Re-try, re-work, re-use. Never erase.

Some moments in creative work are like adolescence, messy and experimental, full of strong feelings and half-baked convictions. Other moments are more like middle age — a season of editing, and consolidation. Right now all my creative work, including my writing, is going through an adolescent phase. It’s been a messy, exploratory, undisciplined time. I’ve been writing by hand for the most part, with an inexpensive fountain pen. There’s a good reason for this, apart from the fact that I simply enjoy it. Which is reason enough. But if my intention in a particular writing session is to be loose and free-associative, and write whatever comes to mind, I seem to need the physical and mental isolation that I find is only truly possible when it’s just me, a pen and some paper, and no other outlet for my undirected thoughts and feelings within reach, except possibly an interesting paperbound book that could spark ideas when my own supply has run out. Certainly not a device that offers me a way to chat with everybody I know, plus my email, plus the news, plus sudoku…

The other morning I had a couple hours free and no pressing obligations, so it seemed like a good time to start organizing the writing I’ve done by hand over the past several months. It was not yet too hot out, so I went out onto the balcony with my laptop, sat down in a chair, and in the other chair I placed a stack of recently-used sketchbooks, notebooks, and looseleaf paper containing a lot of free-form writing. A mustard-yellow Apica notebook I’ve been using as a journal. A 9x12 hardbound drawing-paper sketchbook. A 9x6 spiral-bound sketchbook of the same paper. An 8.5x5.5 mixed media sketchbook from Canson. And a lot of looseleaf paper. Some of it was Southworth cotton resume paper, which is nice to write on with a fountain pen. But much of it was just scrap paper, still blank on one side, held back from the recycle bin for one final use. All this was ready to be scoured for interesting passages to type up and set alongside whatever I also happened to write on the computer or on my phone over the same period.

This is a typical state of affairs. For me, initial creation has always been a wildly disorganized, thinly-spread activity, involving not just writing, but also drawing and composing. I have a habit of reaching for whatever tools are physically closest to me and using them to do whichever creative activity I have an urge to pursue in that hour. The inevitable result is a pile of sketchbooks and paper just like this, filled with writing, drawings, and little musical ideas.

Often enough, all these kinds of things end up layered onto the same page. One thing I have learned from my drawing teachers is the enormous value to be found in layering different sketches and ideas either overlapping, or directly on top of each other. Danny Gregory is fond of observing that a page full of “bad” drawings usually looks pretty cool. He’s right about that, plus, this practice has the additional benefits of also being economical and environmentally-friendly. My slogan is: Re-try, re-work, re-use — never erase. This habit makes for pages that are complex and interesting, and they can help make unforeseeable connections.

A good example of this is a page from the 9x6 sketchbook, which you can see at the top of this post. On this page, I scored a little music over the top of an unfinished sketch of a tree. There is no necessary connection between them: I did not set out to write a melody about a random tree I saw one day. What I did have was a certain sound in my imagination, the 3rd degree of a major scale rising to the 4th, followed by something a bit more gestural, the idea of a descending line that keeps trying to rise but only falls further. For no explicable reason it felt like this gesture had to be in D major. So I scored it in that key and pursued it for a few lines in very simple rhythms. And I chose that page only because I’ve made a point of filling up every page in every sketchbook, and it was the first page in that one that could accommodate more material. Plus — I knew I would never finish the tree.

But here’s an interesting thing: when I came to harmonize the melody at the piano, that partial drawing of the tree underneath had a direct influence on my choices. I can’t articulate exactly how, but I did choose several lush harmonies which came up I think because of the sense-memory I have of drawing that tree on a particularly hot day earlier this summer. Why don’t you have a listen to the sketch here, and tell me what you think?

Those are the benefits and enriching accidents that can come from this kind of loose creative practice, but of course, there is a certain risk in it as well. Once I’m done with a page, it’s kind of already satisfying in its own way and really, nothing more is strictly required. But if I want to do anything more ambitious with these bits and pieces, if I see any further potential at all for them, the fragments and sketches will not connect and cohere on their own. They will remain dispersed if I fail to take the next step of organizing them every month or two in the appropriate places for doing the subsequent work of grouping, consolidating, and editing. If you listen to that musical sketch, you may hear that one sequence doesn’t quite work, and that the last notes feel more like an overlapping beginning to the next idea. Less obviously, something about it also suggests a violin-piano duet to me.

So that is the kind of work I started the other day with my writing. The work of mining my own notes and consolidating them in my writing app. Next I’ll be printing them out, so that I can sit with those printouts undistracted and expand on them further in fountain pen. Here we go. It all adds up if you let it.