Creativity

Writing Thoughts: Sand Mandalas And The Impermanence of Art

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

There’s a Tibetan Buddhist tradition where monks spend days building beautiful mandalas of sand, illustrating various principles.  Then at the end of this long ritual, they destroy the entire thing.  It is a nicely evocative example of the impermanence of all things – and a lesson to writers and artists.

Imagine you are making a mandala, knowing it will be destroyed.  You craft it perfectly, knowing it’s impermanent.  Every step is temporary, each precise.

Imagine working as people gather around you, in awe, looking at it, wondering.  They marvel art artistry, think over the meaning, ask questions.  Then they go on their way.

Then you spin it or scrape it away or let the wind come in and it’s all gone.

That’s very likely to be your book – any book.  That’s likely to be your art – any art.  Few of us will be spoken of in centuries, let alone years ,let alone ever.  We’re unlikely to be Kameron Hurley or Terry Pratchett or any of the other greats.  We’re temporary things, but in the end we’ll be sand – and even the greats will probably stick around a bit longer before they’re footnotes and records.

It’s worth it.

First, it’s worth it because art is what you do.  That is your expression.  That is who you are.  Be it for religion or creativity or to speak or even money, that’s you and what you do.

Second, it’s what you learn by doing this.  The craft, the knowledge, the self-reflection.  Each step in your own impermanent work tells you something more.  Each step changes you – because you too are an impermanent, shifting, collection, so make it a good one.

Finally, it’s that crowd gathered around you, watching and learning.  They may not take home the mandala, they may not see it again.  But they’ll think, and learn, and contemplate.  You may just touch hearts – they don’t need to take a picture or have their own copy to do that.

What many of us artists can hope for is not immortality as creators – and it’s not what we should hope for.  In these impermanent moments we leave behind something greater, not as a work praised for the ages, but in influencing ourselves and others.  Just because your book is forgotten a year or two from now, doesn’t mean it didn’t matter or have an effect.

It’s pretty much the same as how I take the Buddhist idea of Projected Karma – that thing that has an influence down the road.  Influence of action, not permanence of creation.

Just like the Mandala teaches, so can you work.  It doesn’t have to be forever – and indeed it shouldn’t be.  Nothing is, and clinging to past forms, worn and tired, isn’t immortality, it’s a specific kind of hell.

Let the sand be sand.  Don’t mummify your creativity in the hope people will stare at it dumbly, unmoved, un-involved.  Let it be a living thing and go where it may, even when it may die.

Think of how liberating that is.

– Steve

The Brainstorm Book: The Review

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

We’re talking how to solve your creative challenges with a Brainstorm book!

Now that you have a Brainstorm Book and are filling it with ideas, you need to review it. When you review it, you’ll go through the contents, go over your ideas, and figure what to do with them. That means coming up with a review schedule – but also coming up with a way to organize these ideas.

Your Review Schedule

First, set up a time to review your Brainstorm Book. You want to find a schedule that’s going to work best for you and not drive you up a wall. I recommend one of the following two choices:

  1. Do it every 2 weeks regularly.
  2. Do it twice a month on regular times that makes things roughly equal distance. (I recommend the 5th and the 20th).

Now it’s OK to, now and then move the time around a bit, but don’t get too radical. Good, solid, regular review should become a habit so you make the time to do it.

But what do you do? Well, when you review you need to set a few things up in your notes. Let’s get ready for a review.

Preparing for a Brainstorm Book Review

Remember, set this up before your review begins.

When you review a Brainstorm Book, you’ll sort ideas into four separate files. Now that may sound like a lot, but bear with me.
Here’s the four ways I keep ideas.

  • Archives – A collection of files that are things written down that you might refer to one day. One file can be enough, though you may want to divide them into general lists (stories, cooking, etc.)
  • The Incubator – This is my list of things you want to do some day, but aren’t sure when. Keep them in a list in order of importance – and no item can be of equal importance to another.
  • Backlog – Things you are definitely going to do. These should also be listed in order of priority. In many cases you’ll start breaking down work here because you know it well enough.
  • Current Backlog – What you’re committed too now. As an example I plan my work in monthly increments, so it’s a month of things to do.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot, but I keep the Incubator, Backlog, and Monthly backlog in the same spreadsheet.

If you’re familiar with Agile methods, specifically Scrum, some of this may look familiar – that’s because it comes from a mix of my own experience, Scrum, and the Getting Things Done method of David Allen. I sum this up more in the next chapter but to give you an idea:

I use my personal version of Scrum, where I plan work monthly. Every month I determine what I can do (from my regular tasks and Backlog) and then commit to that. Then at the end of the month I re-evaluate.

