What makes an artist/writer? Joan Didion believed a writer was a voyager of the unknown: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,” she penned in her legendary 1976 essay “Why I Write” in the New York Times Book Review. Susan Sontag maintained a writer must be a reader: “To write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading.” Henry Miller asserted the writer had to have an unwavering work ethic and follow stringent routines.
In her part large-hearted treatise on creativity, part practical “how to” guide Art Work, transgressive photographer Sally Mann defines her own list of qualities that silhouette the shape of the writer. Having made art for over half a century, Mann considers herself qualified to give advice to the aspiring artist (“I am just somebody making some little something. Many different little somethings. A lot of the time. And how many little somethings I have made over a long, long time perhaps qualifies me to write this book”).
Mann begins by dismantling the pervasive myth of talent. In our culture, we glorify the idea of the genius:
Picasso, the child prodigy, painting Barcelona and bullfights with the technical virtuoso of someone twice his age.
Mozart composing masterful symphonies before he reached the double digits.
A precocious Sylvia Plath publishing her first poem at the unbelievable age of 8.
Talent is a romantic, almost magical notion. It suggests a gift, something mysterious bestowed on us by the gods, by the capricious hands of chance and fate. Like an exceptional aptitude for numbers or perfect pitch, talent cannot be earned through effort—it’s decreed by destiny.
Though like many aspiring artists, Sally Mann was once devoted to the doctrine of talent, she comes to realize that making art just requires we show up—at the easel, the page, the canvas. Art is less romantic and more routine. If you’re going to make it, you have to possess more steady qualities: discipline, doggedness, stick-to-itiveness, tenacity. Echoing James Baldwin’s astute observation that “talent is insignificant…beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance,” Mann writes:
“Once I decided, at the age of seventeen, that I would try to make a career as an artist, it took me almost no time at all to realize how miserable it was going to be. I had just mastered the ironic tilt of my Left Bank beret and the requisite squint of the eyes—helped along by the smoke from the unfiltered cigarette depending in a Bogartian dangle from my sullen lip—when I wrote this in my journal:
Already!
Ready to quit at seventeen, before I’d even started. My first roll of film and I’m wondering if maybe I should look into something else..less “tedious,” less demanding, more paint-slinging and pirouette-y and unrestrained. Not so many rules and formulas. And here is the word that you will never, not another time in this book, see again: talent—something I believed in back then. And, as I wrote, I for sure believed I didn’t have it.
What I was wrong about was the patience part. Patience, it turns out, can be learned, and over a long period of time I have learned it. Patience, in conjunction with its sibling, tenacity, can take the place of…that other thing.”
Besides an unflinching forbearance, the artist must possess an almost obsessive devotion to their work. As a manager of an 800 acre Lexington farm and mother of three children, Mann always had to squeeze art into spare moments. Rarely did long swathes of time stretch before her like the sublime southern swampland. She had to develop prints with a baby suckling on her breast, shoot landscapes in between changing diapers and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
As Mann herself demonstrates, making art, more than anything, requires a stubborn single-mindedness:
“For almost a decade, I had one baby or another strapped in the Snugli (I had contrived a hole in it so they could get access to the boob without my having to stop work) or in the backpack, their head lolling over the back while I made and developed pictures. I had a playpen and bassinet set up in the dark room and don’t give me grief about my inadequate air-handling system. Desperation is the mother of those adorable triplets—compromise, creativity, and final reconciliation.”
Mann suggests we say a life-affirming “yes” to the rhapsodic joys of creation, despite the rejection, the ridicule, the doubt, the fear, the uncertainty.
Making art is about quantity, not quality. Indeed, quantity leads to quality. The more we say “yes” and make bad art, the more we sharpen our singular sensibility. Each small effort—each painting, each photo, each 8.5 by 11 page—almost invisible and insignificant on its own, eventually accumulates into a body of work like tectonic plates colliding over millions of years to form a mountain range:
“Unless I have a camera to my face, be it a 35mm or an 8 by 10, I often simply don’t see the picture; the only way I’ve found to make good pictures is to make pictures. Many, many pictures. Most of them not very good. Then weed out the duds and start over again—like Penelope, deliberately unweaving, improving, making better work the next day. Even in Qatar, in the most inauspicious, barren landscape, as alien and bleak as the moon, I found pictures to take. But first, I had to stomp my fear into a mudhole and say Yes.”
In her classic, consoling writing guide Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott argues the antidote to overwhelm is looking out of a 1 inch picture frame. When you’re introducing your main character, say, a middle aged woman on the verge of divorce, you don’t have to give endless exposition, explaining every detail of her background or where she grew up. You don’t have to describe where she first met her husband (the Bancroft library at Berkeley) or what, exactly, instigated their break up (a rather clichéd affair with his much younger secretary)—you just have to capture her in this single moment, this single “picture frame.”
Rather than get overwhelmed by the seemingly insurmountable task of writing an 800 page novel (especially when you’ve never written one before), you should give yourself small assignments, sometimes laughably small.
Not “compose the next great American novel” but “dash off one scene of dialogue.”
Not “write 100 genius, supremely beautiful, impeccably crafted pages” but “draft a single sentence, whether it’s good or not.”
Our only aim?
To write one true sentence.
