Why Writers and Artists Are So Intense

I wanted to know why artists and writers are so self-absorbed.

Then I wanted to know why writers, painters, and other artists bloom late.

In popular posts I addressed those questions. Now I want to know why so many writers and artists are intense and have intense personalities.

 

Waking, Wanting To Get Going

Hands typing on a laptopI was excited waking up at 3:00 A.M. yesterday, and I was not thinking of going back to sleep. I wanted to finish some poems where I had left off the night before. I thought, “Let my wife–a calmer, less excitable person–sleep; I love to work and I have work to do.”

Then I started thinking that it was likely that other creative people I know–good friends in the arts–at that very moment also were waking early and were anxious to get to work on their project, that we are similar–we resemble each other in regard to the emotions we bring to bear as we live and work–that we are all creative and we are all intense and excitable. Certain qualities endear creative people to me. One is their intensity.

It seemed to me then that intensity and excitability were a pattern, a hard and fast characteristic of myself and my artful friends, and come to think of it, of many of the famous writers and artists and other creative people I have been reading about, studying, admiring, and writing about all my life. Their intensity made them different.

The Feeling of Intensity

What does intensity feel like?

Sunrise over a lake with blue and orange streaksIntense writers and artists do everything intensely–experiencing, feeling, thinking, and imagining. They are significantly different human beings from other writers and artists (and agents and family members and co-workers) who are not intense. They feel their emotions strongly. They soar high with elevated emotions, and they plunge into dark moods, at times their moods changing so fast as to be bewildering. In contrast, people who are not intense the way so many writers and artists are feel their emotions more mildly and without such major fluctuations between the high moods and the low moods. Differences in intensity between people who work closely together or live together may cause conflicts.

Some writers and artists feel that they are being flooded by waves of joy, that their every cell is being excited. Some writers and artists–perhaps you, certainly I–revise their work tirelessly, at times almost maniacally, ten times, twenty times, thirty times, until they are satisfied the work is the best they can do. Only then can they stop themselves.

The intensity of writers’ and artists’ personality is a powerful element of their creativity. The wonderful poet John Keats thought that intensity–not intelligence or any other quality — in and of itself is the most powerful creative element of all.

Intensity and the Arts

Deep blue-pruple crocus flower against green leavesIntensity is a quality found in many creative people that facilitates artistic pursuits. Abbe Dimnet said that the creator’s intensity will be reflected in the quality of the work: “The experience of most artists is that the quality of their production is in keeping with the intensity of their wish.” Henry James wrote: “It is art that makes life, makes intensity, makes importance.” Horace said, “Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything.” It is their intensity that gives them strength. Keats said, “The excellency of every art is its intensity “ A problem every writer and artist faces is maintaining in every phase  of their story or painting  the intensity that keeps it going and energizes the  creator’s every gesture and the work’s every detail.  They must be able to generate and sustain intensity as they work.

Emotional Intensity and Over-Excitability of Many People in the Arts

“Emotional intensity” of the kind I am describing is a quality that Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, physician, and poet Kazimierz Dabrowski found when he studied intellectually or artistically gifted people. The degree of a person’s emotional intensity is a stable characteristic. Some people are intense; some are not. Just as self-absorbed artists and writers can’t help being self-absorbed any more than they can help having the color eyes they do, intense artists and writers can’t help being intense.

Dabrowski recognized that, as I thought, creative people experience an intensification of experience much beyond what other people experience. Dabrowski considered the intensity of their emotions, their sensitivity and emotional extremes–their “over-excitabilities”–to be part and parcel of their makeup. Every aspect of their personality is intense.

They are “spirited,” and are also more sensitive, perceptive, energetic, and persistent than other people. They possess what I have called “inner” skills such as persistence, confidence, and courage that not everyone has but that lead directly to success in the arts. Dabrowski identified five “overexcitabilites” exhibited by more people in the artistically gifted population than in the general population.

The Five Dimensions of Intense Writers’ and Artists’ Lives

  1. Sensual

Sensualists, intense writers and artists seek an enhanced sensory and aesthetic pleasure in seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, hearing, and sex. They delight in beautiful objects and in sounds of words, and in form, color, and balance. Negatively, they may overeat and be sexually over-indulgent.

  1. Psychomotor

Intense people have a surplus of energy, are competitive, enjoy intense physical activity such as fast games and sports, often are compulsive talkers–they may jabber–and act impulsively. They may have nervous habits. They may bite their nails or have nervous twitches.

  1. Intellectual

They enjoy intensified activity of their mind in their curiosity, concentration, and in their capacity for sustained intellectual effort, avid reading, asking probing questions, and making keen observations. They can vividly recall what they see with their eyes (that fundamental necessity for writers and artists) and may be detailed planners.  They are tenacious problem-solvers. They search for truth and understanding. They think about thinking and love theory and analysis. They are logical and independent thinkers.

  1. Imaginational

In speaking and writing, intense writers and artists often use images and metaphors, are given to poetic and dramatic perceptions, and are skilled at inventing. Some can make up fantasy worlds of their own and imaginary companions and are attracted to magic and fairy tales. Under emotional tension their imagery can mix truth and fiction. They may have elaborate dreams and illusions. They cannot tolerate boredom. They may lack self-judgment and be overly-critical.

  1. Emotional

The feelings and emotions of over-excitable writers and artists are intensified. They are given to extremes of emotions, complex feelings and a large range of emotions and have an awareness of the feelings of others. They have heights and depths of emotions that others lack. At times their mood soars. And it also may plunge. Their moods change quickly.

They may have strong physical expressions of over-excitability such as tense stomach, sinking heart, pounding heart, sweaty palms. Intense writers and artists experience euphoria, enthusiasm, and ecstasy, but also shyness, timidity, and obsessiveness.

But Dabrowski found that inner forces were at work in them also, forces that generated overstimulation, conflicts, and pain, and often set them out in a search for a way out. One way out may lead to inner growth and transformation, another may lead to results such as addiction.

Examples of Famous Intense Writers and Artists

Photograph of Walt Whitman with a long white beardWho could be more intense than poet Walt Whitman who expressed a wish to have “one hour of madness and joy,” “to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom,” “To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am.” Who more intense than novelists Charles Dickens with his phenomenal storehouse of drive that enabled him to work on a multiplicity of books, speeches, plays, travels, and social projects at the same time without ever tiring?

Or Thomas Wolfe whose monumental goal was nothing less than to describe in the millions of published words that poured out of him uncontrollably, as from a spigot, every experience he had ever had? And Gustave Flaubert, a pioneer of a modern writing style, who agonized rewriting his novels and stories to perfection? Or intense painter Vincent van Gogh who produced a masterpiece a day, or Claude Monet, who for his artistic experiments could paint thirty or forty canvasses of exactly the same scene.

There are drawbacks to a writer or artist being over-excitable and intense. But the advantages of being a writer or artist who is intense and has the powerful energies, the drive, and many other qualities that facilitate success in the arts far outweigh the negatives. The creative’s intensity is reflected in the quality of the work they produce–more intensity, better quality work.

If writers and artists are asked to identify the important characteristics they would l really like to have that would positively affect their career, they will be wise to identify intensity.

An intense writer or artist trying to create a vision they perhaps alone perceive is fortunate.

 

© 2023 David J. Rogers

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Filed under Artists, Charles Dickens, Claude Monet, concentration, Dabrowski, Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, energy, Excellence in the Arts, Imagery in the Arts, Inner Skills, Intensity, Moods, Over-Excitabilities, talent, Walt Whitman, Writers, Writers' Characteristics

Embrace Your Destiny as a Writer

Orange sandy beach shore with dark mountains and aqua blue sky in backgroundIf you are to be a writer who will be recognized, you must have faith that you have been created to be a writer, that writing is a destiny toward which your life has been aimed. Virginia Wolf and Toni Morison felt that way, and James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, and Ernest Hemingway. Many writers we haven’t heard of yet, but will, also feel that way. The faith that you are fated to be a writer is a writer’s first requirement. You must believe that it is when you are writing that you’re doing what you were brought into the world to do.

