it over and fade it into the past.
This is important. It is the difference between "okay" and great. It is the difference between diffidence and passion. It is fire and spice and depth and life. Even more, when you have a bunch of good ingredients, whatever you make will be good even if it doesn't look quite good. Like a calzone. Ever had one? If not, you should. The best calzones, in my opinion, are stuffed with homemade meatballs crumbled up with chopped green peppers and tasty tomato sauce. Lots of good spices. Throw in some thick pepperoni, too. Cook it low and slow in a crust sturdy enough to hold it all safely until you cut it open and get that near-divine whiff of oooooohhhhhhhh my yes.
The thing about calzones, though, is they aren't very pretty. I mean, sure, you can put a lot of time into prettying them up, but you don't need to. The party is inside! That's what you're after when you start creating things. Maybe they aren't so pretty on the outside, but the ingredients are *chef's kiss* and you cooked them perfectly. Folks will forgive cosmetic imperfections if you make them sigh with longing at the merest whiff of what you've made for them.
Good ingredients give you time to be good sooner rather than later. Folks will forgive the structural issues with your stories, if they fall in love with your characters or a setting. Let me give you a slightly off-kilter example. I love Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (the first two trilogies at least) even though I utterly despise Thomas Covenant. He is the worst protagonist I've ever read. He is stubborn beyond all logic and reason, his decisions don't make human sense, and even his victories seem passive and weak. However, Donaldson wrote the most amazing setting I've ever read in a fantasy stories. I love The Land and I enjoy visiting it once a year, even if it means I have to deal with Covenant and his ridiculous atrocities. I don't think Donaldson's stories come to particularly good resolutions, as if he hasn't quite figured out how to write a decent ending. Still, The Land. I can't help myself. He filled his books with such good ingredients that I even overlook the one huge spoiled thing he tossed in and some soggy, saggy construction.
Imagine how much better a story you will write when you work on making the outside of your story as good as the inside. Imagine how happy your readers will be when the structure of your story is as sharp and tangy as the delicious ingredients inside. Imagine having the time to make your calzone look as good as it will taste. That's what quality ingredients allows you -- time. Time to learn. Time to improve. Time to build an audience of people who have begun to love what you do even as you get better at doing it. That's the advantage to using quality ingredients every time.
And that's what I'm up to with my poems right now. I know they aren't pretty. That'll come the more I learn. I'll learn the recipes of my art. I'll earn the fancy white hat and the five-star accolades in time. Right now, I'm putting the tastiest things into the best literary treat I can and you're invited to dig in. I want you to start to love my poems (and my stories, too. Don't forget them!) even as I'm learning how to write them well.
What are you cooking up, huh? Let's share our calzones!
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What I Wrote and Read This Week
"The Manuscript" is a tale about, well, a tale!
"August Sucks" is my ode to a month I do not like.
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One More Thing
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