I am very grateful to all of you who subscribe or show interest in the writings I post here. My output is sporadic at best, and your patience is appreciated. When I started The Late World, I had grand designs of publishing every week, or maybe even twice a week. Results, needless to say, have been hit or miss.
But now I find myself on a Saturday morning with some unexpected time on my hands, and I realized that what I wanted most to do with that time was to write a little bit here. My inspiration this morning is twofold: I want to talk a little bit about why I started this blog, and why I named it what I did, as these two items are related.
So first, why? What’s the Big Idea here? Well, The Late World is about creativity, and the creative process. I am interested in what inspires us, and what limits us. I want to talk about my own (tortured, wierd) creative process, as well as look at best practices and inspirations from a wide variety of sources.
Part of this inspiration comes from an old credo, written by my fave poet Carl Sandburg, called “What Do You Think?” It doesn’t often get collected with his other poems—it kind of floats in its own universe—but the lines that I return to again and again go like this:
“TO SPELL Art with a capital A and enjoy paintings, poems, stories, statues and the silent benedictions of architecture; to love expression; to know when to behave and when to get reckless and forget that you're a gentleman; to hoe in the garden, split wood, carry out ashes, get dirty and be actually useful every once in a while if not twice; to pray and aspire and build and when you build, build strong.”
“Building strong” does not always mean “building well the first time,” or even “building fast.” It took me a long time to learn this lesson, and in many respects I am still learning it.
What I have learned works best, at least for my creative process, is grab what you can when it’s there and carry on. Keep movning forward with the draft, or the revision, or the version. Do it crappy and get a full finished whatever, and then revise if and when you can. That’s the only thing that seems to work for me. Try as I might (and I have tried for so many years now), I cannot churn out perfect finished products the first time I attempt something.
So that’s the report from where I am right now. Allow me to shift gears for a few moments, at talk about why I chose to name this blog The Late World. When I came up with the name, there were three aspects I found interesting, three layers (if you will) to the cake.
It’s called “The Late World” because I am, by nature, a night owl. Somewhere around when I was in fourth or fifth grade, my mom bought us a second-hand Super-8 movie camera. It was battery operated, and it shot these sort of rattly film reels that came in plastic cassettes. It was a noisy, hot mess to operate, and I absolutely fell in love with it.
Even though it was not at all the right choice for such an endeavor, I used that camera to make stop-motion animated movies. I would get out the moeling clay, come up with some character, and set it in motion across the screen.
The process was tedious: move the figure a little, press the trigger on the camera for a brief moment, hear a momentary rattle as the film advanced a few frames, and then repeat.
Making a minute-long sequence of movement could take hours. So what I started doing on weekends was to begin when mom went to bed, and basically work all night, into the wee hours of the morning. I would either work until sunup (when the lighting changed) or until whatever I was working on felt “done.” The I would crash and sleep through much of the next day.
So creativity, to me, is a baked-in-my-bones nocturnal activity. It has taken me a long time to get the rhythm of being creative during the daylight hours. So, for that reason, "The Late World” felt like a good description. The world after dark is the native home of creativity for me.
It’s called “The Late World” because I blow every single deadline ever. God help me, I never turn in anything on time. I mean, back when I was in school, I had to, of course. But then I went and got a Ph.D., and everything went kablooey.
To get a doctorate, of course, you basically have to do a lot of thinking and write a book, called your dissertation. I was good at the thinking part, but slow and messy at the writing part. My ideas were going in so many directions all the time, it was hard to know what belonged and what did not. I ended up exploring a lot of false leads (not all of them useless! Some made it into later projects) and a lot of time chasing my own tail.
When I first got an academic job, I was “expected to publish,” but there was really no institutional support for my doing so. I was expected to teach a large number of courses, and teach overloads besides, and then also to participate in administrative activities. Let me say I did not thrive in such an environment, and my creative process atrophied for a number of years as a result.
Looking back now, what is strange is that I kept accumulating new projects, each with contracts, expectations, and deadlines. I kept saying “yes” to new deliverables, even as I was not actually delivering on any of the old ones. I wasn’t doing this because I thought it was cute of something—I have no doubt there was an is a kind of pathological process at work. Nevertheless, I kept procrastinating, even as I was saying yes.
So “The Late World” has this name because I wanted to talk about that. I am a person who writes and thinks brilliant and interesting things, and yet I continually blow deadlines on the way to getting my writing out into the world. I wanted to acknowledge that, and explore why that is. I still do.
One interesting aside: I seem to be better at hitting deadlines for audio projects, particularly for my client work. Over the years, I have tried to leverage that dynamic into my process for my own creative projects, with mixed success. Try as I might, I cannot seem to “trick” myself into thinking that I am my own client, and therefore my personal deadlines (even ones where an editor is waiting on me) always seem less “real.” So it goes.
It’s called “The Late World” because the Earth may, in fact, be dying. This is the weirdest and most morbid layer of the cake, but I want to be real here. We are in a crisis. Species are dying, and oceans are rising. The planet is heating up. We know this, and we are all continuing on like we don’t actually know this. It’s weird.
So I often get caught in a thought loop of despair. Why take the time to write this thing, and get it into the world, if there will not actually be any human world soon in which it will matter? I wrestle with this a lot. Why create in the face of this reality?
And yet: the disaster is not here yet. We are still together now. Even with the wave crashing down on us from above, the dappled beauty of the sunlight glinting on the waterdrops remains.
So I create and write because I am a creator and a writer. It’s what I do, and what I have to do. Even if it is the last thing I do (or among those last things), I want to do it.
So this blog is called “The Late World” for that reason, too. We might be living in the last days, in a former world. It may be too late. But, as Samuel Beckett once said (and Orson Wells, as well) we sing on.
So that’s the cake.
As always, I am grateful to everybody who listens and who has a note to share in the song. Thank you, thank you, thank you.