That sense of being fated stirs writers to action: now they must go out to embrace with their whole being their writer’s destiny, to accept it, to resolve to be it, to realize their writer’s vocation,  and not flee from it the way many people flee from the heights they could have reached.

As a gift to you–a person with a literary talent–nature has singled you out. You have been specially endowed with not only “creative stuff” that is the source of achievement in all the arts and is possessed by only a minority of people, but with personal qualities that equip you specifically to fulfill the writer’s demanding role–energy, high intelligence, curiosity, a love of your language, a dictionary in your head of favorite words, the playfulness of a child, doggedness, discipline, daring, intuition, intensity, deep emotions, imagination, self-assurance, a warrior’s courage, the stamina of athletes, maturity, refined taste and  wise judgment.

Gold fountain pen leaning on a closed black leather-bound bookHistory shows that writers who will amount to anything also all have an attitude of “seriousness” about their work and their lives: “This is my only life; I am not playing games. I try to write every day. I strive to get better and better still and will do that all my life.”

It is the identity of a writer that gives you the confidence that you are a person with a definite life task—to write, to spend your life writing, to create poems, stories, novels, dramas, screen plays, essays–whatever form of literature you desire that comes out of you assembled in your own words, fashioned from the disappointments and glories of your own life, different as your life and your writing are from the life and writing of all other writers who are alive now or have ever lived.

Writing–the physical acts of writing, the movement of your muscles to write, your eyes to focus, the shifting of your weight in the chair–is so essential to writers that if they are prevented from writing for any reason, they will be tense and conflicted until circumstances change and once again they are able to write freely, confidently, and without holding back. And then, as though touched by a healer with extraordinary powers, they will be well again.

Dark grey road bordered by dark green fields leading to a distant point with a dark orange skyAs a writer you must be true to your awesome potential–must be in fact what you are potentially.  If you are not doing enough with your gifts, your conscience lets you know. The conscience of a writer asks, “Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Have I become what I should have become? If I have not become what I should have become, what will I do now?” Your writer’s conscience is the voice that calls you to be the person you are fully prepared to be, the uniquely talented writer you have been created to be.

 

© 2023 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Interview with David J. Rogers

 

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Filed under Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, High Achievement, Success, talent, The Writer's Path, Writer's Destiny, Writers' Characteristics, Writers' Life

Poems Mainly About People by David J. Rogers

Cool Wind

And I thought how lovely
It was to feel
Through an open window
A cool wind on a hot night
Such as this
And to see let in
Between the window shade
And the window sill
Leaves’ shadows dancing on
A midnight floor.

 

The Silence That Settles So Softly

Silence has settled as softly
As pollen on her hospital room
As visitors take their magazines
And as quietly as moths
Go out the door, leaving
Us to face this night alone.

“How fast life goes, Dave,” she says.
“It’s no longer than a mosquito’s life.
Why does it go so fast?”
A little room, a bed,
A pair of eyes; someone watching,
A young woman very ill.
Night has come, the day is gone.
Over the city shines a blue light.
Chrysanthemums stand in a vase.

She asks, “How do you explain life?
What does a person live for?”
It is probably happiness.
Yes, that was it all the time,
The happiness one feels.  No one
Could say she hadn’t known exquisite happiness.

I feel such love toward her that could I,
I would die for her
And am so regretful that I cannot suffer
Her pain for her, and am powerless to help her,
And that she soon will be gone entirely from my life
And from this world.

But now, dear sister,
Close your brown eyes.

 

Phoebe Leads Quite a Life

My friend Phoebe the writer leads quite a life.
She tried to explain why in affairs she chooses men that are out of character.
She said: “I read in George Eliot’s biography a perfect description
Of myself not as I seem, or would want to be, but as I really am:”
She quoted Eliot:
A retiring woman of gentle disposition and orderly habits.
A very cautious woman who chooses courses of action she cannot rationally defend.’

 

Sounds Beyond Number

I’ve run down the front stairs and
Out into the neighborhood
On my seventh birthday.
No adults who love me restrain me.
I am as free as the wind.
About me: the air and sunlight; the clouds,
The church tower, Lake Michigan, the cityscape
That good fortune has allocated for my pleasure
During these years of my happy youth.
These languorous streets of mine,
Mapped indelibly in my mind, are shaded by
Cool poplars, sycamores, and elms this sunny October day.

Familiar cars pass, and in the hedges
Crickets whose voices I recall are out in noisy numbers.
Bob the panhandler is dozing in his favorite doorway.
His mouth is closed but his lips flutter.
Machinists, teachers, clerks, and mechanics
On their way to somewhere else pass me by without a word.

Odors of bubbling tar are in the street where men
Soaked wet with sweat and without shirts
Work diligently in the torrid noon sun.
The silver-painted wagon I am pulling rattles
Among other street sounds beyond my counting.
They ring in my receptive ears
Like the jingle- jangle of festive bells.

 

Mister Koehler

When I was a boy in Chicago
Every Sunday the tallest man in the world
Sat in the seat next to mine in church–8’2”
The disparity in our height was
An object of humor, but not to me.

He had difficulty walking because he was so tall
And his spine was weak.
He shuffled between two wood canes,
Bent over, frail, his arms quivering, his eyes cast down
So that he would not fall.

He drove a car. He was a salesman.
His car had no front seat,
Only a back seat where he sat,
His long arms reaching the steering wheel,
His long legs the pedals.

There is a replica of him
In a wax Museum in London.
He is cited in
The Guinness Book of World Records
As earth’s tallest person.

He was too tall to have a long life.

 

Woman Sitting at a Table
In a Restaurant on Broadway
In New York City

I saw you
Looking at me
Knowing I had
Looked at you,
No chance ever
To see you again
Or you to
Look at me again
With your mystic eyes.
You who had I
Known long ago
I would have run
My finger over
So carefully
And cupped
In my hand
Like an orchid.

 

Young Woman in the Pontchartrain
Hotel, Detroit, Michigan

If I tell you that in the elevator
At three a.m. she stopped me and said,
“I’ve been looking for you all night”
You would have an idea of her lonely
Profession, but no idea what kind of
Woman she was, nor how pretty.

 

In the summer before the often cruel cold Chicago winter each year of my childhood there came in a truck the coal-shoveler who would appear in the alley to do his job. On the way to school I would walk past him carrying my books and would look at his tall pile of coal and wonder “How in the world will one man be able to shovel all that coal?” When I returned home the coal would be gone and the coal- shoveler–his work done– would be sleeping, waiting to be picked up, or he would be gone until reappearing when I would be a year older.

 

The Silent Coal -Shoveler

Behind the apartment building
Where I lived with my family and
Beside a mountain of coal
Toiled the always silent, always alone,
Never-speaking, never-grunting,
Never- complaining
Muscular black coal-shoveler.
From chilly dawn
To the end of afternoon
While I was at school
Or at the playground
From the alley
Behind my gate
Across from the church,
That cadenced scrape
Of his shovel
Between coal and pavement
Could be heard, and chunks of coal
Thumping, tumbling noisily
Like pieces of thunder
Down the wooden chute
Into the dark cellar.

 

Encounters in the Natural World

When I was a boy my father, brother, and I would leave the city and hike in the forests north of Chicago, where now, in a thriving suburb, I live with my wife.  I remember our last hike:

In the underbrush along the path we followed were morning glories, wild flowers, lilies of the valley, azaleas, and asters. In the trees squirrels preened on their hind legs, then leaped from branch to branch. A chipmunk made its departure into the lush chipmunk world.

