In the not too distant future, ballet, music, and sport will be performed perfectly by robots. Every position and every movement choreographed with a precision that a human could never possibly achieve in their lifetime. A robot performer will never fall. They will never be out of sync; never go out-of-bounds. Every jump, catch and note as fluid and majestic as can be.
Boring, huh?
Humans watch other humans strive to do things perfectly because it’s rare that it will ever be perfect. Even the most awarded, respected, consistently performing master of their craft will, on occasion, have an off day. A prima ballerina may tumble. A football player will miss a penalty kick sometimes. A musician will miss a note in their performance of The Flight of the Bumblebee. These are the moments we tell our friends about after it’s over, “Did you see her fall? Did you see him miss that catch? Can you believe it?!”
Failure, in the pursuit of perfection, is exciting to onlookers. Often, the bits that I dislike most about a painting that I complete are the bits that draw the most interest from the observer. It reveals a chink in the armour. The vulnerability they notice reminds them that they aren’t alone–that we’re flawed. That, in the long run, we’ll never attain ‘perfect’. But that doesn’t mean we won’t stop trying. When the risk is gone, so is the anticipation and excitement of the reward.
How do I know when I’ve made it? I recently attended the SCBWI conference in Sydney with almost 400 other writers and/or illustrators. Most of the attendees were unpublished, and of the ones I spoke to, most of them asked what I was doing there, because I was already published. What did I need to learn?
As it turns out, we’re all working at different scales of success. In one view, there’s the ‘beginner to pro’ scale. It looks something like this:
At the SCBWI conference, I was seen as the ‘pro’ by all the ‘beginners’. That’s because of the scale that unpublished authors use in their head to categorise things. I think what they really see is this:
But in my head, that scale it’s vastly different. It’s not whether I’m published or unpublished. No. I’m playing the long game. An infinite game of art. I’m competing against myself and my own ability. Because of this, my scale looks something like this:
See, for me, success is about making my body use the tools of my medium to render my imagination and communicate my ideas as clearly and accurately as possible. It doesn’t matter whether people choose to stop publishing the work I do, I’ll still keep making it. After all, it’s how I started. I was once unpublished, like the other attendees at that conference. In fact, this might sound strange, but the goal of getting published never entered my head at all. I was simply trying to make the work I could see in my brain. I still am. I’ll never stop attending conferences, talks, and workshops. I’ll never stop reading, studying light, analysing the craft of writing poetry and fiction. It’s a lifelong pursuit. And, if people one day choose to no longer publish that work in a book, that’s OK. I’ll keep trying my hardest to move that arrow in my head to the right, knowing full well that I’ll never get there because no matter what I do, my expectation of what I can do will always exceed the skill I have to reach it.
If a casual home cook and a chef had just four ingredients: Bread, Cheese, Tomato and Butter, who would make the better toasted sandwich?
Simplicity and Expertise
Have you ever noticed that masters of their profession are always talking about how to make things simpler? The most accomplished chefs talk about using simple ingredients. Letting the ingredients do the work. Some of the best in the world use a single knife for everything. A chef’s skill isn’t in the ability to source the most ingredients, or the weirdest ones. A chef’s skill is in their deep understanding of the ingredients at their disposal and the ways to successfully combine them to produce the most vivid culinary experience possible.
The act of writing (and the use of language) is no different.
People often assume that writing a children’s book is easy. They mistake word count for effort and complexity. I’ve been asked many times whether I “*just* write for children” or do I write for adults, too? As if writing for children is an easier or lesser practice. What people don’t realise is that children’s book are, in fact, one of the hardest things to write (probably only second to poetry). A children’s book writer needs to paint the most vivid pictures with the least number of words. This means, like expert chefs, they need to have a deep understanding of the basic ingredients so they can combine them in the most effective ways. The ingredients they have to work with aren’t just the words. Yes, a large vocabulary is useful. But an expert writer of children’s books also needs to understand story structure, grammar, poetic forms, meter, and rhyme to name a few. There is a depth to these concepts that take a lifetime or more to hone.
Less can be more
In the absence of the deep knowledge of the ingredients one is working with, whether that be cooking or writing, it’s easy to try and compensate by adding more. Maybe the home cook adds relish to their sandwich? Maybe the emerging writer adds adverbs to their writing?
Over time, as you write over and over and over again and learn from your daily practice, you learn more about the basic ingredients and discover that the relish is just getting in the way. It’s hiding the natural, beautiful flavour of your core ingredients. That’s the beauty of putting the effort in and part of the reason I’m addicted to this pursuit of less.
I want the books that I put into the world to be things that I believe in. Messages that I believe are important. I want to spend my time creating books that have longevity in the lives of kids and adults. I want this criteria to be the key motivating force that drives me to decide whether or not I write a book, or illustrate someone else’s text. I think that making sure I don’t rely on my art for income is really important.