What matters is momentum. As Mann implores with her trademark blend of Southern tough love and no-nonsense simplicity, you just want to get something, anything down on the page:
“You take the first picture exactly as a writer bangs out that first line. Hemingway wrote early in A Movable Feast about gazing out over the roofs of Paris and exhorting himself to write. Basically, it’s simple: You have always written, you will write again, just write the one true sentence you know. Once you write that simple, declarative sentence, and ruthlessly cut out anything resembling what he called “that scroll-work”—in his case, a word possessing more than two syllables—you go on from there. Not one to send anybody rushing for a dictionary, Hemingway made that blockage-busting creative formula work for him, and you can make it work for you. Pick up your pencil, your camera, your paintbrush; find your story, keep it simple. Or, let it find you, but keep going. As a writer, you may have no idea what possible role, say, the death several weeks ago of a woman named Anna on the railroad tracks of your hometown might play in the subsequent five hundred pages of your book, or how the Marabar Cave you have explored since childhood might figure in the narrative plot, but if you don’t type that first line, you’ll never find out.”
“Write drunk, edit sober,” states a quote famously misattributed to Ernest Hemingway. Though he almost certainly didn’t say that (and, in fact, advised against literally drinking while writing), Hemingway was an exacting editor who ruthlessly killed his own darlings.
“The writer must be four people,” Susan Sontag asserted in her iconic Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, “1. The nut, the obsédé; 2. The moron; 3. The stylist; 4. The critic. 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.”
Mrs. Mann would agree. In the initial stages of the creative process, you need to be mad, drunk, deranged. Unfettered and unbound, you can explore, experiment, play. There’s no conception of “good” or “bad,” no nagging worries about word choice or sentence structure or transitions or grammar or organization or coherence, no practical concerns about style, tone, audience, purpose.
But eventually, you have to bring Sontag’s more sane, sound critic to the page.
Do your ideas move logically from one to another?
Does this specific word convey your meaning?
Is this sentence absolutely necessary?
In the drafting stage, you let your ideas grow like a luxuriant garden, bursting with blooming hydrangeas, overflowing with tangled vines and lush, rich greenery. Your rough draft teems with chaotic life: the cheerful chirping of robins, the riotous floral explosions of fuchsia and yellow and pink.
But in the editing stage, you must be more exacting. You cut, you clip, you trim back the weeds:
“I’m pretty sure everybody has these moments; nobody makes consistently brilliant work. But the impact of what little brilliant work we do make will be diluted by the mediocre work if it’s out there too, like a drop of India ink in water. You want only the full-strength, high-test stuff in the world. Wait until you have a lot of it, even if it’s decades, ruthlessly cull out the mediocrities, even if you love them, then slip the winches and set the good stuff out to sea.”
The artist’s life is a purgatory of rejection slips and radio silence. The New York Times doesn’t want to publish your op-ed. The art gallery doesn’t want to show your exhibition. “No” seems to be the only word you hear on a semi-regular basis.
No, we’re not interested in your photo retrospective.
No, we don’t want your personal essay.
No, we don’t think this is right for us. Thanks anyway.
If you find yourself demoralized by constant rejection, Mann offers an unconventional remedy: a dose of delusion. Tell yourself a new story. Pretend you don’t care about seeing your byline in the New Yorker’s refined art deco font. Convince yourself you slammed the door in that snobby art dealer’s face. Tell yourself you want to toil away in anonymity like a Dickinsonian recluse in the 19th century. You didn’t want to go to those glitzy literary launch parties anyway:
“In my case, it was easy to wait out those early decades, because nobody wanted to see my work anyway. I adroitly protected myself from rejection with a tissue of lies, and I can recommend this as an effective strategy: People don’t care to see your work? Doors slammed in your face? Convince yourself that it was you who did the slamming and there you are, leaning against the door to keep the clamoring crowd of dealers, collectors, and editors out. You wouldn’t let them hang a damn show or publish your book even if they got down on their knees and begged you for it.”
The artist develops on a geologic time scale. If you’re going to dedicate yourself to art, you have to think in terms not of years, but decades. The formation of an artist is as ponderous as continents drifting across the planet, as slow-moving as volcanoes erupting and cooling to form Hawaii.
Mann suggests you delight in your obscurity. In those early decades when no one knows your name, you’re free, neither bound to a certain style or subject nor chained to the creativity-inhibiting concerns of the “marketplace.” You can create what you want and—perhaps more importantly—discover what you want to say.
So toss aside your ego and stop worrying about winning awards and acclaim. Put your head down and work diligently for the next two decades:
“…it is not disingenuous to make the argument for holding back your work, even if that means a long period of artistic obscurity, deliberate or not. If you are willing to accept that your success, if it comes, will be later in your career, you can make your art or write your books without regard for the all-consuming, and often fickle, marketplace. Being unrecognized and especially not being identified with a particular style allows us to make the work that matters to us, irrespective of whether it will sell.
For me, staying home and enjoying the simple life of a nineteenth century Flaubertian recluse, which is what I do 99 percent of the time, helps with this approach and perhaps something like it could work for you. Nevertheless, even today I find that I need to employ that still-serviceable protective covering, spun from the mendacious pluck, false confidence, and timeworn lies I wanted to believe, especially when I suffer rejections that sting. (Yes, I do, and yes, they still do). All the while keep working, making our art, whatever it is. It’s our job, just like any other job, only with longer hours.
So double bold that mythically bulging door, send away all the art-world impresarios and agents, don’t succumb to jealousy or study the auction results, go back into your studio, sit at your desk, make your work, and ruthlessly toss out whatever isn’t good enough, for whatever reason. Do that for the next twenty years.”
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