A small female white-tail deer waited for us to pass, a puzzled expression in her bulging eyes, and then bounded across the path. We were so close we could have touched. Then a full-grown, majestic male with more serious eyes appeared as though it had come up from the ground.

Grasshoppers still damp with morning dew dried themselves in the sunlight, and we took care to step around them. A yellow finch, its head bobbing, whistled sweetly, and insects squabbled in the air. The fragrance of warm, sweet clover was everywhere.

A wind rippled across the river in front of us and the gold leaves on the trees along its banks rattled. The sun bright, the trees cast long, thin shadows that in the wind swayed on the water like a company of dancers.

 

Jim, Jim, I’ve Remembered You Often

Jim, Jim, I’ve remembered you often,
My roommate in college, a tortured
Red-headed business major so caught
In the grip of a terrible addiction to
Alcohol that, when desperate, he
Drank anything, including:
Lighter fluid
Hair tonic
Motor oil and lubricants
Gasoline

I had been studying all night when I heard Jim
Staggering up the stairs after a night ending at dawn at County Line, the dump
Where he often wound up after hours. There nothing was prohibited.

He was trying so hard to appear sober crossing the bedroom floor,
But his hands were shaking. His legs were as stiff as brooms.
I watched him compassionately without speaking a word

As I would watch an injured cat or dog, hoping that he would
Be able to do what I could see he had in mind to impress me with–
Hoping that he would be able to hang neatly on a hanger

Without any help the blue jacket he was holding in his right hand.
But the hanger slipped tragically from his grip and
Clattered on the wooden floor.

Then I saw what I cannot erase
From memories of my college years or of Jim:
The expression on his face of shame.

A False Assumption

Some people fall into a trap. They assume
That because the woman or man they desire is beautiful
And seems to be their ideal that they also possess fine qualities
Such as intelligence, kindness, and decency,
But often soon find them lacking virtues without a trace.

 

The Death of Judy Wazorick

I remember Judy Wazorick fondly.
We were in grammar school together.
She had a blue eye and a brown eye,
And sat in the last seat of the last row.
She was shy, but when I looked at her
She always smiled at me.
Now I see she won’t be at the reunion,
And I am so sad because Judy Wazorick
Has passed away.

 

Wings

Two seasons each year–spring and fall–
Flocks of familiar geese flutter down
From the sky to dine on the grassy field outside my home,
Waddling, pecking, bickering like
Children or thieves–then a truce–
Only a misunderstanding:
All is forgiven, friend. Departing
They assemble for the flight
In perfect order, poised, silent; air quivering.
Then torrents of ascending wings–wings.

 

There Were

There were pleasant, guileless women I liked on sight,
And women with the look of dreamers that I knew were
Full of dangers, but couldn’t resist and didn’t try very hard to.

There were women with long, raven-black hair that flowed like oil,
And plain, sincere, friendly women, and women who smiled
So gently, so exquisitely, that I was numb.

There were women who acted as if they were personal friends of God,
And light-hearted women, and women whose mood never changed,
And women with deep voices and treacherous eyes.

There were young, ugly-duckling women who were just about to be beautiful,
And attached women who enjoyed being fallen women, as well as a
Playful, petite woman full of horse-sense and laughter.

They and others brightened my life and are a pleasure to remember.

 

© 2023 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Interview with David J. Rogers

 

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

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Claude Monet’s Experiments That Transformed Art

When a new and different style in the arts first appears, it is not welcomed. Innovation clashes with the artists, critics, teachers, and the public whose tastes currently dominate the art and is greeted with ridicule and contempt.  Such was the case with painting’s Impressionism. It was distained, laughed at, and belittled by the establishment.

Monet painting of two wome in white dresses in a garden with a background of trees

Monet: The Garden

The central members of the group of artists we call Impressionists met each other in cafes, studios, and galleries in the early and middle 1860s, and by the end of that decade had worked together long enough to identify themselves as a group. Among them were Claude Monet, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro (the oldest and most steadfast of them), Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley (the least well known), Mary Cassatt (an American), Berthe Morisot( the most misunderstood) and Gustave Caillebotte. The paintings they created are arguably the most beautiful and accessible in the history of art.

In time, Impressionism established itself as a major force, then became the most popular style of panting in the West. Its appeal passed on quickly to painters in other countries and to all other arts, including the music of Frenchman Claude Debussy whose Impressionist compositions such as Prelude a L’après-midi d’un faune changed forever the very sound of music, and the Impressionistic literature of popular American writer Stephen Crane.

Just as no two Impressionists were exactly alike–Degas the son of a wealthy Parisian banker, Renoir the son of an impoverished tailor, Cassatt a Philadelphia socialite, Pissarro a Danish citizen educated in Central America–so no two Impressionists were trying to accomplish exactly the same thingsin their art.

Impressionist painting of a man sitting on a park bench with a little girl

One of the most flexible aspects of the Impressionist movement was its refusal to be highly defined.   There was no doctrine of Impressionism and there were never rules. There were no clear standards on which to judge a work. The early Impressionists painters shared with the novelists, playwrights, and composers of their generation a fascination with “the here and now,” the wish to represent their own time. Impressionist paintings, prints, and drawings of the streets and locations in Paris and its surroundings reflect their world so accurately that they can be dated.

As a school of painting, Impressionism culminated the art of the nineteenth century. It fused together the contributions of conflicting schools in a way that led painting to the art of the twentieth century, partially as a continuation of Impressionism and partially as a reaction against it.

However different their concerns, all Impressionists shared an interest in the effects of light on objects, none of them more than Claude Monet (1840-1926), to whom light became a long obsession.

An Impressionist wants to reproduce the effects of light rather than the form of the object that is reflected in the light–a painting of a yellow flower only as the impression of light made on the artist.

 

Claude Monet

Photograph of Claude Monet with a beardMonet was the most renowned and most influential pioneer of Impressionism–the giant of Impressionism.  Painting out of doors, Monet devoted his life to creating new ways of capturing light’s changeable qualities on canvas. A 12:00 p.m. sunlight is not the same as a 4:00 p.m. sunlight, or even a 12:05 sunlight or 12:10 sunlight. Early evening sunlight is similar to but, different from morning sunlight. The suns of one month are different from the suns of every other month. Such facts filled Monet’s thoughts.

Monet was only twenty-seven when he painted The Beach of Sainte-Adresse, and shortly after painted On the Seine at Bannecourt, which though painted in brilliant hues, lacked a clear subject or a focus on any part of the landscape. These were thoroughly unconventional landscapes that were in every respect ahead of their time.

The lack of a central focus made On the Seine at Bennecourt more appealing. Monet realized that The Beach of Sainte-Adresse was so unusual, and in a way shocking, that he didn’t publically display it for ten years, until the public was more ready to “understand” it. The Seine at Bannecourt has been called the first truly Impressionist landscape.

Monet was a high-energy, insatiable worker. He strove continually to develop and refine his own art, and through his art, advanced the development of the art of Western painting. Many years passed before the full scope of his talents were recognized. Yet, working alone without a powerful patron, the importance of his vision of art was recognized during his lifetime. Unlike many pioneers who pass away uncelebrated and in poverty, Monet would end his life prosperous and acclaimed.

 

The Mind of a Scientist

The scientific method involving theories, observations, and experiments appealed to Monet. He had a scientist’s mind, testing his theories and carefully recording the effects of his experiments that focused on sunlight. The emphasis on the subject at “a particular moment of time” that he sought to capture in his paintings–which he termed “instantaneity”– is akin to what the French call un coup d’oeil. It means “something perceived in the blink of an eye.”

Monet painting of Waterloo Bridge with purples

Monet: Waterloo Bridge in sunlight

“The quality of instant vision, the subject revealed in a momentary aspect, takes on more importance in Impressionism than it ever had before…The pure Impressionists will paint as if they had caught the subject unaware in a chance gesture, “(John Canaday.) In painting colored light Impressionists break the surface of the canvas into thousands of fragmented tints.

