ART VERSUS SANITY

Once more my brain was blank from writing all day, so I asked my lovely Twitter followers for blog topic suggestions. There were many, like LOVE and DETAILS and MYSTERY and PLOT and HOW TO MARKET YOURSELF AS AN AUTHOR. By many votes ART VS SANITY won! (By the way, how to market yourself came second, so I will blog about it too.) I walked around the house for a long time after that, chewing on an orange, thinking.

What exactly is art and what exactly is sanity and why do we view our lives as something either wild and uncontrollable and creative versus something orderly, boring and predictable? Since when did we decide that to create we have to turn into mad lunatics, and that orderly life is what gives us sanity, predictable things like alarm clocks, coffee, morning commute, work, lunch, more work, evening commute, dinner, laundry, kids, your favorite TV show... well, you get the picture. I scratched my head. I'm the first one who always tweets that I'm insane, that I have lost my mind, and similar glorious things indicating the fact that I have crickets in place of a brain, when, in fact, it's not accurate. I actually have never felt more sane since I started writing full time. It's this fear of being someone different, someone doing something so unlikely for a living (well, almost a living, as I'm not making much money yet) that makes me feel out of place. I would swing from feeling giddy to feeling down, from wanting to jump in glee to crying into a pillow, miserable, in the course of an hour. I can see an entire movie in my head, complete with multiple people talking, a soundtrack blasting, things happening, and I feel like this is something I'm not supposed to feel or see. I slide down back into my fear that I acquired early in childhood. 

You see, I had a pretty violent and unsightly upbringing in Soviet Russia, of which I will start writing in January in IRKADURA. To survive, I escaped into my head. A lot. Normal kids didn't. Normal, other kids, made fun of me. They taunted me. They tricked me. They called me names, they yanked my braids, they stole my school bag and emptied it onto the street. They did mean and nasty things to me. Guess what I did. Most of the time I was so far away into other galaxies that I barely noticed, which infuriated them even more. Since this time, since school, I learned from others that all must not be well with me. I always thought something was wrong with my head, with my brain, and it's not until I started writing that I realized that NO, nothing was ever wrong with my head. I was never crazy, I'm not crazy now. I simply have an imagination so huge that it swallowed me whole since when I was little. I have no other choice but to get it out of me through writing, because it overwhelms with with information. Perhaps this is where the whole concept of art versus sanity originates. In order for an artist to produce art, the artist has to dive into that child, and feel strange and misunderstood all over again, then an artist has to break through this feeling to get to the actual imagery. While doing this we all feel like crazies only because we've been led to believe that we are. But we aren't. Once in the zone, we produce amazing things. We feel normal, sane, we feel ourselves. I battle this fear every day, and I can tell you that I'm slowly getting better. 

What is sanity, anyway? Why are we so afraid to dissolve into the state of mind that has no rules, no order, back to feeling when we were three, when a grasshopper could fascinate us for hours, for the simple reason of it being green? Since when is it wrong to do it? Oh, well, it's because some adult told us that we need to get the hell off the street or some dimwit will hit us with a car. Slowly, one by one, these negative experiences accumulated into what makes us adults. We know things. We can predict things. We want to predict things, to stay safe, to never repeat our mistakes. But art is impossible to produce without daring, without willing to make mistakes, without breaking all the rules and gazing at that grasshopper despite the dishes needing to be done, and children needing to be fed, and bills needing to be paid. Maybe this is why we think that we need to bargain between art or sanity. Either or. Well, we don't. The only thing we need to do is feel safe enough to venture into that place of carelessness, to be able to see the grasshopper. There are two ways we can do it, either out of compete happiness or complete misery. When we're happy, we can easily slip into our inner child. But not all of us are. Most of us slip into creating art out of pain, out of misery, attempting to get rid of it. This is how I started writing, to get rid of my pain. And I slowly grew happy. It's so weird for me to be happy, because I'm so used to being unhappy, to seeing unhappy people around me, that I think I must be positively crazy. 

There we go, I think I made a full circle. You don't have to choose art versus sanity, you simply have to allow yourself to think that ART IS SANITY. Create. We need more artists in this world, more writers and musicians and painters and all sorts of creative folk, to keep this world sane.

Art is not about COPYRIGHT, it's about COLLABORATION

Photo by Joel Robison

I think ever since I posted an excerpt to SIREN SUICIDES Draft 4 on my blog, I've been getting private messages from people wondering if it's a bad idea to post an excerpt, worrying about copyright issues, about someone stealing their idea, asking me for advice. I even wrote a blog post on forgetting everything you ever heard about copyright in favor of sharing your work. This post is an expansion on that idea, and it's going even further. Art is not about sweating over it in fear of it being stolen, it's about giving it away and collaborating with others to create more art. For example, right now two of my twitter followers, Adam Silke and Lori Lesko are collaborating on writing a screenplay based on SIREN SUICIDES. The book is not published yet, but they are both my Beta Readers who have already read it and wanted to try and adapt it, because many people are nudging me about how cool it would be to make it into a movie. So I said, go for it! Do it! In fact, I will post Word files of all SIREN SUICIDES drafts here, on my site, so you can futz around with them any way you want. Write fanfic, short stories, novels, screenplays, songs, anything that strikes your fancy. Do you think I'm crazy? I'm not. Here is why you should do the same.

