Writer’s Quote Wednesday

Writer’s Quote Wednesday is a weekly feature where I delve into famous writer’s words of wisdom and share how I have interpreted the meaning for my own creative endeavors to maybe help inspire yours!

 

 

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the readers eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.

Bill Barich

And I couldn’t agree more!

Seriously when I found this quote I felt heart warm. In many ways it felt like validation to something that I’ve always believed and practiced as a writer/creative person.Though there have been times when walking an unconventional credo has been tested and even given up – though not to any great lengths of success, let me tell you!

It can be hard to “stand apart.” To exist as something so wholly and fully yet have it not fit into any specific life path. It can be isolating, confusing, and quite frustrating at times but in many ways it’s like screaming in the woods naked – what’s the point? I mean you are where you are with nothing but your innate sense of survival to depend upon what’s the use in fighting it with fits that are sure to see you parish in no time?

Creative is something that can’t be taught once it is found within – I mean you can teach someone to paint, to write, to sing etc, but when it is something that yearning and call to arms then teaching is something that should not be forced.

How do you teach something so subjective as art? How do you fit creativity into such an institutionalized criteria? When you really want to add something to the medium how do you teach the maker what to make?

Inspiration is something that needs to come freely from within and not forced to exist in the confines of curriculum in order for it to have any true heart.

Was it not Picasso who said that it took four years to learn how to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child?

It’s because convention tries to – pardon the pun – paint creativity into a performing arts box. It wants so badly to control something that is better left to be wild. Children have no problem simply creating whatever they feel called to create. To do for the doing, to put hand and mind to task from a sparked idea. To just go for it because they feel called to.

It can be hard as adults to remember this freedom from ego’s reinforced standards of conduct. We grow insecure, we second guess, we start to wonder if its any good, if we are any good. We waste so much time speculating whether or not what we do has any worth, any purpose, or place. We get so caught up in the over scrutinizing comparison in what and where we should be in life and career, who we should be and how to cram out creatives selves into fitting into its expectation that we lose faith in ourselves and our craft when it just doesn’t seem to belong on those terms and when it can’t quite seem to catch up to those liner guidelines.

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the readers eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.

A good writer, a good artist of any kind, goes off of instinct, they create from the sheer point of view that it must be done. That they have something to say, they need to get it out, and here is finally the way.

In any true creative medium there is no following in the footsteps of, you have to forge your own path in order to make any kind of impact on the world. That’s not saying that you can’t get anywhere doing something creative in a conventional or formulaic manner, it’s just that in order to become a marvel you need to come from a place where the only true originality exists – you.

You are not Picasso. You are not JK Rowling. You are not Steven King, Quintin Tarantino, Van Gogh, Byron, Angelou, Goya, Woolf, Spielberg, Atwood, Bach, etc, etc, etc…

And that is a truly wonderful thing to embrace, because anything else just exists in the genres ether, in the midst of a million others whose inspiration was clouded with trying to much to be alike and follow the rules set by those who dared not follow the ones that existed before them.

Instead of trying to learn the rules of your craft try first to learn the way of your own. Yes read, but write first. Yes expose yourself to the masters but do not be ruled by them. Do not get buried in the requirements of what it takes to be an artist.

Because in the end true art begins and ends with you.

Why else would childhood exist as the most creative time in our existence? When we are new and unexposed. When what we think comes from an untouched place, comes from a true uniqueness of perspective and independent thought? When we are real individuals co-existing with the world surrounding us instead of just another cog in collective convention?

Just ask yourself when was the last time you looked at something, anything, and allowed your mind to think for itself, without the pressure of other’s imposed standards of opinion?

There is not just one way of seeing anything in this world (with the exception of a few things, like white supremacists, there really is not fine line there) just what we’ve been told. What had been passed down for decades as defined.

But in and of itself definition is a man-made construct of widely excepted opinion!

Everything can be talked in and talked out, talked around and talked through. We are limitless beings with limitless perspectives based in unique cellular coding. Just think about that for a moment…there are an estimated 7.7 billion living people in the world and out of those 7.7 billion no two – not even twins – have the exact same DNA sequence!

It’s about darn time we started acting like it! Creating like it! Living like it!

We want to badly to be a part of a whole but a whole cannot exist without the sum of its parts. We are each a heartbeat adding to the human experience through our own way of experiencing it.

A good writer refuses to be socialized. He insists on his own version of things, his own consciousness. And by doing so he draws the readers eye from its usual groove into a new way of seeing things.

Now I don’t know if this is what Bill Barich had in mind but it’s certainly what it inspired within me sitting here at the computer and contemplating its outreach. I am an unconventional creative, unconventional in most things actually, because it conformity has never sat well in me. I have yearned to have a more conventional life, to be more like others, to instagram on the regular, save for vacation with my 2.5, to settle down, to have gone to collage and had the normal participatory social life, hell I even gave up a few years of my life to try, but it just never took to my stubborn ass because deep, deep down I’ve always refused to fall short of my own potential and in doing so my potential refused to fall short of me.

Stop forcing it. Just let it be, and soon you will see that you already have all that you will ever need.