Monet became so focused on light–to reducing all visual experiences to pure light–that when his young wife died, he was horrified to find himself analyzing the nacreous tints of her skin in the early light.

Monet painting of Waterloo bridge in fog

Monet: Waterloo Bridge in Fog

As his fascination with light grew, he expressed the wish that he had been born blind in order to paint objects without knowing what they were. He began more and more to develop the ability to look at a scene or an object and see light and nothing but light.

 

His Aims Change

His aims in his art changed as he more and more deeply immersed himself in theoretical thinking about his art. In his early painting, like any artist he is absorbed in the pleasure of the subject–what is being shown in the painting. Apparent too is his joy in the act of painting, of the inventiveness and energy involved in the painter’s craft and a participation in a real-life world of sunlight, air, and flowers.

He then experienced the change from being a painter whose role was to respond to nature into a painter who became fascinated and preoccupied by an abstract problem.

 

Saint-Lazare Train Station and the Field of Poppies

The 1877 Impressionist exhibition included in one room seven paintings of the surviving twelve painted by Monet of the Parisian depot Saint-

Monet painting of Saint Lazare Train Station

Monet: Saint Lazare Train Station

Lazare. They were the first series of Monet’s long career to explore a single subject at different times and under different conditions of light and dark.

It has been said that Monet convinced the station master that he was a famous artist in order to persuade him to run the engines while the trains stood still so they would make billowing clouds of steam. It was from the Saint-Lazare station that artists took trains to virtually all the landscape sites that the Impressionists preferred.

Monet painting of red poppies on green hill with cloudy sky and three figures in foreground

Monet: Field of poppies

Thirteen and fourteen years later Monet chose to paint in three paintings the difficult subject of poppy fields. They were challenging because the intense greens, reds, and oranges of the fields were affected very little by atmospheric conditions. To compensate he looked tor variety in the skies and the shadows in the trees. The poppy group was followed by another series of five paintings of ripening wheat, and that series was followed by The Haystacks.

 

 

The Haystacks Paintings, the Rouen Cathedral, the Pool at Giverny

In his later paintings Monet’s fascination with the scene became a devotion to the technical process of painting works that illustrate a style he was seeking to create. Monet was analyzing the relationship between color and sunlight in a variety of stages between early morning light, the bright light of midday and evening half-light exhibited a series of fifteen paintings of haystacks he painted in  1891 in different lights at different times of day.

Brown and light blue wheat stack in pastel field with orange-gold skyMonet became obsessed with the sculptured shape of haystacks and with the dramatic contrasts of light and shade inherent in their form. The haystack paintings were a great success and led Monet to a more elaborate analysis of the effects of light on objects.

Monet painted forty pictures of Rouen Cathedral on gray days, bright days, in early light, late light, full light, and light at different seasons of the year. The Rouen pictures were followed by another series of a perfect subject.

For the subject that would absorb him most Monet need go no further than his garden. He preferred to reside with his family in spacious suburban houses with elaborate flower gardens and immense day-lit studios. In the garden of his house in Giverny was a pool of water lilies that took his attention in the 1890’s. He discovered in the pool and its surfaces, leaves, and blossoms that floated on it his subject for the rest of his life–the translucent petals of the blossoms, the leaves half-submerged in the water the same color with light glancing off surfaces, the whites and rainbow tints.

 

From the Effects of Light to an Art of Abstract Surfaces: The Water Lilies Period

Monet gradually transformed his art from painting spontaneous approximations of the effects of light and atmosphere to an art of abstract surfaces existing for themselves. The focus of his art became the  surface of pools and areas where the balance of water, light, air and the delicate substance of blossoms co-mingled, echoed each other, crossed on another’s boundaries, and blended together so that there was no difference between them. His last works were a series of large decorative panels in which the forms of nature are difficult to distinguish.

If the water lilies are thought of as real-life water lilies they become a great disorderly mass of arbitrary color. But if the water lilies are considered abstract arrangements of color applied in careful strokes they coalesce meaningfully.

 

Through his obsession with light, his energy, work ethic, scientist’s mind, craft, and controlled experiments, Claude Monet took Impressionism to its limits–and beyond.

 

© 2023 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

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A Book of Spiritual Wisdom To Help Discouraged People

Face of a sad-looking light brown and white puppyThink of the last time you were discouraged. You were knocked off balance and became weakened and vulnerable. Possibly something you longed to happen did not happen, or something you dreaded happening did happen. Then you were discouraged. Courage is a thing of the heart. The word “courage” derives from couer,” the French for heart. To be “dis” couraged is to lose heart. You were never too young and will never be too old be to be discouraged. You don’t outgrow discouragement.

 Bordeaux Mastiff dog happily running through waterAction is the most effective antidote to discouragement To rid yourself of being discouraged strive to be a person of action. The happiest and most courageous people in the world have a preference for action. Rarely are they discouraged. They are too busy to be. In high spirits they persist through difficulties, overcoming setbacks, resisting gloomy moods, never losing hope. That is why they are so happy. The samurai of ancient Japan were the most action-obsessed men and women who ever lived.

 

An Example of What Happens When You Are Discouraged

Good things can come out of bad things. So life taught me.

When you are cheated out of money, it is usually because you were too trusting, and I was to the tune of a sixty thousand dollar loss at a time when sixty thousand dollars might just as we’ll have been six million. I had a wife and four children and I was not rich. I had performed work in good faith, and then did not get paid. My spirit was taken out of me, my once firm faith in peoples’ decency was now shaken, and I couldn’t find Library with shelves full of bookspeace. So I began to search for solace and wisdom.

I had to think. I had to decide what to do now. I was so miserable and angry that I decided, being a writer, to put together a research-based book that would help me recover and would also appeal to other people who were battling the pains of discouragement.

The product of what I thought would be a one year creative venture was to be a book about which people would say, “It saved me from despair. It gave me hope. Once I was discouraged, but now I’m not.” In the book there would be no anger, bitterness, or vengefulness toward anyone, even the two evil men who had taken food out of my children’s mouths. Just good sense, good feelings, and good writing.

White and grey Japanese pagoda style building with blue sky and green treetopsI chose as the basis of the book the spiritual insights of samurai warriors of ancient Japan. It may seem that the psychology of people like that who lived four centuries ago  in a foreign country would have little to say to you, yet if you are interested in ways to strengthen yourself spiritually, that is the place and era to look for information. Samurai had introduced the teachings of Zen into the Japanese culture. Zen was “the religion of the samurai.”  Many samurai were poets.

Were you to acquire the skills of the samurai that the book I wrote is concerned with, the following benefits–the changes in their lives readers told me about–would occur:

Your resilience in recovering from discouragement and other setbacks would be remarkable

Your commitment to your major life’s purposes would be miraculous

Your powers of concentration would be exceptional

You would be afraid less often; old fears would disappear

 

Committing Yourself to Action

Puppet or doll of saurai warriorSamurai were models of action-oriented people. The essential feature of the samurai “Way” (way of life) is action. (That a discipline is a Way is indicated by the suffix “do.” The samurai Way is “bushido). All samurai spiritual insights and training were designed for one reason: to equip the person (a samurai or you) to make up their mind quickly and firmly and to go into action confidently.

Samurai were consumed by making a decision and taking steps to achieve their goals, and doing so with little time between the urge to action and the action itself, just as the flame appears immediately when you strike a match. A text that guided samurai says, “The Way of the samurai is immediacy. It is doing things NOW.” Another says, “When things are done slowly seven of ten turn out poorly.”

You will have ideal results if like a samurai you commit your entire being when you take action, putting all of your physical, spiritual, and psychological strength into the acts your life requires you to perform– an author writing a book, a sales person making a pitch, a public speaker addressing an audience, a parent listening to a little child as she speaks to you, etc.

