![I like this blog to be exclusively original content, but I wanted to share this with my readers. It’s a graph depicting artists’ capabilities over time (red line) and the perception of their capabilities over time (black line). Pretty damn accurate, and a nice reminder that as long as you keep doing whatever it is you create, you are going to get better.
I think pretty highly of myself and my abilities, otherwise I wouldn’t be pursuing this career at my age, but I recognize that there is a lot of room to improve, and I’m looking forward to the books and stories I’ll one day write.
billdixoncomedy:
Growing As An Artist
By Bill Dixon
80% of the emails I receive through this website go as follows:
Q: No matter how hard I try I feel like I will never be a good [writer, musician, painter, cook, burlesque dancer, comedian, tap dancer, juggler, misogynist, cow tipper, cat collector, etc.] I really want to be good but I just feel like I will never get there. Did you go through a crisis of confidence? What should I do?
A:
The photo above represents a theory I have about artists:
Let (X) represent time in years (left to right: 0-10)
Let (Y) represent how awesome you are at your particular art form (bottom to top: “Someone please drown me in a urinal” to “I’m Awesome!)
The orange line represents the rate at which a majority of artists grow into their art form, or the Generalized Artistic Growth Rate.
The black line represents the artist’s perception of his or her art, or the Perceptive Rate of Growth.
So what does this mean to the aspiring artist?
If you think you are an amazing and talented individual, chances are you have not been participating in your artistic community for very long.
I call it the, “Dude, I could totally do that” phenomenon. It occurs in art galleries, restaurants, concert halls, and comedy clubs across the planet every day. Someone watching, listening to, tasting, or experiencing a piece of art leans over to a friend and says, “I could totally do that.”
“I could totally do that” is Day Zero. Now Day 1 is an important day:
Day 1 is the day you realize you don’t know what the fuck the word “aperture” means.
Day 1 is the day you figure out not to wear your nice jeans when you use oil paints.
Day 1 is the day you are holding an acoustic guitar over your head trying to bounce the pick out of the body for the 10th time that day.
Day 1 is the day you are scanning the thesaurus for synonyms for “happy.”
Day 1 is the day you realize most chefs don’t use microwaves.
Day 1 is the day you realize beat matching is fucking impossible.
Day 1 is the day you realize Photoshop takes up an unbelievable amount of space on your hard drive.
Day 1 is the day you gasp in horror when you find out how much the fluid head tripod for your video camera is going to cost.
Day 1 is the day you realize that you are not holding the microphone close enough to your face and it’s no matter because no one is laughing at your AIDS joke anyway.
Day 1 is the day you realize that those male ballet dancer “fags” could dead lift your Honda Civic.
Day 1 is the day you realize “I can totally do that” is an unbelievably naive statement.
Now the horrible irony, the overwhelming, earth shattering, bat shit crazy irony is there is only one statement that can get you to Day 2.
“Dude…I can totally do that.”
So if you think your work is shitty and contrived, and for some reason you still wake up with that nagging voice in your head saying, “I could totally do that,” I would say you are on the right track.
Read more Dangatorium Popular](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyn9hteqap1qg121vo1_1280.jpg)
I don’t think there’s a way that the statistic could ever be found; does art imitate life more often than life imitates art? I haven’t cared to Google it, but maybe someone who reads this will type the words into a search bar and actually come across a website that has neatly organized the information into an easy-to-navigate website with plenty of links to references. The numbers exist somewhere, two columns side-by-side, continuously updating themselves. And I’m sure we’ll find them some day.
Until then, I’m here to expand on the side which I believe is in the lead (although I don’t have any evidence yet): art imitating life. More specifically, in my case, fiction imitating life.
When I was 19 or so, I let a friend go through the notebook in which I scrawled all my 19-year-old thoughts. Where has my fiction gone? I wrote into one of the pages, wondering why it was that not even a single story had invaded my pen in months. Knowing I was open to receiving feedback on the thoughts I send out into the world, my friend answered my question in her much more interesting handwriting in the margins of my notebook: Fiction comes from life. Go live.
I feel transferring life into fiction is not only inevitable, but rather the only reason why I have fiction at all: I want to take life and put it into words. But in fiction, I can make something happen to life which wouldn’t ever happen to it at all. I can have a watch that tells me how many people are thinking of me, or I can turn a car blue when it was actually red, just because the word ‘blue’ was more lyrical in the sentence it ended up in.
In fiction, I can combine the characteristics of two entirely different friends of mine in order to create a character named Jesse. Though the two people he is based on in real life are characters in and of themselves, each suited to be main characters in their own novel, in fiction I can mend them together into who I need to tell my story.
There’s some danger in doing that. Everyone knows that writers throw real life into their fiction. We give characters names that begin with the same letter as the people that inspired them. We write about what actually happened, barely cloaked in a slightly different setting with an entirely different ending. The danger is that a writer knows where the line is between fiction and life- even if it’s blurry and thin and wavers in the slightest wind- but the readers don’t.
The fear of having fiction misinterpreted as truth is (and should be) a backseat passenger in the journey of writing. But it’s there, warning me that the real life inspiration for a character whose death I’m about to write will know it’s them that I’m killing off, and they’ll be devastated when the thought that I didn’t want them around longer enters their head. Or I’ll write a true event into a fictional person and the real life person with whom I lived through that event will assume that the entire character is based around them and they’ll wonder why I changed their gender, why the main character (who sounds a hell of a lot like real life me) is in love with them.
Fiction is powerful because readers, particularly those that the writer knows, have no way to distinguish what’s real from what’s fictional in the writer’s mind.
This is just a teaser post meant to lure you into reading my guest post over at Thinking Too Hard, where I expanded on the topic and focused in on the wavering line between fiction and life when writing about sex, relationships and love. Check back soon for a link to that post.
