Making Art

 “The basic craft of drawing is about two things: you learn to control your hand and to see.” – Ralph Ammer

Talking about what art is can go on forever – as I said last week, the only definition that I think works universally is “Art is what I am pointing at when I say ‘That’s art!’” But I-know-it-when-I-see-it doesn’t do much to help anyone make art.

In my personal experience, the people I’ve known who were seriously trying to create art above all else (whether they’ve been painters, writers, musicians, or anything else that society considers artists) have reliably been the ones whose results were not anything that I would point at and say “That’s art!” I suspect that the reason is that they spent too much time looking at the wrong thing.

If what art does is to convey a worldview, evoke an emotion, present a vision, or say something important, then focusing on “creating art” won’t get one anywhere unless and until they have a worldview they want to convey, an emotion they want to evoke, a vision they want to present, or something important to say. If “art” is your only goal, you have nothing to “art” about. On the other hand, if your goal is to tell a story, convey a worldview, or say something about a topic that you find fascinating or important, and to do so in the most effective way possible, you’re well on your way.

A lot of people seem to think that creativity and imagination are at the heart of making art. I don’t disagree. I do think that creativity and imagination fall into the category of Great Abstractions. We know what they are, but you can’t point at a molecule of creativity or a teaspoon of imagination. And if you can’t isolate them, how do you teach them?

I think this is half of the reason behind the oft-repeated claim that “You can’t teach Art; you can only teach Craft.” The other half is that art, especially making art, is personal. It’s about what is important to the painter or writer or composer, and trying to tell someone what is important to them rarely ends well. Figuring out what is important to you is one of those things only you can do. Creativity and imagination, on the other hand…

Creativity and imagination are about seeing, hearing, or feeling things that aren’t there … yet, but that could be (or could have been) under different conditions. Making art is about bridging the gap for everyone else.

Seeing, hearing, or feeling things that aren’t there yet, but that could be, starts with seeing what is actually there (as opposed to what you think is there or believe ought to be there), and then making connections. In order to make connections, you need to have a collection of things to connect to each other – a knowledge base. Before the Internet, several painters I knew had multiple filing cabinets stuffed with reference photos – pictures they had taken of trees, rocks, cars … anything they might want to paint one day. One of them, who had been painting for forty years or so by the early 1980s, said he got more out of deciding which photos to take from what angle, under what light conditions, at what seasons, than he did out of drawing them later, because in order to make those decisions, he had to look at what was really right there, rather than what was in his head.

This is why every writer I know is an intellectual pack rat. We store up everything – historical anecdotes, a comment overheard on the bus, the smell of the building that burned down (and the way it smells a week later), the sounds of birds and dogs and waterfalls, disasters and celebrations, heroes and con artists, our own experiences and other people’s stories. It’s all part of our ever-growing knowledge base. There’s always something new to learn and do.

Having a large knowledge base is the first step, one that is never actually finished; making connections is the second. It’s called lateral thinking or divergent thinking, which is another way of saying “Thinking outside the box.” Lateral thinking is one of the fundamentals of humor, which is a good place to start observing it. It comes easier to some folks than to others.

Many of the people who are trying to teach creativity try to codify the steps that make up out-of-the-box thinking … but that’s just trying to come up with a new box. A few of them use a formula that sounds suspiciously like “First, there’s a miracle (the lateral thinking), then you do this, that, and the other.”

There isn’t a formula or a step-by-step recipe to follow. There is, however, a combination of observation and practice. The observation part is fun – reading and watching things that break normal routines and patterns and go off in completely unexpected directions. (Gracie Allen was queen of this kind of word play and pattern-switching.) Practice can be playing word games (there are books and apps full of “brain teasers” that require lateral thinking in order to get to the solution), but eventually, it comes down to … writing.

The simplest way to “force” lateral thinking is the twenty-answers method. Your characters have a problem; write down twenty completely different ways they could solve it. Usually, by the time you have reached number seven or eight, you have exhausted all the obvious, logical, typical, or clichéd options, and you have to find new and different solutions.

The thing to remember is that creativity, imagination, and lateral thinking aren’t about what you expect to happen, even if what you expect is the twenty-page plot that you yourself invented. You have to be willing to let go of familiar patterns and take that sharp left – lateral – turn in a new and unpredictable direction.