DAY TWENTY THREE

"Know your lines and try not to bump into the furniture."

The above quote is one of those which seems to have many origins. I know it as advice given by a grand old man of the theatre to a novice actor, as a traditionally trained British stage actor to an American method actor, and as self-deprecating comment by Noel Coward on his own approach to acting.

It comes to mind as I've been thinking about the ratio of words written about any given activity compared with the doing of the activity itself. This blog is one infintesmally small example of what I mean - it adds a weight of words, and however much I try to avoid it, analysis, about activities which are best experienced in the doing, or in the appreciating. Words, albeit the main means by which we might communicate about experience, tend to get in the way of the more direct experiences of doing, looking, feeling, touching, using or even wearing, all of which are possible with crafts.

In particular I have been thinking about the number of writers - at all stages of career and development - who write about their own writing - what they are writing, what they are going to be writing, the struggles they are having with writing, with a plotline, a character, a scene, their WIP (work in progress) as a whole. This seems particularly prevalent among unpublished authors and one might speculate they may in part be trying to boost their confidence, or find their way through the inevitable problems of a creative process.

You don't hear so much about painters painting about their painting, or woodworkers working something in wood about the thing they are making in wood; unlikely but not wholly unfeasible in both cases. From my experience I can say that to make something in wood other than the thing you are intending to make is simply prevarication and a colossal waste of making time. Admittedly some work may require a model or mockup, many sculptors develop their ideas with maquettes, artists may do preliminary sketches and so on, all as a necessary part of the process, what some people (I think inelegantly) refer to as 'throat clearing'.

I do wonder whether some of this writing about one's own writing serves to block the writer's voice rather than clear their throat, however. There can be too much analysis, too much introspection, too much concern for the craft of writing, to the idea of being a writer, as opposed to the doing of writing itself. The same can be said of any craft, art or skill. 

For my money there is a fine line between wanting to share one's struggle with, (or indeed one's curiosity about), a piece of work and a performative projection of oneself as a writer. The same could be said for makers in all kinds of fields. Even for writers of blogs. It is something else to ponder.

I'll leave the last line to the author who once said words to the effect that, "Most people want to say they have written, but they don't want to have to write."

Onwards...quietly.          

Picture credit: Jamillah Knowles, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons (I actually had one of these typwriter toys. It did nothing to encourage the young writer in me, taking as it did about a minute-per-single-letter to type anything, and the result was often a smudged, crooked, indecipherable blob of greyness).