Fleshing It Out

The creative process is mysterious, but Rule #1 is, follow your nose. Go with the flow. Do the next indicated thing. Sometimes you may have a fairly definite outcome in mind, sometimes not. Even if you think you know where you’re going, you may be surprised.

At one time I did a fair amount of composing in a computer-based home music studio. In recent years, not so much (and that’s a story for another time). This week I wanted to give myself an incentive to get off the dime and actually finish a piece rather than let yet another sketch gather dust on the hard drive. So I thought it might be fun to document the process of turning a sketch into a finished piece. As of today, it isn’t quite finished, but it’s far enough along that I can share the process step by step. I’m not even sure of the title yet, but I may call it “Casual.”

This is not, I hasten to add, a profound or deeply emotional piece of work. My personal view is that it’s just sort of mildly cool. It’s a flexing-my-rusty-muscles sort of piece. I decided up front that I would use nothing but Propellerhead Reason 4. I’ve done a couple of all-you-need-is-Reason pieces in years past, so I knew I wouldn’t be shortchanging myself in the sound resources department. Giving yourself some artificial boundaries for a given piece can help the creative process by reducing the choices to a manageable set.

I launched Reason and soon came up with a modest little groove in 7/4 that I liked. This initial sketch used

Little Things

I’ve been wondering why I enjoy something as bizarre and pointless as writing interactive fiction. But ultimately it’s no different from a lot of other creative hobbies.

There are people (mostly men, I imagine) who build quite elaborate model train layouts for fun. Such a train layout might fill an entire bedroom. In the evening you might find the guy building a trestle out of popsicle sticks and then painting it rust-red so it looks authentic.

In each case, what’s fun is creating a tiny model of the real world — a model that has light and color and sound in it, and where things move around. The human brain seems to like building models.

A community theatre performing Shakespeare is the same thing, isn’t it? There’s more social collaboration than if you’re building a model train, but the result is a tiny model of the real world (the life of Richard III, for instance) that includes color and sound and movement.

Photoshop Junkie

Remember the Mac IIci? Great computer, for its day. Back in 1992 or thereabouts, I found myself with a loaner machine in my home. On it was a copy of Photoshop.

I can’t draw, so Photoshop was an ideal program with which to discover the joys of being a visual artist. Apply three or four filters to areas selected with the magic wand tool, apply a few color contours, and you can end up with stunning abstract textures that you might never think of if you could draw. I had a few of my best images printed (not cheap, in those days) and framed (not cheap either). Four or five of them hang on my walls today.

Computers are a lot faster now, and I’m sure Photoshop is more powerful too. But it’s also expensive! Plus, I don’t need a bad case of mouse hand. So I’ve been able to resist temptation.

Last night I was looking for some basic photo processing software to crop some images, and downloaded Gimp. Oh, no! It’s Photoshop! And free! (Yes, I know it’s properly GIMP — the Gnu Image Manipulation Program. I just hate names that are in ALL CAPS.)

I still don’t own a digital camera, but I do have a nice scanner in my office, so old family photos are fair game. Not only that, but the possibilities for presentation of digital artwork have progressed rather markedly. In 1992, there was no such thing as a personal website, let alone flickr.

The possibilities go far beyond that. I’ve had a look at Ren’Py, a free program for building interactive visual novels. The folks who created it seem to be devoted to anime-style comic books, but you could do a slide show with it. The slide show could be nonlinear. It could include embedded Python code that would do some odd or provocative things.

This could be fun!

Redundancy

I keep a spare bow in my cello case. And of course an extra set of strings. If something breaks just before a concert, I want to be prepared. If the cello itself breaks, of course, there wouldn’t be much I could do. Redundancy is only practical up to a certain point.

This morning when I turned on my external hard drives, preparing to work on a piece of music, Windows crapped out somehow. The file system on one of the partitions had gotten corrupted. So I poked around in the disk utilities area for a few minutes, and spotted a hint that I ought to run chkdsk. So I did.

Twenty minutes later, my drives are back on line, seemingly none the worse for wear. Not that I’ve checked every single file, you understand. But at least the directory structure has been restored.

If I’m serious about doing any sort of creative work with a computer, how much redundancy is practical? I back up my work files, of course, to separate physical devices. I don’t always do it after every work session, but I’m pretty good about it. I have three external drives, and I sometimes (when moved by some random impulse) make extra copies of the backups.

What I don’t have is a log that lists what is backed up where, and when the backups were done. Maintaining such a log would be a huge extra chore. I hate chores.

Then there are the program files and the sound library files. Many of the program files can’t be backed up, because they’re copy-protected installations. The library files are simply too big to make multiple copies of: The Spectrasonics Omnisphere library, for instance, is 42 gigabytes.

If I hired an IT professional to whip this system into shape, what would that person recommend? Creating and maintaining an entirely redundant second computer with its own storage devices? I can’t afford that. But I do think I need to get more serious about redundancy. I’m just not sure where to draw the line. Nor am I sure how much time I want to spend on a daily or weekly basis insuring the continued viability and integrity of my system.

Up to now I’ve been operating in a sort of semi-pro, stick-your-head-in-the-sand-and-hope-for-the-best manner. If I decide to get more serious about recording music, I probably need to get more serious about redundancy as well. But you can make yourself crazy with this stuff, because ultimately nothing is 100% reliable. You could maintain three identical hard drive arrays and then have them all crap out on the same day. It’s not likely … but a lightning-strike could toast everything. Where to draw the line?

Gifts

This could easily turn into one of those hackneyed “our time on Earth is limited; we have to make the most of it” sermonettes. I don’t want to go there. The thing I want to get at is a little different.