Stories are meant to be shared. Ever since mankind started speaking, we have been processing the world around us through stories, trying to make sense of lightning, famines, diseases, and other things that were unexplainable. Stories became a vehicle to share our experiences and learn from each other, without having to witness the actual events. They took root in one mind, changed in another, transformed in the third, and sometimes didn't look like the original story when the forth person was telling it. But that didn't matter. What mattered was the fact that a certain message was passed around, and it changed and grew and adapted as it did so. We changed with it. Any art works this way. A painter looks at a painting and gets an idea. A musician listens to a piece of music and hears a new tune forming. A writer reads a book and gets inspired to write a new one. It's even more inspiring for an artist to witness another artist create something, participate, walk away and create something new in turn. It's like a chain of events. It's how we feel connected to each other, making sense of this crazy life together, like we used to when sitting around the fire after a hunt, processing the world around us. Give yourself away, give your art away, and you will inspire others to create, who in turn will inspire you again, and you will never feel stuck anymore. Forget about writer's block. Only imagine being able to watch another writer write. I know, because I did a live writing session and people who tuned in said that they felt like they wanted to write too. Together with me. So give, share, inspire.

Books are no longer the product. I know for this many of you will pelt me with rotten tomatoes. Go ahead. I will still say it. Look at the music industry. Look what happened to CD's. CD's used to be the product for sale. Not anymore. CD's are promotional material now. Musicians make their money from doing concerts and other various performances and appearances. What do you think is happening with the book market? Do you see the signs? Why are big publishers merging? Why are we flooded with books from self-published authors? Why are book prices falling? Yes, you get my drift. The book industry is moving in the same direction. Books are less and less the actual product that sells. Don't yell at me, don't roll your eyes, let me finish my thought here. What I mean is this. Digital books are given away for free or sold for very little money, for readers to taste them, to like a particular author, and then the actual physical copy of the book becomes a souvenir, a collectible item, something a reader would buy after she or he has already read the book and simply wants to own it, to reread it over and over again. Authors travel extensively on book tours, teach classes, give lectures, for all of which they get paid. With the advent of eBooks, book piracy will be on the rise. It's merely a digital file that can be downloaded and stolen. Then why not simply give it away? Why not give people a chance to support you as an author, rather than make them pay for your books, which they can download off of the internet for free anyway? I propose a new model for making money as a writer. Don't make your readers pay for your work, let them support you. Let them donate, or pay what they want, after they have read your book, not before.

Unlock a million new ideas in your head. Imagine never having to experience writer's block ever again. Imagine never being stuck pondering what to write about next. Imagine never having a problem to finish what you have started, never having to shelve your half-done novel because you don't know where it's going and are stuck. That would be nice, wouldn't it? Well, collaboration will do this for you. Here you can shout obscenities at me all you want, but I actually, for once, know exactly what I'm talking about. I have created a collaboration community with my readers, primarily on Twitter, but also on Facebook and Google+, and there people have unblocked others simply through sharing their experiences, in short bursts of ideas, tips, tricks, and hand-holding that has nothing to do with professional advice you get from experts, but is simply an outreach from one human being to another via shared emotions. And that support alone has moved people. Ever since I started doing it last year and since it really took off several months ago (I suppose it tipped, as Malcolm Gladwell would have said), people have been sending me numerous messages on how they got back to writing simply because they saw someone else struggle with the same issue. I went further than that. I have created flash fiction chain story events on my blog, where I called on 10 to 20 writers at a time, and they wrote a chapter each, weaving one story together. Together. You know what that did to people? People who never wrote in their life before, are writing their first novels now. You know how powerful this is? This is what collaboration does. 

I could go on and on with examples, because this is a hot topic for me. Growing up, I tried writing but was always told my writing is awful. I wouldn't have even started, if not for my boyfriend who believed in me. It was he who urged me to post my except on my blog, because I was scared shitless. And it was the tremendous amount of comments from people that kept me going, and it was messages from my Beta Readers that made me a better writer. Some people call it crowdsourcing, I call it collaboration and the sharing of love. It wouldn't have happened if I didn't share my art with people. I would still have been hidden in my cave, slaving over my art, and maybe by now I would've given up. So, open up, let people support you, and you will be one happy writer.