Hold nothing back in reserve. Clear your mind of all distractions. Forget everything else. Forget yourself. Forget the impression you are making.  Forget winning or losing. Forget fame and wealth.  Forget setbacks. Concentrate solely on performing the action beautifully. Behave as though your every act is the last of your life.  Behave as though this is what you will be remembered for.

Are you a person of action or are you waiting for someone to save you?

 

Writing a Successful Book

Clickable (to Amazon page) image of cover of Kindle edition of Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and LifeI was fortunate to find a good agent who had faith in the project and in me, and we proposed the book to a publisher who accepted it. There would be an advance in two payments. That was good; I needed the money. I laid everything else aside,  not having time to waste, and was excited by the process I loved–studying, reading, writing, revising, using my brain, having insights, then “aha” revelations.  I found that the sections that gave me the most trouble  and took the most time invariably proved to be the most popular when the book was published. That was a profound learning, I worked twelve to fifteen hours a day for two years to finish Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life.

Fighting to Win’s popularity began slowly. There was a minimum of initial publicity. But then the book found its market–men and women looking for strength, a new beginning, and an escape from discouragement. It caught fire in one city after another, racking up sales in the United States, Japan, and Europe. When my article “Fighting to Win” appeared in Success Magazine it was the most read feature Success ever published.

 

Being Discouraged Is Contrary to Good Mental Health

Smiling, happy-looking young woman with short blond hair and sunglasses with yellow and white tulipsEvery day’s goal of healthy people is to be happy, to love and be loved, and not to be discouraged. But there are many impediments–opponents. In the arts among artists and writers I know so well, and in everyday work and personal life, like a samurai in battle, everyone encounters those opponents. Some are outer opponents–an outrageous person who’s hard to get along with (a harsh critic of your writing or painting, for example if you are in the arts), personal crises, setbacks, failures, Etc. People who steal from you.

But most opponents are inner psychological “dragons” in the samurai vocabulary, powerful opponents such as obsessions, anxieties, fears, and worries. Usually the inner spiritual opponents are the most dreadful. Every person has talents. If you surrender to dragons it makes full realization of those talents impossible. You won’t become the person you had the potential to be.

Golden-colored dragan headAll samurai training was designed to overcome those dragons so that in your everyday life you will progress smoothly from experience to experience, challenge to challenge, achievement to achievement, happiness to happiness.

 

Be Ready for These Five Dragons

Samurai were trained to overcome five universal spiritual blocks to action, and developed many methods for doing so, as Fighting to Win prescribes. If left alone without dealing with them, these blocks will fester and lead some people to discouragement. Those main inner opponent dragons are described in Chapter Two of Fighting to Win. They are:

  • Fear–of any kind (Everyone is afraid of at least one thing every day)
  • Being afraid to take risks. (That fear makes people timid and cowardly)
  • Thinking too much and not acting at all, or not quickly enough
  • Doubting yourself (the main dragon of many people, particularly people in the arts.)
  • Hesitating

Deep pink and white lotus blossom on dark backgroundAcquiring wisdom from the samurai Way suits people who wish to overcome discouragement and are able to make use of insights and techniques from any era or culture that will help them. What strikes me is the ease with which readers of the book adapt those insights from centuries ago to their current everyday living.

Writing is said to be therapeutic, and that was certainly true of my experience writing Fighting to Win. I overcame my deep discouragement and was happy to find that the book helped many people overcome theirs.

 

© 2023 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Interview with David J. Rogers

 

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

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Writers, Artists: You Are Not a Failure If Your Work Is Rejected

Vincent van Gogh self portrait pale blues greens, yellow and brownWriters and artists throughout history have feared and hated rejections of their work.

The most coveted goal of writers and artists–the end result and focus of all their education, training, efforts, and hopes–is to see their work published or mounted on display.

Artists and writers are particularly sensitive. When their work goes unaccepted and rejections occur time and again, as often happens in the sometimes cruelly competitive worlds of writers and artists, the emotions they feel are frustration, then discouragement, and then misery.

cartoon of woman crying and hand held up behind her saying NOEach rejection compounds the effects of the previous rejections and can lead writers and artists from heights of blissful optimism to the total disappearance of confidence. Yet without confidence, writers and artists cannot do their work.

This post shows that writers and artists are not failures if their work is rejected. They may be passing through a phase on the way to great success. Or they may find joy and peace of mind in the act of creating without making any effort to sell or publish their creations. They may find satisfaction without an expectation or desire to be published, or they may seek alternatives. Self-publishing is currently very popular, as are blogs and newsletters.

But even for writers and artists whose goal is to have their work published or accepted, rejection does not mean failure.

 

I Read a Post About Rejection

A few days ago I read an article which asked how writers should Sad-faced dog respond when editors reject their work, and there it was, the questions “What is winning? Is winning the only thing that matters? Is getting published the only thing that matters?  Is that the only credential that makes you a significant literary person?”

Having been involved in many intense competitions in sports, in earning a living in bitterly competitive business environments, and in the arts, I have seen that there are more enduring, valuable, and humane ways of finding success than that. I feel that my views can help writers and artists who are trying very hard, but unsuccessfully, to achieve the ultimate goal of having their work accepted

Painting of white book floating above blue water and skyI remember once learning that a publishing house I was interested in submitting to typically received 5,000 unsolicited manuscripts a year. Less than seventy would be published.  What about those thousands of disappointed writers? I’m sure they had worked very hard and had high hopes. But their hopes would be shattered. Are they to conceive of themselves as failures? Are they supposed to give up hope of ever being successful?

I think that there is a healthy response for writers and artists who submit a work and do not have it accepted, an optimistic and hopeful attitude.

 

Other Forms of Winning that Precede Success

If you are a writer or artist, you are not a failure if your work is rejected. You may be winning.

You are winning and not failing when you refuse to let any fear of rejection or any intimidation stop you from submitting your works. (Stung by rejections, some writers and artists grow excessively cautious about showing their work at all. They become paralyzed. Better to be bold and fearless.)

Portrait of William ShakespeareYou are winning and not failing when you are persistent in spite of setbacks, are able to recover quickly, and are resilient.

You are winning when regardless of rejections, your writing and art are now better than ever before, when you are at the peak of your abilities, performing at your personal best.

You are winning and not failing when you make sure that the quality of your work (and your reputation) are always improving.

You are winning and not failing when you are mature and skilled enough to write and paint expertly. (Any person must spend thousands of hours developing an expertise in any art before they should expect to excel in it.)

You are winning when you are motivated and working hard. (Hard work will overcome many problems. Creative people have faith that effort along with talent leads to the best results; they are in love with work.)

You are winning when the work you submit is absolutely finished, polished like a precious jewel, and as high quality as it can be.

The word No, written in white on green, purple, red and other colorful squaresYou are winning and not failing when you are knowledgeable–about the subject, about your craft, about what the client is looking for, about everything you should know. (To creative people ignorance is not bliss.)

You are winning also when you are true to yourself and have integrity (and are not so desperate to be successful that you compromise too much.)

You are winning when the works you produce have many strengths, like many pillars of a temple, and few weaknesses.

 

Still life with a grey/green pitcher, red and green grapes and red pomegranatesThose are the ways you are really winning even during those times when it feels like you are not.

 

 

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 The Worst and Best Traits of Creative People

Night scene of ridge over water with street lights Whether you find creative people in remote little mountain kingdoms accessible only by mule or in big, modern, cosmopolitan cities, you will discover that they are surprisingly alike. The many traits they share are not all favorable; some are obstacles. Yet those traits–the worst and the best together–prepare creative people for fascinating lives other people look at with admiration and envy.

 

Creative people:

Feel deeply and are gifted. They are people whose ecstasies and traumas will be the raw material for their creations–never to be forgotten, but reflected again and again many times in the works they contribute to the world.

