Text and Hubris

A brief reality check.

My company pushed a screensaver to my laptop that continuously displays the company “values” in ever growing sizes of black and red text. I have come to believe that I now work for the Ministry of Truth.

I don’t fear rejection, I fear the possibility of failure. Both fears are pathetic.

I work tonight. I am to fix a setting on ten servers and test that everything still works. While this would be fine the fix does nothing important and no one is really helped. I miss that direct interaction with users who are doing something and who need help.

I honestly want to be laid off from my job. I want this because it is easy and passive. This is a form of thinking that does nothing. Action feeds movement.

I don’t tolerate long-suffering people well. Martyr complexes are for chumps and people who want to complain. If you don’t like something change it. Stop expecting other people to notice. All it does is lower their opinion of you. I count myself as one of the top offenders in this category.

I wouldn’t mind pursuing both an MFA and a Ph.D. eventually. I curse that it took me ten years to find where I belong and that I have no clue how to really make it in this culture. I guess I will just have to be me (now that’s scary).

I miss my snarky side and he needs to be expressed more.

It’s Spring Break this week which means that I have a little more time than I usually do. It’s a rather nice departure from the constant pressure that makes up most of my weeks. I had enough time, in fact, that I was able to add to a couple of the short stories I am working on. I wrote for few hours and, after I was finished, I realized that I hated everything I wrote. Now, it is quite possible that everything I wrote last night was absolute trash. I am certainly capable of writing garbage. In fact, depending on the day and my own bipolar sense of self-worth, I might argue that most of what I write garbage. None of that really matters, though. What matters is that I was able to get the few thousand words actually down on the page. I will go back over the writing during the editing process and cut, chop, and rewrite a good 30% or more of what I wrote yesterday because that is how it works.

We’re taught with art that inspiration is key. Every media portrayal of the artist follows the same arc of inspiration, mad dash of work, and finished piece. The artist then becomes this savant who magically weaves great works out of the energy of vision. While this is a wonderful romantic thought, it is also absolute bullshit. We look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with a sense of awe and reverence only viewing the final work and forgetting about Michelangelo on his back painting for four years straight. Great texts, great paintings, great works in any genre and medium take work. They may also take determination, skill, and even talent but work remains the most important ingredient.

The truth is that there are days when inspiration is miles away. The are days when every word takes effort and every page comes with pain. I used to think that this was some sort of block. I realize now that this is the difference between being a hobby writer and someone who does this full-time. I love to write, I need to write but I also want to write for a living. That means I write even when I am not feeling the most on my game. Sure, I may rewrite it all later but the ideas still flow in their own sluggish ways. The work loosens those sluggish lines and opens them for something more later on.

At least, that is what I keep telling myself.

This Friday I will submit my application for the Undergraduate Workshop. I will target poetry and creative writing with a preference on creative writing. I’m not sure I will get in. My recent work has not been up to the level of quality I would like. Time and work have conspired quite effectively to minimize my productivity and the project I was planning for my New Media class was eclipsed by another project that has stalled. Simply put, I don’t have a lot of fiction to submit.

This leads me to an even greater concern: I get accepted for poetry. You see, I never considered myself a poet. The poems I write tend to be for me. I write them purely as an exercise and that is all they were ever meant to be. I got stuck, though. My senior year is almost here and I wanted into the writing program. Since I came in as a junior, I was well behind. I needed a creative writing class for Spring and the fiction class I had signed up for wasn’t applicable. This left me scrambling. Poetry was available so I jumped for it. I like poetry. I enjoy the structure and the lack of structure. I love playing with words and poetry does translate nicely into the New Media space where I plan to make my professional home.

The poetry workshops are driving me insane, though. Only one of the students, an older student like myself, has fun with their work. Everyone else is so deadly serious and deadly boring. I worked with two poets at Kirkwood and they were fantastic. They were both gifted writers and professors and I felt lucky to have them. So far, my poetry experience at the U of I has been lackluster to say the least.

I don’t know. I have an advisor for the fall for my Honors Thesis. I want it to be a creative piece which means I need in to this program. Poetry or prose, I’ll let the fates and a committee of strangers decide.

Courtney and I spent last evening at a celebratory dinner party in honor of a close friend who was accepted into grad school. It was an enjoyable evening of good wine, great food, and even greater conversation. In that sense, it was precisely what any good dinner party should be.

On the way home, I began to think about how one goes about building a successful creative team. After all, everyone who attended this party was certainly creative and either successful or well on their way to being successful in one form or another. I am incredibly lucky to have such a strong group of creative friends. We had in fact tried several times to actively pull together as a team with varying degrees of success. It frustrated me that none of it was working.

Of course, I see the same problem in my professional life and in my academic life. Corporate teams rarely work effectively. The only truly effective technical team I worked with was run by Othgood and management shut that team down because, to put it simply, it threatened the existing power structure too much for their comfort. Most corporate teams are filled with individuals working to survive. They dodge layoffs and watch coworkers drop like flies without batting an eye. There is no sense of loyalty, connectivity, or shared value. The same is true in the academic world. I am watching my project stall because I can’t effectively manage people who only have a cursory interest in its success. I may actually go outside of class to complete it which may be the only way to get it done. Students, like workers, are only interested in the grade. The product is secondary. A paper needs an A. It doesn’t matter the voice or the content as long as it guarantees them a good grade. In that sense grades are currency, unfortunately, art driven by currency alone tends to be devoid of any real life.

What’s the fix. then? As usual, it is deceptively easy to understand and incredibly hard to implement. It is all about vision. You need people passionate about the work and the idea. I have creative and talented friends, but they all have their own focus and passion. We don’t have a shared vision and I don’t really think we ever will. Without a shared vision, you end up with people working in a hundred different directions. I admit its frustrating. I would love nothing better than to take them and merge them into a solid and effective creative team that could focus on each others visions, but you can’t force a team. You can only develop it with willing members. People who are willing to do the work and to follow through all the way. People who help keep you accountable because they value the project as much as you do.

Of course, this is an unlikely thing to find beyond a single project. I suppose that is why there are so many individual artists, it is hard to find a shared vision. It would sure be nice, though.