This week’s exercises went a little better but I still haven’t hit my stride.

The Exercises:

• My Pet by Alison Lurie
• Wedding Cake Assignment by Debra Spark

The Results:

While the exercises above went fine, this week was all about writing on the fly.  In particular, I did a couple of fun exercises with my writer’s group.  One of the exercises was to write a short parody based on a postcard of a piece of art.  I chose Henri Rousseau’s The Dream.

Then we also did an exercise where we wrote a short piece with one of the following three titles:

1. How to Eat a _____________
2. Eating __________________
3. Recipe for a ______________

This exercise was inspired by the poems How to Eat a Poem by Eve Merriam and Eating Poetry by Mark Strand.  I ended up writing an ode to my writers’ group.  Unfortunately, these two exercises don’t count toward the writing challenge so this week I only crossed two off my list.

I love stories like this:

Paul Harding–a writer and graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop–had what the New York Times refers to as “a quiet little novel he wished to publish.”  After sending it out to several agents and editors, he got one rejection after another until… a small press (Bellevue Literary Press) picked it up.  And guess what?  This “quiet little novel” has now won the Pulitzer for Fiction.

The cover story in the arts section of yesterday’s New York Times (Monday, April 19) tells the story in detail, but my favorite line is the last one.  When asked about his upcoming work, Harding said:  “I sort of feel like I know how I got here, every step of the way….  Something like this can befall me and it won’t be catastrophic success.”

Which brings us to the heart of this post.

Catastrophic success.  What a seeming paradox, and yet it rings so true.

How easy it is for writers to take one success and let it cripple them into paralysis.  I know this happens to me every time I let someone read my work.  The more they ooh and ah, the heavier my fingers feel next time I get to the keyboard.  In fact, I find that success can be more deadly to my motivation than failure.  After all, failures–even colossal ones–end up motivating me into writing because I want to fix the problems.  But if all I get is success–even if it’s a tiny one–it means there’s nothing to fix.  And this is where I stagnate.

I think this is why many writers get stuck or hit “the wall:” they show their work too soon.  Earlier this semester, I resisted showing my Master’s thesis to anyone (even my peer group and my adviser) because I knew whatever came of it would not be good.  Criticism would psych me out and good comments would make my motivation fizzle.

More importantly, though, I needed to have a heart-to-heart with the book.  It took a lot of different tries and beating my head against the wall to understand what was going on in this book.  Now that the book and I have resolved our differences, I’m finally ready to hear what other people have to say.

In the end, it all comes down to trust.  The writer must trust her readers not to abandon her mid-story.  She must trust the writing to mean what she’s trying to say.  And she must trust herself to view the work with clarity.

I recently added a new book to my writing bookshelf: The Art of War for Writers by James Scott Bell.  This is not a book to be read in one sitting, but rather, a book I plan dip into now and again, when I need a swift kick in the pants.  This week’s kicks are:

Recon Protocol #07:  Whining will not help you win the battle for publication.

All I can say is YES!  I am sooooo tired of hearing about how hard publishing is and how miserable it makes some writers.  I hereby vow not to whine for the duration of my thesis.  Heck, let’s make it the duration of this entire draft.  Because yes, becoming a published writer is hard and sometimes painful, but so are all worthy careers.  Like being a secret agent or a brain surgeon.

Recon Protocol #03:  Know the difference between a hero and a fool.

You know the phrase “don’t be a hero”?  In short, a hero is someone who does heroic things without really setting out to do them in the first place, while a fool is one who thinks he’s already a hero so he just sits back and expects all the laud and admiration to come to him.  We all know writers who are fools and writers who are heroes.  The trick is both to be a hero yourself and also try to refrain from smacking the fools upside the head.

This is just a small sampling of the pearls of wisdom (pearls I tell you!) that are in this little book.  And as for the writing-as-war metaphor, what can I say?  As someone who treats most endeavors of her life with military precision, I was right at home with this book.  All I know is, if it weren’t for my problems with authority figures, I’d make a great war general.