(You can also get a detailed guide here)

Now you know what you have toset up, let’s talk about how we use the review.

Reviewing Your Brainstorm Book

When you sit down to to a Brainstorm Book review, commit to taking one hour to do it. You may not use all of the time – but sometimes you will. You may also find yourself needing to go over, which is fine, but if it’s a habit you may want to get more efficient.

With that time set aside, do the following:

First you take your Brainstorm book, and go to the latest page that needs revieweed (I mark pages as I review them). You look at the idea or ideas there and decide what to do with each:

  • Ignore It – The idea may not be worth it or isn’t as great in retrospect or you weren’t sure what you wrote down.
  • Archive It – It may be something you want to write down but there’s no place for it. Put it in an Archive file.
  • Incubate It – If it’s an idea that you really see value in, really want to do, then put it in the Incubator. However the Incubator is ranked in order of priority as noted – so you have to put the idea at the right priority. You might reshuffle the entire list (this is why you may need an hour)
  • Backlog It – If an idea is really important, really must-do, put it in your Backlog – and again, put it in order of priority. If the idea is maturing, take some time to flesh it out more – you may break it into parts – another reason you may need that hour.
  • Current Backlog – If an idea is that important, that necessary (or that awesome) put it in your current backlog so you get to it soon.
  • Do it now – If it’s going to take a few minutes, why not just get it over with?

Simple, isn’t it? You look at ideas and determine how important they are, then put them in the proper areas. It’s intended to be simple because we don’t want to overcomplicate this. Next chapter, we’ll talk how to use these gatherings of ideas in more detail.

Why The Review Matters

Now that you’ve started to do your reviews, why are they helpful? Well, first after a review or two you’ll see why they matter, but heres a quick summary:

  • You don’t loose ideas or worry about losing ideas. You record them twice over to make sure you have them.
  • By seeing your inspiration you’ll be able to trust it to help you. Even if there are problems in being inspired, you now can see them, address them – and know when they’ve worked.
  • Analyzing your inspiration helps you understand how you think. You may find ideas repeat, or that certain days are better than others.
  • You can get re-inspired. When you look at your ideas, they don’t just come back to you, new ideas form. This further helps you understand how you think and have confidence in your imagination.
  • Reviewing them like this is the start of deciding what to focus on. By sorting items into different lists (or discarding them) you start prioritizing already.

This prioritization helps you get ready for long-term planning to bring your ideas to life. In fact, that’s the next chapter.

– Steve

Writing Thoughts: Focus, Not Limitation

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr.  Find out more at my newsletter.)

Lately I’ve been talking about how we need to focus on our work to get anything done.  My friend Serdar has been following up on my musings, with discussing selecting work as triage or how we select our work carefully like a DJ.  Each column is a reading-worthy videpoint.

However, I have come to dislike the triage metaphor, and in further discussions with him, came to the realization that we creatives, writers, etc. often look at limiting ourselves as bad.

We don’t want to limit ourselves.  We want to tell every story, explore every nook, paint in colors no one has yet seen.  We want to do it all.  Creativity means a head full of infinity in a mortal frame that has to pick and choose what parts of that endlessness to let into the world.

We make it even harder because we often talk about our need to be selective and to cultivate work in negative ways.  Triage. Limitation.  Pairing ideas down.   Killing your darlings.  We come up with the most negative ways to talk about this, ensuring of course we want to do it less.

Thats the problem.  So let me make a suggestion – as a creative don’t talk about choosing what work to do in the negative, find positive terms.  Yes it’s a psychological trick, but by using negative terms you’ve already been tricked into seeing this as a bad thing.

Think of it as:

  • Focusing on the best choices you create.  You decide on what brings the most benefit and do it.
  • Curating the most important works you can do.  You’re like a librarian or a DJ creating a best-of for people, chosing what they truly need from your infinite repertoire of possibilities.
  • Cultivating a garden of possibilities.  You choose what to “grow” in your works and nurture it to life.
  • Being a steward of ideas.  Perhaps that means not just developing them, but also knowing when to pass ideas on to others.

So I challenge you as a creator to look at your need to focus and find the most postivie way to look at it that is still rational.  Find a way to see the good in it, and you’ll be able to focus better and more effectively.  In doing so, your need to make choices will be much easier.

You don’t need triage when the DJ has you dancing to the best tunes already.

– Steve