Write While True

This is the fourth and final episode in a series I’m doing about the book Art & Fear [amazon affiliate link] by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

In this, the final episode of the series, I’m going to tell you what they think you need to be in order to be an artist.

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I decided to do a four-part series on the lessons I learned from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

This week, in part three, I want to talk about a quote about what art means to the maker.

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I reread the book Art and Fear by Bayles and Orland and they had so many ideas for how to get people to make art, that it worked for me to start my blog going again, and then ultimately restarting this podcast.

For part two of this four part series on Art and Fear, I’m going to share the what they said that inspired me to not quit. Here’s the quote.

Quitting is fundamentally different from stopping, the latter happens all the time. Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again, and art is all about starting again.

That quote is really the inspiration behind season two, and the episodes I’ve made since I restarted.

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One of the things that got me back to podcasting after a two year break was rereading Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

This time, while I was reading it, I kept a lot of notes and found four themes that resonated with me and helped me get going again.

The first theme is very practical. It’s what they think is the secret to being prolific. For the past two months I have been applying it a lot.

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We just passed the second anniversary of the break that I didn’t come back from right away.

I know exactly what was going on. I had a lot of travel to visit family and for work and it was just hard to find the time to plan and record podcasts.

Well, since it’s exactly two years later. It’s summer again, and I want to take another break. But this time I have a plan to take a break, but still publish on schedule and hopefully, not lose my momentum.

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When I was done with a journal, I’d put it on the shelf with others. I do a good job of making sure to transfer anything important to a real tracking system at the end of the day, so there wasn’t much in the journal that I thought would be useful.

At some point, though, I picked up an old journal, it was probably a few years old at that point, and just flipped through it. As expected, it was mostly boring. Just a mundane list of what was going on that day. Meetings, task lists, chores.

But every once in a while …

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I’ve been using a paper journal for years. Even when I worked on big teams, I still kept a separate journal with my personal daily tasks and schedule. For years, I just used a single journal for everything. I’d just go through it and then start another one when I hit the last page. Any kind of paper capture that I needed to do was in that one journal.

A couple of years ago I started splitting out separate journals based on the purpose.

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When I was 13, my mom got me an electric typewriter for Christmas. She was a secretary, and she taught me how to touch type, and she wanted me to have something to practice on. But unfortunately, when I opened it up, it didn’t work.

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If you are just coming to this podcast on this episode, I have to tell you that I talk about Morning Pages a lot. It was the subject of Episode 1. Listen to that for the full description of what they are or read the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron [amazon affiliate link], which is where I was introduced to the idea.

The main thing to know is that I start each morning by writing three pages of long hand writing in an automatic stream of consciousness style. I never show them to anyone and they aren’t meant to be published. The point is to train my brain to generate text on demand.

If you read the entire thing, I would have a couple of sentences in a row here and there that make some sense, but overall, it’s not well-structured in any way. My pages tend to stray from topic to topic because I’m not considering the entire text.

This is the breakthrough I had today.

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I thought it would be a good idea to re-listen to all of my podcasts from season one. Each of them is only about 10 minutes and there are only 15 episodes, so it doesn’t take too long.

This had two effects.

First I realized they weren’t as bad as I thought, which made me feel better about restarting.

The second thing is that I started to hear the advice almost as if it was coming from a third party because I had recorded these so long ago. I had dropped many of these practices during my break, so it was almost like hearing from a different person. But that person was making podcasts and I wasn’t, so I decided to listen to him.

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