A short post-vacation something

As I lay down for a post-church nap today, I had (what I felt at the time was) a great idea for a blog post. I assured myself that I would remember it when I woke up. I'm sure I've lost many ideas this way.

There are two reasons I didn't have a post up last Sunday. The first is that I spent last weekend at a house in another state where I had access to most of my friends but not the internet. That's only half an excuse, though, because I had meant to post this video as a filler and instead I, um, didn't.

Anyway you might have seen this already because it's not new, but Neil Gaiman (noted fantasy author who writes whatever the hell he wants, mostly) and Kazuo Ishiguro (noted literary author who also writes more or less whatever the hell he wants) got together recently on the radio and talked about the breakdown of genre boundaries. If you've got 10 minutes it's worth a listen.

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."

Creativity in recombination: authors and earthworms

I recently had the pleasure of reading Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and, unrelatedly, some keen analysis of the "canon" of Star Wars from the perspective of 1979, and, still more unrelatedly, some engaging discussion of the soil of the New World in Charles C. Mann's 1493. It has all reminded me that there is, truly, nothing new under the sun, but you can do amazing things with a blender nonetheless.

Let's talk about The Graveyard Book. It's meant as a children's story, about a boy named Nobody who grows up in a graveyard, is raised by ghosts, and has bildungsromantic adventures with ghouls and other spooky creatures. It felt like a fresh story to me, even though you might not think it has a right to. It is, after all, an unapologetic rehash of Kipling's The Jungle Book. While Kipling's not exactly fresh in my mind, I recognized one chapter that drew thoroughly on Mowgli's encounter with the monkeys (for structure) and on H.P. Lovecraft (for everything else).

But that's Neil Gaiman's shtick. He has spent his life filling his head so full of mythologies and legendaria that he can hardly sneeze without producing a novel combination of archetypes. (Part of) what makes Gaiman so much fun is that he makes no attempt to hide his sources. In a sense, he lets you see how his creativity happened because if you recognize at least some of the elements he's drawing on, you can trace for yourself how he combines them. And that is creativity, or at least a large part of it.

While I'm at it Star Wars, as much as it's praised, deserves more credit than it normally gets for putting new skins on old archetypes. There was no reason for George Lucas et al. to hide the similarities between Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress, The Dam Busters (apparently the origin of the "Death Star Trench Run"), or Buck Rogers. The combination itself was novel enough to be something new.

Essentially, much of what we celebrate as great creativity is the work of earthworms: churning culture's litter of old ideas into a fertile topsoil. Which isn't to belittle it at all--that churning turns used-up stories into fresh ones.