Don’t call me that

Oscar Wilde once said that some things are too important to be taken seriously. That captures how I go about writing. And to prove it, as I write this post I’m thinking about Monty Python’s Oscar Wilde sketch, and not any of Wilde’s plays, novels, and further wisdoms.

And don’t call me an artist. That sounds way too serious for me. No, it’s ponderous and pretentious, and is just another useless label. My writing practice is what I take very, very seriously. The results, not so much. So, just don’t call me an artist. Here in Indianapolis, there is an annual Gathering of Artists, put on by the Indiana Writers Center, of which I am proud member. But I will never in a million years go to such a thing, unless they call it something else.

All images

I practice writing every day. I don’t even write, as such, most of the time. In reality, I direct the neutral mental energy collected and assembled from other parts of the writing practice. Those parts include but are not limited to yoga, meditation, cardiovascular exercise, journaling, sitting in the sauna, and lots of intentional distractions such as doing the dishes, mowing the grass, feeding the cat.

It is always there

I do my best writing as I harvest the mind’s energy during all the activities I mention above. My brain and five senses are doing one thing, while my subconscious mind can act freely. It sends me names, bits of dialogue, character traits. You name it, it is always there.

So, to say I sit down, usually after a solid-ass night’s sleep, and “write” or craft or God forbid, perform the work of an artist, isn’t accurate. It just doesn’t capture how I feel emotionally about what I do to produce novels.

One of the hidden benefits to this is that I avoid labeling the results of my writing practice. Labels require maintenance and don’t work anyway because the implication of a label is that the thing labeled will stay what it is forever. Nothing does. Not the thing labeling, nor the person doing the labeling, categorizing or whatever you call it.

There is only one thing worse than being called an artist. And that is not being called an artist. Or did I get that wrong?