Freedom and Choice
I acknowledge that I’m one of the lucky ones. I have a day job that I really like. As a software designer, I get to work with a group of smart, diverse, and creative thinkers who are all motivated to make things better for people. The conversations I have with this amazing group of people have been hugely influential for shaping my view of the world, which in turn influences the stories I write and the art that I make. My job is in software, an in-demand industry that, let’s be honest, pays pretty well. The company I work for, Cogent, has flexible working hours and is fully supportive of its employees having other interests outside of the company mission. As I said, I’m pretty bloody lucky.
Having this level of flexibility, autonomy, and salary, means I’m free to explore the world of writing and illustration without being dependent on it for making a living. If the illustration jobs dry up, that’s OK. If I come across an offer to do a book about bums or poo, I can say no (although the little child in me will still giggle and probably want to give it a shot). I don’t need to chase a project because next month’s rent is due. It means that I can make choices driven by what means most to me, my values.
Is your day job actually good for your art?
I know many artists are striving to make more time for their art. They’re working day jobs in service of the creative work they’re trying to achieve on nights and weekends. Some of them dream of making a living from it someday. A vision of finally submitting that resignation letter to a manager they’ve tolerated but never liked. But sometimes, it’s worth thinking about whether that ‘dream’ is truly what we imagine it to be. Whether the yin and yang of ‘day job’ and ‘art’ actually work in service of one another. Perhaps the frustration you face in your day job is a source of energy in your creative work. A way to ‘rebel’ against the day’s events. That’s how it started for me. I found watercolour when I was searching for a way to spend more time away from the computer screen.
I often think, what would happen if I worked as a full-time illustrator? Would I miss the conversations and people I love to spend time with at work? Probably. Would I crave to return to some software-related hobby? Who knows? What happens when I’m forced to paint things I don’t necessarily enjoy painting because I need to pay the bills this month. Yikes, that sounds depressing.
See, maybe the answer isn’t leaving my day job and doing art full-time. Maybe there’s room for both in my life, and it’s better that way. Maybe it’s the same for you?
Talent. It’s a pretty powerful word. If you have talent, then that’s great. What a lucky person you are – to be so talented at something! We speak of talented people as a different class of person. It’s synonymous with being gifted or special in some way. A gift is something you didn’t earn, but something that someone bestowed upon you. Something you were just lucky to acquire when some higher power was giving out gifts.
But, what does it mean then, if you’re not talented? If you got the short end of the stick when gifts were being handed out? Instead, you got coal in your stocking and the knowledge that, well, you were never destined for anything special. Not in this life anyway. No point trying anymore, I suppose.
Talent is a load of crap
Me? I’m lucky. I’m talented, people say. I’m so fortunate, people say. I’m different. Special. Not everyone can do what I can do, people say.
But what most people don’t know is how hard I work to do what I do. I think ‘talent’ is a load of crap. I think we’ve invented talent as a catch-all to give ourselves an excuse to stop pursuing things when they get a little harder than what we think they should be. Calling someone else ‘talented’ gives us a way out.
Talent equals strengths plus hard work
It’s widely acknowledged, at least in most literature on humanity, that every person on the planet comes with strengths and weaknesses. Some things we’re naturally good at, and others, well they require a bit more hard work if we want to improve them.
I’m comfortable with saying that one of my strengths is empathy. From very young, I’ve always had very high empathy. I’ve also got a heightened visual perception compared to other people who I’ve met in my life. I distinguish colours with a higher level of granularity than most people, and I notice shapes and colours that other people don’t seem to notice. It’s always been this way for me. I didn’t know it was a strength until I met people for whom this was a weakness.
When I frame my strengths like this, no one says, “You’re so talented at empathy,” or “You have a talent for noticing fine colour differences in everyday objects.” The ‘talent’ lies in art, music, sculpture. Creative pursuits that require a hell of a lot of… you guessed it, hard work.
As we learn in school, your strengths alone will only get you so far. Unless they’re honed (from advice from teachers, friends and others), and we put in the hours of practice to hone them, strengths, well, don’t do very much all by themselves.
But.
If we decide to work hard to refine our strengths, those strengths become SO strong that when they’re seen by others for whom it’s their weakness, it feels like something different to them. Something, how should I say, unattainable? And when something enters the realm of unattainable, we need a new word for that. Gift is one. Special is another. I’ve heard ‘blessed’, too, if they’re religious. And then there’s Talented.
Make yourself talented
So, how do you make yourself talented at something? Well, the first step is to know yourself. What are you good at? What do you generally do slightly better than anyone else without seeming to have to work at it? In my case, it’s empathy (which is also a weakness by the way but I can talk about that later). My visual perception is another strength.