Red-haired, barefoot little girl in a blue dress with a serious expression sitting on a chair and playing a violin May be “overlooked” as school children. Their talents unrecognized, they may have undistinguished elementary and high school careers, only to be recognized for their significant achievements later in life to the surprise of everyone.

Are self-absorbed, concerned first and foremost with themselves, their own wellbeing and state of mind, their projects and their cherished and most private desires, needs, hopes. Their self-absorption can make them overly emotional, temperamental, and difficult. But self-absorption is a necessary feature of a creative personality.

Proud, may react defensively, angrily, bitterly to criticism.

Man wearing a black sweater holding his head in his hands, as if sad or upset Sadly, at times may be too emotionally ill to work, particularly poets and writers who may be victims of the high and inexplicable incidence of debilitating mood disorders affecting them.

Have a strong belief in, respect, and enthusiasm for their art.

Need confidence. Confidence grows exponentially with each success. The most accurate predictor of future success is past success, as “Since I have written a best seller before, I can do it again.”

Are often “seduced” by their art. There is no shortcut to the tremendous amount of experience necessary to become highly skilled in an art. It is hard for someone in the arts not to see their art taking over more and more of their time and possibly becoming their most important activity, finding themselves doing everything for their art.

Are rebellious, bold, and open to new experiences. More daring than the majority of people. Have no fear of risks.

Pianist performing in front of an audience on a stage with a shiny wood floor and a background of blue water behind him Have an insatiable need to establish rapport with and hold an audience–followers, fans to applaud them.  And yet, deprived of an audience, they will still work just as conscientiously.

 

May not seem to be but are competitive, ambitious, prone to envy and jealousy.

Will of necessity bloom late due to the difficulties of becoming established, overcoming a sequence of hurdles, and mastering their chosen art. Late developing, being “behind,” they needn’t despair because they often accelerate and “catch up” quickly after their first successes, often surpassing those who bloomed sooner.

Tend to “live in their heads.”

Consider themselves the best judge of their work, its “foremost authority.”

Are lucky to have the particular creative talents esteemed by society that make them ideal writers, artists, actors, dancers, composers, etc. as if  they are people who have been ordered from a catalogue.

Beige and brown Siamese cat sitting up on a light-colored wooden table and looking at the viewer with intense blue eyes.“Know who they are.” Are marked by a clear, unambiguous sense of identity, as “I am an historical novelist specializing in women’s roles in England during the Victorian era.”

Can be characterized as having heightened perceptions of the drama in the world and the beauty and importance of their art. In time they develop a “novelist’s mind,” or a ”painter’s mind,” or an architect’s, or dramatist’s mind, etc.

Can be perfectionists who are extremely hard on themselves and others (loved ones, associates, subordinates).

Abhor pretense.

Are not driven by the same needs as even the people dearest to them. (That causes conflicts).

Hold sacred their independence (Will fight for it, don’t want to lose it) Hate having their freedom interfered with or restrained.

Are far more self-disciplined in their work than most people in other fields.

Fanciful painting of many red, orange yellow, blue, and green, and white open umbrellas floating in the skyCan be playful, child-like, humorous, silly, fun to be with, and seem younger than their age.

Are committed to the development and refinement of their talents; motivated by “an urge to improve.”

Are exuberant, often boastful, about their achievements.

Love to work, work hard, sometimes harder than seems humanly possible.

Possess extraordinary energy and are excitable.

Must be patient and longsuffering because if they reach high-level mastery and become famous they will have persisted doggedly through thick and thin for years; many “rough spots on the road” appear in a creative person’s career.

Are strengthened by powerful needs to be competent and to be respected.

colorful abstract painting with yellow, red, pink, green blue, black, brown and traces of other colorsBenefit from a rare ability to focus on one object, problem, or task for extended periods without being bored or losing interest. (Facilitates completing “big jobs” like writing novels and painting murals.)

Strive to find “the one true voice” that expresses them vividly and accurately. (Doesn’t happen overnight.)

Generally find more pleasure working alone than working in groups; do not avoid, but relish, solitude.

Must quickly develop a capacity for mature self-criticism, objectivity, and judgment about their work and their abilities

Highly value authenticity, integrity, and sincerity.

large number of small jigsaw puzzle pieces in blue, orange, yellow, green, and brown piled on top of each otherFor survival must become skilled at overcoming obstacles, of which there are many in the arts.

Have a practical problem-solving intelligence; prefer difficult to easy problems.

May show minimal interest in current events, gossip, and politics–not interested in discussing them, “tune them out.”

 

Creative people possess many gifts, many strengths, and many imperfections. As imperfect as anyone else, they nevertheless benefit the world in innumerable ways.

 

© 2022 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Interview with David J. Rogers

 

Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers

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The Three Qualities Found  in Successful Artists and Writers

A Story of Three Artistic Friends

I was sitting in my living room that wintry Saturday night with three old friends who were successful in the arts:  a novelist, a poet, and a Path and trees covered with snowpainter. The storm buffeting the windows and pelting them with hail and snow made impossible even the thought of digging cars out and driving home. But everyone was in a good mood, and the house was warm. We were happy being together again after being separated so long by COVID.

For a while the conversation wasn’t really a conversation–just random comments, funny memories from their careers and mine, times we had spent together, and our favorite projects. I told them that I had an idea. I had a topic that had intrigued me for a long time. The novelist, a very cheerful man, said, “What topic is that?” I said, “I’m glad you asked.” Everyone laughed, and I said, “I would like to know what  main qualities bring a person success in the arts–qualities that Da Vinci had, and Shakespeare, Monet, Brando, Faulkner, and anyone successful in the arts now, in the past, and in the future. What are the main qualities instrumental in their success?”

Everyone was agreeable, and Norman started things off.

 

Norman the Poet

Energy

Norman is an award-winning poet I have been friends with since I attended one of his riveting readings. The principal feature of his personality is gentleness which is reflected in his often-tender lyric poems. He said, “I’ve given this question some thought too.  I think a lot of Depiction of swirling energy in pink, blue, yellow and greean against a black backgroundaccomplished people in the arts have wondered what they have that makes their creative work possible. The main quality anyone must possess if they are trying to be successful in anything, not just the arts, but certainly the arts, I feel, is energy. Powerful, potent personal energy equips creatives to produce a steady flow of works. Isn’t that our goal?

“Phoebe and Paul, I know you will each have something important to say, but I think an accomplished person in the arts is inconceivable without a high level of sustainable energy. The most successful artists have the energy and reserves of energy to work very hard, sometimes in a creative frenzy, and produce their art steadily over the course of a satisfying career.

” I cannot imagine people in any field having more energy than those of us in the arts. Athletes may equal us, but don’t surpass us. Artists are the antithesis of lazy, but have a passion to roll up their sleeves and work. I think they have had this passion all their lives. Their energy breeds more energy, as though their supply of it is inexhaustible. In a creative state of mind and body they don’t seem to get tired the way other people do. They can work long hours when working long hours is needed, as when they have a deadline. Imagine writing a novel. It is a pleasant ordeal that requires the expenditure of energy every day from the first draft which may have been written a thousand days before the finished book is available to readers.

“Consider the staggering achievements of Shakespeare. He wrote more than thirty tragedies, comedies, and histories, and the sonnets, and directed plays and acted in them. He managed a theatre company and had a wife and children to take care of.  Vincent van Gogh produced three thousand works in his brief five year career. That’s two works a day`. Picasso was even more productive.

“I’ve never known a successful creative person who lacked impressive energy. Their main goals are to pay their dues mastering their craft and then to produce one work after another non-stop. A big reason for a creatives’ failure is just lack of the energy that excellence in the arts requires.”

