How Do I...?
EPISODE 063: HOW DO I…?
The time has never been better to be a self-teacher. Learning how to do new things is as simple as asking Google, YouTube, or the million blogs and articles online. But this will only take you part way. It'll help you understand how others do things, but answering the bigger question is harder: How do YOU do something? It's less important that you learn the way to do something than it is that you discover the way YOU do something. Let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
The great danger of making a living, at least in part, from teaching about creativity, aside from the nagging feeling that I really ought to find the day-to-day practice of my own creativity much easier, is that others hope that I might be able to make their daily practice much easier as well.
"Hey David," the emails begin, "how do I...?" and then the road forks in a million different directions, and while most of them are about photography, they're also mostly not about the technical but about the creative. "How do I make a book of photographs?" is a good example, but others include "how do I write my first book?" and "how do I make a living at this stuff?" Way to start with the small questions right?
The desire for shortcuts and to avoid unnecessarily re-inventing the wheel, is understandable. If you have access to the kind of knowledge or wisdom that'll help you avoid making the same mistakes as others have made, you'd be crazy not to take advantage of it. I ask Google a hundred questions a day in hopes that it'll direct me to some group wisdom or crowd-sourced understanding that will save me the kind of trial and error it often takes just to gain momentum on whatever new thing I'm working on. If I need to learn a new chord on the guitar, watching a YouTube video can give me a nudge and get me over the first hurdles and save me from trying to figure out a chord chart. You put your fingers here. You strum these strings, but not this one. Got it.
So it always amazes me when I get emails asking about a simple photographic technique, when the time it took to write the email itself is always so much more than the time a simple search on Google might have taken to access much clearer and more robust answers than I can possibly offer. I love that people trust me to help gain clarity on things, but I worry sometimes that what they gain in a quick response, they might be losing in not having to figure it out themselves, which is always the better way of learning.
I had a French teacher in grade 07 who told me relentlessly, whenever I asked her what a word was, or what it meant, she'd say the same thing: "cherchez-le dans le dictionnaire" I can still hear it. Look for it in the dictionary, she would tell me. Over and over again. At the time I thought she was just being lazy, but in hindsight it was me that was trying to take the easy way out. In the end, through her insistence on me finding my own answers, she didn't just teach me French, she taught me how to teach myself.
What's this got to do with you and your creative life? I think almost every creative endeavour I can think of has started with the words, "How do I...?" but there's more than one way to ask that question and it might be more important than many of the other questions we can be asking ourselves, and I thought perhaps we should talk about it. I'm David duChemin, and this is episode 063 of A Beautiful Anarchy, welcome here.
Music / Intro
When we ask the question, "How do I write a poem?" (as just one example), there are two questions hidden within the words, and the difference comes in the emphasis. "How do I write a poem, make a book, paint a painting, do the thing I have never done?" is the easiest to answer, on some basic technical level we're probably asking how others have done this thing and what we need to know in order to get started. It is a question, primarily, of craft and I don't think it's an unimportant question, but like I said earlier, the time has never been better to get as many replies to that question as you care to listen to. Follow your curiosity to Google, YouTube, Blogs, Online courses, wikipedia, or the people you know; chase the knowledge gap and fill it in.
The second question hidden within "How do I write a poem, or a song, make a sculpture or create a book?" is found when you put greater emphasis on the third word, the personal pronoun I. How do I do this thing? How do I make a book? How do I create a website or a podcast or chainsaw carving?
Google can't answer this for you. I certainly can't. I'm too baffled by my own ongoing search for my own answers to these questions. "How do I make this photograph?" is a question that begs a lot more questions. What do I want it to be about? How do I want it to feel? How do my own style, voice or tastes lead me to answer these questions? What does my gut say?
What is very sure to me is that once the matter of craft is taken care of, once I've answered the 'how' from a technical perspective and see the possibilities, I know my real concern is not how others would do this. And I'm guessing it's not yours either. Not really. You don't want to fit the mould, paint by numbers, or follow a template, do you? That can't be what you're asking. You're asking–I think we're all asking–not how it's done, but how it might be done by us, by YOU - your way, in a way that comes from somewhere much deeper than the desire to make merely another book, another song, another poem, as if the world were in dire need of more of the same, but your book, your song, or your poem. Not only can no one but you answer that, but you can't answer it except by trying and doing, or, to use the language from the last few episodes, by digging, by playing, by exploring.