Once you’ve identified your strength/s, then you have to work your butt off to turn them into something that is out of this world. Practice relentlessly and consume as much knowledge from books, mentors, classes or short courses as your body and mind can sustainably consume. ‘Sustainably’ is key here, burning yourself out won’t get you very far.
How you hone your strengths isn’t easy (in fact, it’s actually the hard part), but it’s the part that turns strength into a ‘talent’. It’s the part that tricks people into believing that they simply can’t do this superhuman thing that you seem to pull off so effortlessly.
There’s this concept in improv theatre, a rule of thumb; it’s called ‘Yes, and’ thinking. The purpose of ‘Yes, and’ is to accept someone’s line of thinking (the ‘yes’ bit) and then build upon it (the ‘and’ bit). When you experience a really incredible improvised theatre performance, it’s often (at least partly) because the actors are using ‘yes, and.’
Picture books always start with an idea. It’s the back’n’forth of this idea between two open-minded creative people that leads to true picture book magic. It just works.
In improv theatre, you don’t know where the story is going to go. It’s not something that’s planned to the nth degree. There’s no script, no storyboard. It’s what makes it so fun. It always starts with a question, or a statement or a scenario, but where it goes from there is up to the actors. “Yes, and” encourages growth and play. It embraces the uncertainty not as a thing to be challenged or removed, but an advantage or a feature of the format. It removes early judgement. It’s what separates it from non-improvised theatre.
Consider this scenario. Two actors, one playing a patient, the other playing a doctor.
PATIENT ENTERS DOCTOR’S OFFICE.
Patient: Doctor Doctor! Please help me! I’ve swallowed a sparrow and now whenever I speak, I can’t help but cheep. CHEEP!
In a “yes, and” environment, the Doctor now builds upon that idea.
Doctor: Oh my goodness, a sparrow! I’ve seen this before. Do you have an uncontrollable craving to eat worms or seeds yet?!
Can you see the ‘Yes, and’ here? The doctor acknowledges the situation, “A sparrow!”, and then builds upon it using their role as a doctor. A doctor normally diagnoses by enquiry of symptoms, so they think, ‘well, what other symptoms might there be if a person ate a sparrow’.
The actor playing the patient had no idea where the story was going when they setup this zany scenario, but with some simple “yes, and” thinking, the story has moved on, it’s become immediately more interesting. No one owns it now. The Doctor didn’t say, “No, but that’s just stupid! Whoever heard of such a ridiculous thing.” There’s no judgement. That can come later. And now, with this idea of worms and seeds, it’s up to the patient to apply their own ‘yes, and’ to expand on it.
Patient: Oh my goodness Doctor, Yes! I do have an unusual craving for seeds. And sometimes, when I burp, feathers come out.
… and so the story evolves.
Like in improv theatre, picture books always start with a scenario or an idea. A protagonist is in an environment where there’s some sort of conflict to overcome. Some authors are more prescriptive than others, but the best picture books texts are loose and open. There’s a space in them. Room to move. They offer a scenario, and invite the illustrator to respond. The parallel between our patient and doctor scenario is clear.
When you pick up a picture book, the relationship between author and illustrator is evident most of the time. There’s a stiffness to the work when the illustrator just ‘illuminated someone else’s vision’. But if both actors have contributed equally to evolve the story, or the character, or the environment, whatever aspect of the book that really makes it sing, the whole thing feels unified. As a reader, you get lost in that world and, well, that’s just the magic of books, isn’t it?
One of the great joys of working on picture books, like improv, is the uncertainty. Not having all the answers up front. The possibility of getting to a point where the final story has evolved in to something neither of you could have come up with on your own.
“THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called
finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. ”
Finite games require rules that everyone agrees on. It comes to a definitive end. There’s a prize to play for. Someone wins the game when all other players agree that that person has won. The most obvious example of finite games is sports. In baseball, football, ice hockey, you name it, there’s a trophy that all teams are striving to ‘win’. In baseball, there are 11 innings and everyone playing the game knows that the team with the most runs after 11 innings wins. There are other rules, of course, all described in a rule book, that everyone has access too, so they all know how to play. Finite games are simple. You play, within some boundaries, to win.
Infinite games, on the other hand, are as the name suggests, without end. People play infinite games merely to play the game. Infinite games may or may not have rules. If they have rules, those rules aren’t fixed, like in a finite game. A mother doesn’t play ‘forts’ with her daughter to ‘win’ at forts; they play because they enjoy the playing. Forts end when either player stops enjoying the game.