Recently, I attended the Tim Burton Exhibit at the MOMA and was completely inspired.  I am always pleased to see an exhibit where we get a look into the artist’s process as well as the final product.  In particular, I love being able to get an inside look at the thought processes of such a creative individual like Tim Burton.

In addition, it is a very brave thing for an artist to put work on display that had once been simply rough scribbles of a creative mind.  Many of the objects in this exhibit are things that were never intended for public viewing and I must say that I admire Burton’s guts in allowing us to see these personal early sketches.  On a side note, I am also amazed that Burton saved so much of his stuff.  There were sketches and papers that dated back to his days in high school.  The fact that he has been such a meticulous archivist of his own work is what makes such a great exhibition possible. Not to seem presumptuous, but part of me muses: if there were ever to be a “Gabi retrospective” somewhere, would I even have the stuff to show?  Most of my early work is either long gone or lost in the labyrinth that is storage.  Seeing this exhibit makes me wish I had saved more work from my past.  At the very least, it would be fun to look at it now and see how far my writing and artwork has come.

As an exhibit, this one has some serious flaws.  Let’s start with the first hallway.  This hall (pictured left) is lined with television screens depicting Burton’s work along the left-hand wall.  Problem: if people stop to watch one of the screens, it either blocks the flow of traffic or it means that other museum-goers must cross in front of them to pass through the hall.  While the face sculpture above the entrance does make for a unique threshold into the world of the exhibit, the hallway does not work.  I can understand the concept, if we were talking about an exhibit where people have to stand in line for hours to get inside. This exhibit, though, uses timed tickets to manage the crowd and the hallway occurs after the ticket taker’s stand anyway, meaning that all these TV screens do is block traffic.

The second problem is the obvious side effect of this exhibit being so popular.  The exhibit is not designed with crowd control in mind.  Many of the objects on display require getting up close to get a good look, which means if you get one or two people in front of a drawing or glass case, no one else can see.  I realize that the nature of this collection makes this type of exhibit design somewhat inevitable, but come on, this is the MOMA.  I’ve seen exhibits there that are much more effective in shuffling crowds through quickly and effectively.  The space seemed small for the number of pieces on display and there wasn’t a clear path for the visitors to follow so they milled around, making the rooms feel more crowded than they would if the flow of people were more fluid.

Which brings me to my next point of critique: the signage was awful.  I’ll admit right now that I’m not one of those museum-goers that reads every last little sign, but I like having some broad signage that signals:

1. Which path I should take through the exhibit to best enjoy it,
2. How the exhibit is organized, and
3. Clear transitions between the different areas of the exhibit.

The only signage I found in this exhibit were a few that said things like “Surviving Burbank,” “Beautifying Burbank” and “Beyond Burbank” (written in an appropriately Tim Burton-esque font that I thought was quite nice.)  I am not a fan of the “white box” theory of museum exhibits (i.e. paint a room white, throw some art on the walls and “let the art speak for itself.”)  I think particularly in an exhibit like this where the art pieces have so much personality, it’s important to create a real “experience” for the visitors.  The entrance sort of does this but after that the exhibit falls flat.

Finally, one of my main disappointments is that there is no exhibit brochure (or if there is, it was so poorly displayed that I couldn’t find it when I was there).  I’m not talking about a catalog of the exhibit, but just a small brochure that each visitor can take home.  I am reminded of the MOMA Exhibit called Safe: Design Takes on Risk which did an excellent job with a brochure that had a particularly clever design.  This brochure both illustrated one of the main messages of the exhibit but also gave the viewer some basic information about the exhibit itself.

While brochures are by no means necessary at all exhibits, I feel that not having a brochure for this particular one is a missed opportunity.  It wouldn’t need to be complex.  The idea is that since Burton’s work really does “leap off the screen” and create an experience for his audience, it would be nice if this exhibit did that too, especially since the exhibit website is so fabulous.  A simple brochure would help transition the visitors’ experience to beyond the walls of the exhibit itself.

Overall, the material on display in this exhibit is phenomenal but the exhibit itself leaves much to be desired.