Minding the Muse

By Priscilla Long

Minding the Muse is a practical handbook for the artist or writer—highly experienced, aspiring, or somewhere in between. Long draws from her extensive background as a poet, writer, and master teacher, but also gathers the insights and practices of a wide range of high-achieving artists, including mystery writer Raymond Chandler, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet and performance artist Patti Smith, and the painter Joan Miró. Beginning with the first sparks of artistic creation—“Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing”—Long moves through the various stages to “Completing Works” and “Poet as Peddler, Painter as Pusher: Marketing.” Every creative worker will find something here to take to heart and into the studio or workroom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coffeetown Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781603813648

Priscilla Long

PRISCILLA LONG is a Seattle-based writer, writing teacher, and editor. She is the author of Crossing Over: Poems, The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, and Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Bloody Coal Industry.

Book preview

Minding

the Muse

A Handbook for

Painters, Composers,

Writers, and

Other Creators

Priscilla Long

Smashwords Edition

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Coffeetown Press

PO Box 70515

Seattle, WA 98127

For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

www.priscillalong.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover design by Sabrina Sun

Cover art The Painter’s Hand by Chuck Smart

Minding the Muse

Copyright © 2016 by Priscilla Long

ISBN: 978-1-60381-363-1 (Trade Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-364-8 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939844

Produced in the United States of America

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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* * *

To Geri Gale,

Jack Remick,

and Don Harmon.

To M. Anne Sweet.

To Gordon Wood.

Peerless peer artists

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This thing for which you have sought so long is not to be acquired or accomplished by force or passion. It is to be won only by patience and humility and by a determined and most perfect love.

—Alchemist Morienus, 1593,

quoted by C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Introduction

You are a painter. Or you are a composer. Or you are a poet or a novelist or an essayist. This little book gathers insights from creators both past and present, as well as from creativity researchers, on the experiences and working methods of poets, painters, and other artists.

The choices and strategies of effective creators—creators able to shape a significant body of work over a lifetime—often differ from those of talented and creative people who end up with a small, scattered, or unremarkable pile of effects. Some of these effects may be excellent, but taken as a whole they fall short of the creative worker’s potential.

Over the years I’ve studied the lives of artists and writers from Picasso to Patti Smith, from Raymond Chandler to the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. I’ve wanted to see what I could learn about how they went about their lives and work. I’ve used my own discoveries and those of creativity researchers to inform and improve upon my own strategies as a writer and poet. I find that no matter how experienced I get, there’s something more to learn. Here you have what I’ve gleaned so far.

Whether you are an old hand or just starting out, it can be helpful to reflect from time to time upon your own art practice. What has worked well for you? What could you improve? Minding the Muse is intended to aid you in this process of reflection. If you find here even one or two ideas to fertilize your working process, its purpose will have been served.

Questions to Contemplate as You Continue Your Practice

Peruse these chapters in any order that strikes your fancy. I suggest beginning a notebook in which to reflect on your own art practice. On each subject, begin by describing what the reality is right now, since our efforts to move forward must necessarily proceed from a good comprehension of reality. Write for ten minutes on your present situation (My current situation with regard to — is …). Do not stop. Do not worry about correctness or eloquence. Then write for five more minutes in response to the question: How can I make my practice in this area more effective by 5 percent?

First session: Write for ten minutes, looking in on your art practice from the outside. What do you see? In your own terms, what are your most effective habits and strategies? What could use work?

I.

Productivity: Learning to Work

I am a work horse. I like to work. I always did …. I’ve never had a day when I didn’t want to work …. And even if I didn’t want to compose … I painted or stacked the pieces or something. In my studio I’m as happy as a cow in her stall.i

—Louise Nevelson, sculptor

Learning to work is about learning to sink into the work. Learning to be patient with the work. Learning to work every day, even if only for a short time. Learning to eschew distractions.

Learning to work is learning to drop conditions under which you can work or will work. Conditions like When I get more time or If this novel ‘works’ [meaning gets published and makes me rich and famous], then I will write another. Or, I can only work when I can get a block of three or four hours.

Work begets work. When we learn to simply work—without fuss, without undue anxiety, without trepidation concerning whether we will create the masterpiece of our dreams or fail to create this masterpiece—the work begins to carry the worker. It begins to make itself.

For the disciplined creative worker, working is not a decision or a big effort. It’s a daily habit, a routine. In her book The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp writes, I come down on the side of hard work.ii In 1920 the painter Joan Miró wrote to a friend, "I am working as much as I can. People who have managed to do something have followed different paths, but they have never deviated from hard work."iii

Work can be trouble and no fun and seem to go nowhere. One of the effective strategies of effective creative workers is to keep working anyhow. At the age of thirty-three (in 1935), the great Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti decided to begin working from a live model once again. He estimated that this departure from his current practice would take about two weeks. But, he wrote to a friend, the more I looked at the model, the more the screen between reality and myself thickened. You begin by seeing the person who is posing, but gradually every possible sculpture interposes itself between the sitter and you. The less clearly you actually see the model, the more unknown the head becomes.iv His two-week digression ended up lasting five years.

Another time, at the end of 1941, Giacometti decided to return to Switzerland from his home in Paris to see his mother. He planned a stay of three months. His sculptures, to his distress, had been growing smaller and smaller. Before leaving Paris, he promised his brother Diego that he would return with a sculpture of a less absurd size. A larger sculpture.

Three months