I can’t help but think that art shares similarities with infinite games. Artists (mostly) aren’t competing for a common ‘trophy’. What success means for one artist is not the same as for another. Every artist is bound by different rules, too. These might be mediums one works in. Or the time in which they give themselves to make their art as they balance other life commitments. And maybe the subjects which capture their heart and attention are different. Art ‘ends’ either when the artist themselves make the decision to stop making art, or, well, the artist dies.
In our ever competitive, capitalist society, we’re encouraged to follow our ‘side hustle’, to ‘follow your passion’ and ‘live your dreams’. But, it’s important to be clear on whether you’re playing an infinite game with your art, or a finite one. If you’re playing the infinite game, then followers, likes, sales and reviews don’t mean anything. They aren’t the rules if you don’t want them to be. You play so you can keep playing, maybe that’s the point.
I’ve come to the realisation that everything is a draft. Every drawing I do, everything I write, and yes, even every printed book. I’ve published nine books now, and yes, they’ve all been drafts… for my next book, and the one after that, and the one after that.
Once you realise that everything isn’t final, that everything you do is a learning experience and, in most cases (unless you’re a surgeon), not fatal, the pressure’s off. Nothing will ever be perfect, even though, at the time, you truly believe you’re doing your best work. And you are, with the knowledge you’ve got so far.
Now, I look back at my body of work and I can clearly see how much I’ve evolved. How much I didn’t know back then is obvious. In order to do your best work, you’ve just got to do the work. Over and over again. Draft, after draft, after draft.
Watercolour, Acrylics, Oils, Pencils. Art supplies are alluring. They all have their own special qualities and challenges. They all produce different results and the potential can be overwhelming. So, which one should you stick too? The ultimate question – How to prioritise all this fun stuff!?
Sometimes, I play with gouache, acrylics or coloured pencils. It’s all SO fun for so many different reasons
Firstly, I think it’s important to acknowledge how incredibly lucky we are to have this choice. That at any time, we have the opportunity to use all these different methods of expressing ourselves. I also think that, as adults, we have to learn to be OK with being a kid again. When we were kids, we picked up and experimented with ANYTHING – coloured pencils, markers, paint etc. and we were unashamed of doing so. As kids, we didn’t feel like we needed to ‘focus’ on just one medium so we could become experts. The joy was in the variety, in picking a medium for our mood, in playing until things ran their natural course, and then we moved on to the next thing.
Jack of all trades, master of none
As adults, we’ve been trained to value specialisation. At the end of high-school, we’re supposed to ‘choose a career’. Focus on one thing. Go for depth on a subject, not breadth across all subjects. And, for getting a job and money, this is generally a pretty good idea. It’s how people become surgeons, or how I became a software designer. To have achieved this, we probably let go of art, music, or any study that doesn’t help us achieve this singular goal.
Then, after focussing for so long and reaching a level of seniority in our speciality, we have the opportunity to play with art supplies again. But, we still try to apply this ‘focus’ mentality to it because we’ve spent so many years training ourselves to think like this. But we aren’t trying to get a job or money from our art. Our art is for us. It’s play. It’s enjoyment. So, we need to un-train ourselves. We need to be OK with being that child again and picking up whatever we feel like, playing with that for a while, and then, when we’re not enjoying it anymore, be comfortable letting it go for the next new thing that takes our interest.
This is fine if your focus is to enjoy and indulge in self-expression. But it also means we need to be OK with not achieving mastery. If mastery is the goal, (like we have in our jobs) then focus is useful, but whenever we try anything for the first time, as kids or as adults, I think we need to give ourselves permission to play, first. If we stumble across a medium that sucks us in, one that pushes and motivates us to seek mastery, then we can focus. But for now, I say just have fun.
*I’d like to dearly thank Zuzana for her question which prompted me to discover what I really think about this idea of ‘choosing which art medium to explore’.*
Whenever I write a story, I ask myself, does this story have a conclusion? And when I say conclusion, I don’t mean an ending. There’s a difference.
Author of Invisible Ink, Brian McDonald, describes a story as “A telling or re-telling of events leading to a conclusion.” On the surface, that sounds pretty simple. But what Brian means by ‘conclusion’ isn’t ‘the end or finish of an event, process, or text’. Conclusion, in Brian’s definition of storytelling, refers to the alternate meaning of conclusion, “a judgement or decision reached by reasoning.”
So when I ask myself, does this story have a conclusion, what I’m asking is, have I encouraged the reader to decide something? Have I helped them make a decision? Have I told or retold events whereby the reader has experienced an epiphany and received the true message of what I was trying to say?
When I think of conclusion like this, endings become less important, and it keeps me focused on what I was trying to say in the first place. It’s a handy tool to use when you’re deep in a project, and you risk losing the forest for the trees.
For more about this, listen to this episode of the Paper Wings Podcast.