 

Phoebe the Painter

Talent

Phoebe has long experience and has had many shows. Her work can be found on the walls of several museums. She oozes confidence–a woman giving an impression of total self-possession, independence, and fearlessness. She is remarkably attractive. A friend once described her to me by saying, “And then I saw crossing a bridge the most beautiful woman on earth.”

She said, “I believe that the most important quality in an artist is talent. People in the arts are people with a gift, and that gift is their talent.  Shakespeare, Picasso, and van Gogh had tremendous energy but if they hadn’t had more talent than other people, they wouldn’t be the artists we admire so. An artist will not succeed without substantial talent.

Talent is the most recognizable quality in the creative world. It is everywhere. The most impressive thing in the world of art is the virtuoso performance, a display of talent by an individual that is so great that you will remember it long after you have forgotten everything else. There it is in Norman’s poems and Paul’s novels, and Degas’ and Jackson Pollack’s paintings, Laurence Olivier performing Hamlet, and Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s novels. Their talent is–how should I say it–extreme.

Colorful photo of young girl working on artwork“Painters, writers, actors, and dancers enter the world talented. From the beginning of their lives they can draw better than other children or write more interesting compositions, act out scenes more skillfully, dance more gracefully. Just look at the lovely paintings some little children can paint and the poems they can write.  Some children are too young to have learned to paint, yet they paint wonderfully and have technique. No one has taught them. They can paint superbly before being taught.  When they are being taught they absorb information so quickly, it’s astonishing. That’s the definition of talent.

“Talent cannot be depleted. If you have it you will never lose it. There will always be more. To be very good or great you must add to your talent. Creative people have been favored since birth, but not without the gods requiring something in return, and that is the responsibility to augment their talent.  Much of the energy Norm was talking about an artist applies to getting better–studying, practicing, experimenting.

“Raw talent is a quality which grows in quantity with effort.

 

Paul the Novelist/Actor

Focus

Paul had his first literary success as a college sophomore when his short story received an O’ Henry Award. He went on to write novels, and then in his words “branched out” into theatre acting where he also found success. That snowy night he said, ”Who can argue with a creative person’s need for inexhaustible energy and for talent that is exceptional? But I think that focus that is the salient factor that brings success to anyone in any field, especially in the arts, where the creator must concentrate so hard so often on so many things.”

He continued, “People often think of broad periods of time: ‘In eight months I’ll take my vacation and in eighteen years I’ll retire.’ But the creator in the act of creation focuses, thinking only of what occurs in single moments, such as ‘this brush stroke’  and ‘this sentence,’ ‘this musical phrase,’ or ‘these lines in this play I am to deliver now.’ The best moments of a creative person are that sliver of time when your mind is sharp and focused only on your work, when your mind is alert and clear, your concentration undivided and pin-point.

Magifying glass illuminated in gold light“I think that focus is a rare quality–the famous image in Zen of lack of creative mindfulness being a drunken monkey. People in our business have to learn pretty quickly to discipline their minds, so they don’t wander, but stick to the creative job at hand and not let any extraneous thought cancel that mysterious moment when you’re hard at work, focused, and being as creative and fulfilled artistically as you will ever be.”

Paul said, ”I also think that people in the arts have to be sure that they are in the art that most suits them and where their energy, talent, and focus will bring the best results. That may seem so obvious that it’s not worth mentioning, but what has struck me is that practicing artists sometimes discover they are focusing on the wrong art or genre, or that other artistic careers are right for them too, the way I discovered I could act and write both. Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it that a creator wouldn’t realize that another art or creative specialty would be more suitable. But it happens.

“There are other examples of people in the arts who were focused on the wrong specialty. Thomas Wolfe began by thinking that he was a playwright and was educated to be one in college and at graduate school at Harvard.  It was only after studying and writing plays for ten years, when his lover said, “Tom, you’re not equipped to be a playwright. You’re intended to be a novelist” that Wolfe became a novelist. Mary Cassatt spent several years painting in a conventional style before living in France and falling under the sway of Impressionism. She became an Impressionist herself. She destroyed all the paintings she had produced prior to making that change. “

“For me the key to success in the arts more than anything else is focus, both in the sense of mindfulness in the moment and in the sense of concentration on the most suitable and rewarding art.”

 

Application of Energy, Talent, and Focus

We thought our evening together had been fun–and enlightening. I said, “Other qualities are important to creators too. Self-confidence, intelligence, a rich imagination, detailed memory, drive, intensity, curiosity, experience, and careful preparation, for example, and beyond those of course is luck–is the person lucky? But energy, talent, and focus–I like that. We could look at the theatre department of a small college. Let’s say there are thirty students in the department.  They will all receive exactly the same training in acting, but the results will be different.

“Let’s estimate that after college fifteen will have no further connection with acting.  Ten will get involved in community theatres.  Five will become professional actors, two in lead roles. One will become a star. What we’re saying is that it’s likely that those who will become professionals will have more energy, talent, and focus than the others, and that the star will have more than anyone. I think we have something.”  Phoebe said, “Something good happens whenever we’re together.” Norman said, “We’re a good team.”

Going Home

painting of a simple house on a snowy nightThe storm still didn’t look so good, so they stayed the night. In the morning Paul insisted on making breakfast. I made coffee. We vowed to get together again soon. Then in early afternoon a bright sun came out, the winds died, and they left for home where work and many challenges were waiting.

 

© 2022 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

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The Weakness Many Writers Don’t Know They Have: Ideas and Models for Describing Places in Your Writing

Many writers have a weakness, but are not aware of it. They fall short when they describe places. Their places don’t seem real and are not vivid Small wooden farm buildings behind a wooden fence on the side of a road with grass and autumn treesor accurate. They are not interesting. Because of an inadequate handling of places, a work that may be superb in every other respect is without convincingly-described locations, scenes, and settings. Descriptions of places are not window dressing that a writer need pay little attention to, but a feature of writing fiction, nonfiction, and drama that is indispensable. Poorly written descriptions of places detract from the quality of the written piece.

When you read a description of place by someone such as Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, or Ernest Hemingway, who has elevated that skill to the level of art, you are impressed. You read the description more than once. You think, “This person can really write.” You realize that giving attention to skillfully composing your book’s or story’s places will enhance the works that you are striving so hard to make readable, enjoyable, salable.

Rust-colored field in front of rust-colored barn and silo with blue sky and pinkish cloudsAward-winning short story specialist Eudora Welty did more than anyone else to point out how central to effective fiction place is. She said that the story’s place affects “all currents” of the work, all of its emotions, beliefs, and moral convictions that “charge out from the story” as the author unfolds it. She said the places should always be identified, and adds that they should be described in a particular way that requires significant writing skills.

They should be described concretely.

They should be described exactly.

To describe places concretely and exactly requires the writer to be patient and take time writing about the places and not dismiss them with a few vague words. It is worthwhile to pay attention to places in works you read so you might learn from them. Don’t hurry through them. Study them. See how they are so skillfully put together.

Look at the places in writing you are working on, especially the work you are submitting to publishers or intend to publish yourself, and make sure places are both concrete and exact.

Some Writers, Poets, and Artists Are Known for Their Places

View of Chicago skyscrapers behind a bridge over the Chicago RiverPlace has been particularly important to some noted authors. You cannot imagine the story’s characters without the place where the author has put them:  Dublin  to James Joyce, small town and rural Mississippi to Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, Paris,  Spain, and Africa to Ernest Hemingway, Camden, Ohio to Sherwood Anderson, southern United States to Truman Capote, James Agee, Reynolds Price, Pat Conroy, and many other “Southern writers,“ the plains of Nebraska to Willa Cather, Chicago to Saul Bellow, the Mississippi River to Mark Twain, the English moors to Charlotte Bronte and sister Emily,  eighteenth century London to Charles Dickens, Mexico and the state of Texas to Katherine Anne Porter,  Los Angeles to mystery writer Raymond Chandler, and so on.

