Ten Wise Sayings About Creative Practice

But did Chekhov really say (exactly) that? And does it matter if he didn't?

The other day, I came across a quotation from one of my all-time favourite painters, Edgar Degas:

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

This meshes so well with my best writing tip of all that I instantly put it into the talk I was drafting, complete with some sweaty, weary ballet dancers for the powerpoints. And as it happens, recently I’ve come across several other statements by artists which speak to my own and others’ creative process in writing - which means they also speak to my teaching.

I’m not normally a great one for the snappy aphorisms and quotes plucked from the Internet. My Inner Academic won’t let me post quotations without checking them out at least to some degree and it’s surprising how hard that can be: as Abraham Lincoln said only the other day on Threads, the Internet is a largely reference-free zone.

On the other hand, the fact that these did click with me does mean something. Someone has boiled a sprawl of ideas and experience down into a neat and therefore memorable phrase: now I have a label for that sprawl, a rule of thumb if you like, as Showing and Telling, say, usefully labels a surprisingly complex set of interacting guidelines.

So when it comes to creative practice, perhaps the accuracy and precise origin of a quotation isn’t so much of the point.

Does it really matter if Chekhov said, precisely,

Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

if it nonetheless sums up a crucial insight that ‘oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’* - in this case about Showing and Telling? Certainly, digging into the truth of that not-exactly Chekhov quote, as teased apart by the entirely splendid Quote Investigator site, isn’t just top-notch procrastination: it’s also thought provoking about how writing works. **

Should you not take an apparently useful aphorism or rule-of-thumb to heart if it wasn’t said by the literary star it’s ascribed to? Will it harm your practice, instead of helping it, if you work to such an idea when it wasn’t actually written by Saint Anton? Surely not! After all, we’re not building up an evidence-based argument here: we’re not trying to prove a thesis or make a theory bomb-proof.

Contrariwise, as Tweedledee (creation of a logician, of course) says, is the click in my mind simply the product of my own confirmation biases?

Does this phrase feels right and useful merely because it expresses something I already believe to be true - just more neatly? Should I instead refuse to settle into the comfort of having help to do what I was trying to do all along, but seek out and accept challenges to what I currently think about these things?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, is there? (Where’s the right punctuation mark for a rhetorical question when you want one?) Certainly it’s worth checking out the writer or artist who aparently said this thing; if you really hate their work or think it’s objectively bad, then their advice may not be right for you. Having said that, Stephen King is not the writer for me, but creative process is a different thing from creative output, and his On Writing has considerable merits.

What’s more, the fact that my post Sometimes: Twenty-Five Things Which Don’t Get Said Often Enough is one of the most popular on the Itch attests to the fact that sometimes we long to have our biases in favour of Showing or Active Voice questioned or even turned upside-down.

So here are ten quotes which I’ve recently come across which seem to me useful, not merely comforting. I humbly offer them to you, with the best link I can find, not only because they feel true (to me, confirmation biases and all, obv), but because they’re useful to me in my practice:

1) J M W Turner: It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.

It’s startling how much of my posts about writer’s block, procrastination, inner critics and their dressing-up boxes are at heart about coping with and overcoming fear.

2) Minor White: One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

I need to blog about this. Essentially, what raises writing from ‘enjoyable and serviceable’ to something really special is when every phrase and scene is doing at least two jobs in the text. So you can always ask yourself: what else could and should this sentence be doing? How could I tweak it, so it also does that?

3) Gwen Raverat: The whole of a long life is spent learning to see, to know what one is looking at with one’s inner mind: not in gaining experience, but in losing it.

This is a visual artist on observation without preconceptions, learning to let go of the ‘experience’ which leads us to shut down Keats’s negative capability. And talking of Keats …

4) John Keats: We hate poetry that has a palpable design up on us.

In other words, readers love learning but they hate feeling taught: if you want them to go with you, Show them what matters to and about your characters, cut most of the explaining, and trust them to do the math to come up with the conclusion: the lesson, the understanding or the moral outrage.

5) Ann Lamott: Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friends.

I take this to be ostensibly about the crazy first draft - which it is, of course. But it’s also, surely, about accepting our humanness, about the inevitabililty of inhabiting the messy middle muddle of life, if we want to inhabit life at all. And fiction and creative non-fiction is always about life.

6) Margaret Atwood: Writing is writing down, and what is written down is a score for voice, and what the voice most often does … is tell, if not a story, at least a mini-story.

Fundamentally, we were and are speakers and listeners before we were and are writers and readers - and what we say always exists, unfolds, in time, just as music does. It has no other way of being.

7) Alexander Pope: True wit is Nature to advantage dressed.

I don’t think Pope means ‘wit’ as in ‘witty’ here, so much ‘wit’ as in intelligence or wisdom. Fiction-writers work with the stuffs of real life past and present, and our craft is to make something more interesting and intelligent out of them.

8) Henry James: Really, universal relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, as by a geomtery of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

James was talking about endings - but, as I blogged about the other day, it’s just as true of beginnings. Our challenge is to create a satisfying, complete-seeming story out of the unsatisfying, incomplete randomness of real life - without sacrificing real-seemingness.

9) Konstantin Stanislavski: Who am I? What will I be? Why am I here? Where am I going?

These are questions*** for an actor to ask themselves in trying to inhabit their role. Swap in ‘you’, and we have questions to ask both our major and our minor characters. As someone else said (though I can’t find out who), everyone is the hero of their own story.

10) Edgar Degas: Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

As I said at the top, this echoes in my tip ‘write your second draft for your reader, and your third draft for the person you need to persuade’.

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* That second quote is from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) l.297, since you ask.)

** Chekhov’s ‘Gun on the wall’ quote is also not all it might at first appear to be, either in words, or in the meaning one can draw from them. And that’s before you’ve tangled with my ‘Reverse Chekhov’ rule.

*** I’m pretty sure this is from An Actor Prepares, or just possibly from one of the other two books in Stanislavski’s trilogy, but haven’t been able to pin it down.

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