Happy anniversary!

And goodbye.

Okay. Not really goodbye.

But today is the one year anniversary of this blog. (Cake!)

When I set out, I wasn’t sure I could manage a daily blog for six weeks let alone six months. When I made it to the six month mark, I wondered if I could manage a year.

When I hit the three-quarter mark, I realized that the mental overhead of coming up with something to write every day for the rest of my life and then writing it was probably not really how I wanted to be spending my time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do hope to be writing most days, if not all, for the rest of my life. But I have decided that is more likely to happen if I turn my attention back to fiction or playwriting and away from blogging.

I’m not closing down the blog.

I’ve enjoyed doing it.

I’ve enjoyed the feedback I’ve gotten, and I’ve loved having subscribers. Even if some of you are ignoring the daily invasion of your inbox—(I know, I’ve subscribed to some blogs, too. There isn’t always time to read them all)—I have enjoyed the feeling that we are communicating. It has been a privilege to be allowed to enter there.

Thank you for your attention.

The blog will stay open. I just won’t be posting daily. You may not hear from me for days, weeks, months. But, who knows? If I have something to say, I’ll speak up.

If you’ve signed up for the RSS feed or the email subscription, you’ll know when that happens.

The rest of you are welcome to subscribe now or pop back in here from time to time to check.

It’s been fun! I’m proud to know that I managed it 365 days in a row.

So here is the final entry for Smith Sundays.

Elaine Smith—once upon a time, she wrote a blog post every day for a whole year!

Don’t tell me it’s not time for cake!

3.14…..

life of pi

Maybe you’ve already seen the movie?

I understand it did rather well. And I hear that it is visually spectacular. Having been directed by Ang Lee, I don’t doubt that. Nor do I doubt that it is as faithful as possible to the novel.

I haven’t seen the movie yet. I am going to put it at the top of my list, though. And I’m going to use this Friday Find post to tell you that the book is is a FIND.

If you haven’t read life of pi, get thee to a library. Or a bookstore.

This novel is a work of art, destined to be a classic.

A sea story, an adventure yarn, a word painting, a philosophical fascination.

Author Yann Martel has pulled off a miracle.

Compelling plot, beautiful prose, ideas to linger and provoke thought.

This is one of those books that is both dangerous and inspirational to those of us trying to be writers. The inspiration comes from the illustration of what’s possible, the dangling carrot of poetry and plot. The danger comes from the very well-founded fear that I am not capable of transcending my limitations and achieving something close to this.

The hope lies in the story itself.

Pi transcended his limitations.

Maybe we can, too.

Cognitive surplus

And what’s next?

I’ve been reading Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. I haven’t finished it yet, and I haven’t processed it fully. Maybe I don’t fully understand it.

But the idea that new technology has fostered new methods of collaboration is certainly something I’ve experienced for myself working on creative projects with people around the globe.

The idea that it has altered the way we market our creativity is also one I recognize. One, too, that comes up frequently in the work of Seth Godin, one of my favorite bloggers.

Traditional publishing methods of the book and music industries, while still in existence, are losing ground to the tools available to all of us to get our work out ourselves.

Got a website?

Publish your novel, post your artwork, stream your movie or your music.

In addition, the accessibility of pretty much the sum of human knowledge and creative works is altering how audiences approach them. If I can read this book for free, will I want, for very much longer, to pay for that one?

I think the answer is probably no.

And I wonder what’s going to happen?

The gatekeepers have less power than ever before. They can no longer keep you from getting your work out to the public. All they can do is curate. Suggest one thing over another. And the fact that they do it from behind a desk in a monolithic museum is becoming less relevant.

We don’t pay so much to go to a movie, anymore. We pay a monthly fee for the right to watch all movies. Curation by algorithm. Because you liked this one, you might like that one.

So, what happens?

How does the model for how creative people get paid change in the face of this new paradigm?

Because it’s going to change, certainly. It already is changing.

Sometimes I think, on some level, that the whole capitalist endeavor has reached the end of its sustainability and, possibly, usefulness.

I just don’t know what takes its place.

I wonder.

Anna Deveare Smith

National treasure.

Anna Deveare Smith is a playwright, professor and one of the most extraordinary actresses you will ever see.

She is a pioneer of documentary theatre and became widely known for her one-person shows in which she used material from countless interviews to construct a script and embody the people interviewed. Her best known pieces using this technique are Fires in the Mirror about the Crown Heights Riot of 1991 and Twilight: Los Angeles about the 1992 L.A. riots. If you get a chance to see them, do!

She is now known to a wider public due to her recurring roles as National Security Advisor Nancy McNally on The West Wing and as the hospital administrator on Nurse Jackie.

Her ability to fully embody, physically and vocally, the people she has interviewed has been rightfully described as chameleon-like. It’s truly amazing.

I’m really excited about an interview she recently gave to The Boston Globe in which she talks about writing a fictional play for the first time. I can’t wait to see what that turns out to be.

Go take a look at the complete interview, of course, but here’s a little bit that caught my attention and explains a lot about Ms. Smith’s work:

The thing that speaks to me the most is the idea that a child understands, an early, primal idea, which is: That’s not fair. When somebody tells me something in the course of the interview that’s not fair, I become very interested because I know what’s going to happen linguistically is that as they tell me about a moment or something that shattered their sense of who they were, they will then have to go to their most rich resources to make the world right again, in front of me. And that’s when I start working.

It sure is good work.

Take a look at this TED Talk and see for yourself.

Mind Mapping

A cartographer’s nightmare.

Mind mapping is a brainstorming technique used by artists, advertisers, programmers and members of countless other disciplines.

It’s a way to visualize connections among and between things. It’s a way to chart the flow of a process, of a story, of an idea.

