Showing your work

There's a question I've been meaning to raise for a while, but I've put it off because I couldn't suggest an answer. Then in last week's post, I sort of stumbled on a partial answer, so I'll go ahead and raise the question.

With the advent of internet celebrity and, perhaps, the "maker revolution," there seems to me to be a trend toward audiences wanting to see the work that goes into art. I first noticed this when my sister introduced me to the music duo Pomplamoose. Specifically, she showed me this video:

 

Pomplamoose's videos are brilliant, but they are the opposite of "slick" (meaning, in this case, apparently effortless, hiding the mechanisms behind the finished product). In fact they go out of their way to make sure you understand what they're doing so you can appreciate it.* You can see the same idea at work in their "video song" music videos, where they scrupulously show you the origin of all the sounds they use in the song:

 

I know that music like this tended to be a sort of blur to me: whole instrumental tracks could play without me realizing I was hearing them. I imagine lots of people experience music similarly. Playing Guitar Hero 2 was a revelation for me, and after that I started being able to tease out the lead, rhythm, and bass guitar parts in songs I was listening to. By the same token, I can hear more going on in Pomplamoose's songs because they signaled for me to listen for them.

So musicians can show the components of their songs. Visual artists can record videos of their progress for fans. I had trouble figuring out how writers could take advantage of the same phenomenon. Surely no one would want to watch me write live--it would be sort of like reading a finished piece, except only a few words would appear every minute.

Neil Gaiman has at least a partial solution, I realized. Like I talked about last week, his writing lets the reader see his work of recombining familiar elements. It brings readers closer to the actual process of writing, which is more about arranging ideas than simply having them. It dispels the hazardous myth that writers just conceive their ideas in perfect completeness and then write them down (a process which I suspect many people imagine takes no more time than reading).

I shouldn't be resentful, but the art-as-magic myth doesn't do anyone any favors. As my friend Elinor Diamond pointed out recently, writing is work. The writers of yesteryear worked hard to give the impression that they weren't working hard. Some of them flat-out lied about their writing process in order to make themselves seem like some sort of word-wizards.

The dynamics are changing, and wizardry doesn't pay anymore. The process is becoming part of the product. I'm sure there's more to this puzzle than I have figured out.

* Even in their more out-there videos, they eschew a reaction of "how did they do that?" in favor of a "I can't believe they did that."