Marcel Duchampe, had the internet been around in 1912 might have Googled, "how do I paint a nude descending a staircase?" and he might have learned how others do it, have done it, or believe it should be done, but he could only find out how HE would do so, by doing it, by trying, and finding his own way. His painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 was anything but conventional.
Miles Davis could have learned how others play Jazz by watching and imitating and immersing himself in the Jazz world, which he no doubt did, but the only one that could discover how Miles Davis played Jazz, was Miles Davis.
Bob Ross probably could have taught Georgia O'Keefe a thing or two about how to paint a flower, but only Georgia could have discovered, on her own, by doing it, how George O'Keefe painted flowers.
"How do I write a poem?" when asked of ee cummings, is a different question with a different answer for Billy Collins or Amanda Gorman.
The same is true of Frank Lloyd Wright, Charles and Ray Eames, Sally Mann, or Annie Leibowitz.
"Hey, Annie, how do I make a portrait?" I can imagine saying.
"I don't know," she'd say, "How do I make a portrait or how do you?"
When we ask "how do I do this or that?" we are asking how it is done, has always been done. How others have done it. We are asking about technique, and expedience. It's a question concerned with status quo. Often, it's a question concerned with not doing it wrong, a question that is more risk averse than it is creative.
When we ask "how do I do this or that?", with the emphasis on the "I," we are asking questions about the unknown. Questions concerned with authenticity, questions not concerned with doing it the right way, but with doing it our way, and inevitably, the answer that echoes back to us (and it does echo back to us, because we're the only one who can answer this) is: "how do you want to do it?"
I think we probably need to ask and answer the first question before we answer the second. Asking the first question isn't necessarily lazy, but not asking the second question is. The first asks what others have done. It asks about craft and convention and what is now foundational to those who already know. It is a question about the more obvious possibilities. It respects those first innovators and learns from them. If we're wise we'll dig around in that soil a while., and learn everything we can. Why did others do this or that and to what effect? Was it received the way it was because of the time and culture in which it was made? Often that is the case. The exact things that made something great in 1921, won't even make a ripple in 2021. Art-making happens in the now, not the past, and rarely does repeating what has been done satisfy us, but it can certainly teach us.
What I know from my own experience is that there are two ways of asking and answering the question about how we do a new thing. The first is to ask the question of the most obvious and immediate sources available, to get an answer and do it that way. The second is to find the answer in the doing, to ask it of ourselves, not others, knowing that no one but ourselves has any idea how we will do it because we haven't done it before. We teach ourselves and find out how we do a thing, by doing both. It's not uncommon to rely on the answers of others for a while as we learn our craft. To try on the techniques that worked for the past masters of whatever craft you work with, but where their way and your way, well, where they part ways is in the difference between adopting and adapting. The former takes the techniques of the past, assumes that's just the way it is done, and risks nothing in using those ideas as our own, in which case our work will likely be more a reflection of those who went before us than a reflection of ourselves. The latter builds on what came before, it adds to it, or takes away from it, it bends it to go in a new direction, or combines it with something else. It is an evolution, or adaptation, rather than an adoption.
To be creative in any medium is to be an autodidact; a self-teacher. Not only to learn yourself, but to learn about yourself. To be curious enough to peer into what you don't yet know and what you've not yet done, and to choose the courage to not just to follow your own path, but to make your own path, and to risk a few scratches as you whack your way through the understory. It is to be willing to ask, "How do I do this thing I've never done?" and be open to all the wild possibilities suggested by the collision of what others have figured out before you and what makes sense only to you. To be creative is to let that question hang in the air while you search, not for the right way, but for your way.
Thank you so much for joining me. What a privilege it is to make this for you and to be part of your creative life. If this podcast makes a difference for you, the best way you can say thank you is to share it with others. And if this podcast is new to you, you'll find it takes a short break every 4 weeks when I send out a new issue of On The Make, which is like a written episode of this podcast, sent to your inbox every fourth Sunday morning. If you're not already getting it but you'd like to, just go to StartUglyBook.com, scroll to the bottom, and let me know where to send it. Once a month I'll draw the name of one listener to whom I'll send a signed copy of A Beautiful Anarchy, the book that started all this, as a thanks for listening. Our times together each week are a little too one sided to be a real conversation, but if you ever want to change that, you can get me anytime at talkback@aBeautifulAnarchy.com. Thank you again for being here. We'll talk soon. In the mean time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0