I like mind mapping and project management software. For a while now, I have been partial to Personal Brain software—now, I guess, called just The Brain. It’s a great way to tie together a lot of disparate items, allowing you to link to web pages, photographs and other files, notes, etc.

It’s fairly resource intensive, eating up your RAM and disk space, though, to say nothing of the overhead in maintaining it if you really want to use it well.

Still, I like it—if only for the pleasure of saying, “hold on a minute while I open up my brain.”

But I found a simpler, web-based mind mapping tool at bubbl.us.

It’s very easy to use with clear and simple directions.

So, get on over there and start planning your next novel.

Patti Smith

Godmother of Punk

Poet, singer, songwriter, activist. Patricia Lee “Patti” Smith has had quite a jam-packed life.

Highly influential in the punk rock movement, Smith has been a performer and songwriter for nearly 40 years. Acclaimed in her own right, she has also co-written with Bruce Springsteen, toured with Bob Dylan, co-wrote a play with Sam Shepard, had a love affair with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and married Fred “Sonic” Smith, a fellow musician.

She has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction with her memoir, Just Kids, is now working on a crime novel, pursues photography and continues to perform and support causes in which she believes, some of them controversial.

I’ve never been much of a fan of punk rock. But I admire any woman who can achieve what this one has.

When your mind is a blank

You’ve got “Room to Write”

The only thing worse than a blank page (or better?) is a blank mind.

For a writer, however, it can feel like the end of the world. Certainly, of that career that you are still struggling to get off the ground.

With the internet, of course, come lots of websites full of writing prompts. Random. Daily. Whatever you need. And they are all useful—and used.

If you’d like something a little more portable—and, arguably, more substantive, I invite you to take a look at Bonni Goldberg’s Room to Write.

With 200 “daily invitations to a writer’s life,” you ought to be able to find something to jump-start those moments of blankness.

These “invitations” are different from the ordinary prompt in that they are accompanied by mini-essays on writing along with the assignment. Each entry takes up a single page (of this smallish-sized book). There’s the little essay: Goldberg’s own meditation on the day’s prompt. There’s the assignment. And, there’s an applicable quote or two from other writers.

Some of the assignments seem too complex and weighty for me when I’m just looking for a way to get my hand moving across the page. Some don’t interest me. Others are spot-on perfect. And, of course, each entry’s classification changes with time.

You can work your way through in order. Or you can open the book randomly and get to work.

Plenty of free prompts available elsewhere, of course. But this is a useful find.

Non-functional function

Beauty for no reason.

Today, I am thankful for the human impulse to create beauty even when it serves no other purpose but itself.

We seem to have drifted from that impulse as we become more enamored of efficiency and utilitarianism, but once upon a time—and I think it still lurks within us—we took the time to make even the most useful things beautiful.

As testimony to this impulse, I bring you:

Manhole-covers.net

This website is a gallery of old French manhole covers.

What could possibly be more functional than the cover to the access point to the sewers?

And yet, craftsmen designed and metalworkers created works of art—to lay down in the street and be trodden on.

Nowadays, here in the United States, our manhole covers are relatively plain. A manufacturer’s name stamped into the metal, perhaps a numeric code allowing workers to identify the location.

Less expensive, I’m sure. Functional. Doing what it needs to do and no more.

(Trivia question: Do you know why manhole covers are round? It makes it impossible for them to fall through the hole.)

So, we gain speed on the assembly line and we lose a bit of beauty out of the world.

The impulse is still there, though. Watch any of the decorating programs on HGTV. If you ever get the chance, take a look at the main building of the Jacksonville Public Library. There are people who still believe in beautifying the utilitarian and manage to buck the system and carve out enough time and money to do so.

And today, I am thankful for them—and wishing for a more developed sense of visual creativity so that I could be like them.

What happened

To my artist brain?

This is what I want to know.

I’m convinced we all start out with the ability to be hugely creative—and then, something happens.

I don’t know what.

Maybe an art teacher laughs at a drawing. Maybe we make too early comparisons between our own lopsided clay pots and the Ming vases we see in museums. Maybe we just get too caught up in linear thinking to make the leaps and connections required for innovation.

Something happens, though.

Usually, I think of myself as moderately creative. I have had some success with writing. I did recently discover a heretofore underestimated aptitude for drawing.

But then I see something like this:

And I wonder.

Ideas for you

For free!

I’m talking about TED Talks.

TED started in 1984 as a conference to bring together people from three disciplines: Technology, Entertainment, and Design. It has since grown to include experts from almost every field of human endeavor in two annual conferences.

More than 1400 TED Talks are available online and have been viewed over a billion times. They are posted under a Creative Commons license, so they are free to re-post and share.

Participants in TED are challenged to give the talk of their lives. Scary, huh? What’s so amazing is that most of them do.

Fascinating, informative, moving.

There is something there for everyone, and everything on the website merits your investment of your twenty-or-so minutes to listen.

I, myself, am partial to Brene Brown’s talk on vulnerability. And I love poet and teacher Sarah Kay’s If I should have a daughter. You can find links to both of them on the introductory page New to TED?

There are various other compilations of recommended talks.

12 TED Talks that Every Human Should Watch

Five Key TED Talks

and lots more you can find by googling.

You can just go to the TED site and work your way through everything there. (I keep meaning to do that. Maybe one a day—like a vitamin!)

But, what a miracle!

These marvelous thinkers and speakers, sharing their ideas with us. Costing nothing more than a few minutes of our time. A bigger investment than scanning a Facebook meme or a 140-character Tweet—and with a much bigger payoff.

These are the ideas our best minds are considering. These are the things our best speakers are talking about.

These are conferences that happen far from most of us, and we get to participate. No admission charge, no airline ticket, no hotel fee.

What a miracle!

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

Category Archives: Creativity