Places are very important to poets too: America is Walt Whitman’s subject, and Patterson, New Jersey is special to William Carlos Williams. And a place may be a favorite subject of painters: his gardens to Claude Monet, the hill visible from his window to Paul Cezanne.

Models

Below are places from my life I have described in stories I’ve written:

A Chicago Alley Late On a Rainy Night When I Was Five

Bungalows on a neighbborhood street with lawns and a sidewalk(My father was an air raid warden during World War II, and once he took me with him during an air raid practice when the lights of the city were turned off and the skies were filled with search lights) “My father and I turned and came up behind the church where a delivery truck was parked. We walked down the alley, keeping our eyes trained on the apartment buildings’ windows, past the empty lot overgrown with weeds and covered with tin cans and newspapers, and past the bent-in-half, arthritic and reclusive witch’s bleak house. Her ferociously unfriendly German shepherds were oddly quiet. We passed the drowsy homes and apartment buildings of neighbors, only some of whose names we knew. Behind the walls of those buildings were people not unlike us, simple people, all with the stories of their lives never to be written.  All shades were drawn, and so the night was perfect, with no more reminders necessary.

My father stopped to look straight up through the drizzle again and then so did I. Between the sweeping beams of the search lights, white stars Wet road with starry-looking street lamps at nightand a full moon dangled in the sky. On the back porches in neat array, like miniature glass sentinels, stood the empty bottles left out for the milk man.  Branches of trees laden with rain bent low over back fences like old women on canes. When the wind blew, the leaves showered the two of us with water, and we laughed. On the ground lay deep puddles that we had no choice but to step through, which was fine with me because I was wearing boots. My father’s shoes made squishing sounds and he said,” Another pair down the drain” and we laughed at that, and I splashed through, heavy-footed.”

Chicago on a Summer Night

“It was a typical August night in the city, a moonlit night that if you lived in that part of the country you knew intuitively would witness a drop in temperature that would turn a blistering hot day cold almost precisely one minute after the stroke of twelve. In the air circulating on a breeze were fish smells from the beaches of Lake Michigan that were coming into view as we walked through a park that had a merry-go-round and Park bench between two trees and sunsetswings. The night had taken on an indefinable splendor and given me a feeling of exquisite peace that I hadn’t felt since childhood. I saw a white yacht that was illuminated by deck lights out on the lake.  Small waves rocked a rowboat that was not very far from me. With a whoosh, waves tumbled over themselves onto a beach.  A bell chimed somewhere on the water. There was a splash and then another. The vivacious woman I was with took off her shirt and bra and swung them over her head like a lasso. She said, “Guess what I do for a living.” I said, “I’ll bet you four million dollars that you are an actress.”

A Bar in a Town in Montana, United States

After we graduated from high school my good friend Nick and I–he eighteen, I seventeen–decided to ride freight trains for a while.  A train heading west came along and we hopped it.

“Down the wide main street and prominently visible from our freight train that had just pulled in, the alluring green neon sign of the Welcome Inn burned brightly. It was a small, squat, one-story square log building that night and day hummed and trembled with pulsing music and in which who knew what went on. But we were curious to find out. We entered that tumult of sweat and whiskey, amidst the glow of the red bar lights and clouds of floating cigarette smoke, and stood at the bar next to a tattooed woman snapping a bull whip and wearing a black satin cape with shining red lining, and saw a man with a chin scar and an eye-patch get angry and pull a pistol on another man. The second man took the gun away from the first and slugged him over the head. He turned to us disgusted with his friend, who lay dazed and prone on the floor, people stepping over him, and said, not in any way angry, “He’s always doing that,” and that was the end of that.

Pale blue and brown old cars lined up on grassOld cars with dented fenders and gaudy garters dangling on their rear-view mirrors and pick-up trucks with rifle racks cradling ominous shotguns and carbines were parked four deep in the lot. When the door of the Inn swung open, muscular men, their shirt sleeves rolled up above the bicep, sauntered out arrogantly, their arms tight around the waists of conspicuously made-up women, their heads thrown back in exaltation and abandon, and the chime of laughter spilled into the night like flowing wine.”

The College Town Where I Lived

“… a small drowsy college set in a little town of narrow, winding cobblestone streets crowded with lovely old gnarled oaks, maples, and sycamores and wild, untrimmed hedges. Pinnacles, domes, and spires of church towers, like the great cathedrals of Europe, rose gradually and wonderfully and were visible everywhere. In the yards, along crumbling stone fences sprouting moss, lichens, and ferns, were an abundance of rose gardens that were sadly withered at that time of year. The town was surrounded on all sides by tractors and threshers left overnight by farmers in wheat fields, and the campus was split in two by a river with an Indian name.”

 

A street with shopsExcellent writers should be able to describe places that they have experienced or have heard or read about and can clearly envision as they compose. They should be able to create vivid descriptions that enliven the text and appeal to the reader’s senses.

 

© 2022 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Interview with David J. Rogers

 

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Fourth of July Killings in Highland Park, U.S.A.

Today a terrible thing happened in my home town. A young man so full of cruelty, anger, and evil that he felt he was at liberty to kill as he wished murdered a number of my neighbors–my friends–at a parade that I have attended dozens of times on July Fourth,  a day when everyone in this country is happy and proud to be Americans. Seven dead, dozens wounded.

Year after year the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park was a beautiful event that was attended by people from all walks of life and all ages who live here in Highland Park, Illinois. Barack Obama walked in our parade one year when he was a U.S. Senator. The bands were always loud and joyful, the dancers graceful. Dignitaries in the cars and on the floats tossed pieces of candy to little children who bubbled over with excitement as only carefree children can.

Photograph of intersection in Highland Park, IL near center of townHighland Park is not a big place at all. It is an idyllic little Midwestern American city of about thirty thousand–clean and peaceful, and until the Fourth, safe. Clustered together at its center are a railroad station, City Hall, public library, and on the library lawn a long chromium sculpture no one understands. It is a community that values the arts: more writers live here than in any other community between Chicago to the south and Milwaukee to the north. Double screen writing Academy Award winner William Goldman was from Highland Park.  Actor/movie director Orson Welles lived here in his adolescence and sat on his lawn reading Shakespeare; Frank Baum would take the train up from Oak Park to meet with his Oz books illustrator who lived here; the high school theatre program is renowned. Also, Michael Jordan lived here when he was leading the Chicago Bulls to championships. I’d see him at the Post Office waiting in line just like everyone else. There is no standing on ceremony in Highland Park.

My wife and I moved here forty-something years ago to escape crime and other problems big cities have and were happy here from day one. We raised four children here. The schools are good, the teachers caring. My two daughters were on the high school gymnastics team. My two sons were in the school’s theatre program, my older son in a production that won a state championship. He still remembers it with special pleasure because a girl asked him for his autograph.

To the east, along Lake Michigan, the homes of Highland Park are very grand, elegant, and old. The streets are lined with magnificent trees through which on summer mornings such as today gentle breezes blow as resident Robins, Sparrows, Blue jays, and Cardinals sing gaily. In its way it is an innocent place–like a child–with very little crime, friendly people who say hello, how are you on the street and treat each other with respect, people who obey laws and pay attention to ethics and morality and the Golden Rule. It doesn’t belong on the news. It is out of place there. It shouldn’t be the center of the nation’s–the world’s–attention. It should be as it always has been–“a nice place right off U.S. 41” that is sublime because nothing much ever happens there.

I went outside for a few minutes and began to wonder what will happen to our parade now .Seven dead, dozens wounded. Will there ever be another parade on the Fourth? Or must we find solace in the drum rolls that exist now only in our memories, and the baton twirlers that are there too, the bright July suns, gleeful children, proud parents and grandparents all together on the one day we once upon a time could rely on to make us all happy?

 

© 2022 David J. Rogers

For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:

Interview with David J. Rogers

 

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