I’m still processing the unexpected death of Larry Granger. Larry was an inspiration to a lot of cellists in the East Bay, and certainly to me. In the past five years we got to be friends. He was a very outgoing, social person, and I’m sure he had scores of friends — maybe hundreds. In that respect we were opposites. But on two or three occasions I saw a side of him that perhaps not everybody saw.

I have the impression — I don’t remember the details of the conversation – that when he was young, he felt somewhat aimless and undirected. But at a certain point he made a decision: He was a good cellist, and he decided that if his life was going to amount to anything, he had better take the cello seriously. So he buckled down and started practicing hours every day.

He wasn’t at Juilliard, or even at a conservatory. He was at Cal State Hayward. But he had good mentors. From that launching platform he was able to move on to a career as a full-time professional, playing first with the Oakland Symphony and then with the San Francisco Symphony. He got to tour the world with the Symphony. He got to hang out with the most famous classical musicians of our generation, or at least watch them in rehearsal from onstage.

I think Larry had a sense of the gift that he had been given, to be able to play marvelous music with so many talented people. He never tired of passing that gift on to other musicians.

In other respects, he was just an ordinary guy. (Not that any of us is really “ordinary,” but you know what I mean.) I used to be amazed by the amount of stuff he carried around in the trunk of his car. Larry was chronically over-prepared. He would go to a casual chamber music session carrying cardboard boxes full of sheet music, just in case any of it were needed – and maybe two music stands rather than just one. From that and from a few conversations, I think he may have felt a little insecure; not about his playing, certainly, but perhaps about some other things.

But he had this one great gift. He was sensible enough to see how lucky he was to have it, and smart enough to see that he needed to take responsibility for the gift, to use it to its fullest.

How many of us take full responsibility for our gifts?

I’ve struggled with this for most of my life. I have too many gifts, for starters. And they’re forced to express themselves from underneath a thick blanket of depression, over-intellectualizing, and more than occasionally just being pissed off at the world. I wish I had been more like Larry. I wish I had had the sense, when I was 20 or 25, to say to myself, “I have this great gift. I’m a musician. I need to make the most of it, every day.”

Here’s a creativity mantra, in case anybody is in search of one: “If I were taking full responsibility today for my gifts, I’d….”

Text(book)ing

Writing The Inform 7 Handbook was a lot of fun, and a good experience too. Now that it’s finished, I’m wondering what to do next.

I learned a lot about Inform by writing the book. If you want to learn more about a subject, write a book about it! I felt there was a genuine need for a different type of instructional material for Inform than is provided with the software, so I was giving back to a community that has done some nice things for me. Inform is new, so there’s not a lot of information available yet. It’s a fairly advanced type of programming environment, and it’s always nice to write about the latest and greatest. Plus, pretty much everything in the interactive fiction community is free, so I didn’t need to worry about selling a publisher on the book project; all I had to do was write it and upload it.

That’s a tough set of ingredients to pull together a second time.

For about five minutes I was contemplating writing an introductory book on a music programming language called Csound. In favor of the idea: Csound is

Feeling Good

People create stuff because they enjoy creating stuff. That’s a truism, so let’s be a little more specific. When an artist creates a new work of art, what’s going on is that the artist’s brain is producing some sort of chemical, or perhaps a pattern of synapses firing, that causes a feeling of pleasure.

This response is probably learned. Put a child in a family where being creative is rewarded, and the child will learn to produce an internal pleasurable stimulus in anticipation of a later external stimulus, such as praise.

Maybe some people have a greater natural capacity to give themselves this jolt of pleasure. We’ll leave that question for the neuroscientists to puzzle out.

I don’t think it matters much what creative medium is involved. Some people get enormous pleasure from

The Art Business

Many artists are adept at self-mystification. We like to feel that our best works come from some mysterious well (call it the unconscious or God, your choice). We hope to visit that unconscious well often, and we fear that if we pay too much attention to the mechanics, to the nuts and bolts of art, the path to the well will be blocked.

I’ve been practicing self-mystification with great success (though with a slightly different motive) for years. It has gotten me precisely nowhere. Out-of-print novels, a few mp3s that are free downloads from my website, and I make most of my art bucks teaching cello to kids.

I love teaching, don’t get me wrong — but helping little fingers learn to negotiate the tricky bits in the Gossec “Gavotte” for the tenth or twelfth time is not high on my list of the creative satisfactions to be found in life.

As I burrow through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I find myself intrigued by the notion of a vision quest. If I were to envision a creative life for myself, what would it consist of?

Though it may strike self-mystifying artists as alienating or crude, I’ve started analyzing my alleged art career in exactly the same terms

Here Come Da Judge

I’ve joined a weekly Artist’s Way group. We’re going through the chapters in the book one by one. Even after the first meeting, I could see changes happening in my approach to creativity — good changes.

But you can’t always take the book’s statements at face value. This assertion, from “Rules of the Road” (on p. 55) set off alarm bells for me:

“Remember that it is my job to do the work, not judge the work.”

Excuse me? As an artist, I am constantly, unceasingly judging my work. It would be literally impossible to do any work at all without judging. Even if you’re fingerpainting, there will come a moment when you’ll have to decide whether to grab the yellow paint or the red paint.

What’s Next?

I’m an applause whore. I tend to choose creative projects to work on based on the likelihood that the finished work will be noticed and appreciated. The Emily Dickinson routine, where you write the poems and then stick them away in a shoebox, has always seemed cockeyed to me.

Sometimes I guess wrong. Four years ago I wrote a long novel that my agent felt he couldn’t market. It’s still sitting in a shoebox. The point is, I believed it had some potential, or I wouldn’t have put the time into it.

As I finish up my latest piece of interactive fiction (look for it in the Spring Thing competition in April), I find myself looking around and wondering what I want to do next.