Some people just have art built into them, don’t they? So what are the rest of us supposed to do?
I have a minor in music. I wasn’t a natural pianist, but I was damned determined to learn how to play. And I was pretty good. In college, I transitioned from my Saturday morning piano lessons to theory and performance classes. I was pretty bad. At one point, my instructor yelled at me because I could not get the point of a little passage of Chopin. The notes just weren’t coming out right.
I couldn’t figure it out. I was technically playing the notes correctly, but still pissing off my instructor who basically had had it with me. I remember complaining to my sister, my super cool sister who is 12 years older than me and my beacon for all things rad in this world. She had been a punk rocker, she drove a Jeep, she got her MFA in theater in San Francisco, she could artfully arrange a scarf over any lamp. There is no one cooler, or more artistic, than my sister. It was my sister, in fact, who said words that unlocked “art” for me.
“You have to learn it well enough that you stop thinking about it, and you just feel it.”
When she said it, it was one of those camera zooms from a thousand miles away onto my blanked-out face. A neural explosion. I felt my brain rewiring. "Stop thinking and just feel." That became my definition for art.
It did not, however, help with Chopin. Turns out, I just wasn’t great at piano. BUT a few years later, when I decided to devote my time to fiction writing, her words came to me again. Struggling over how to get characters to do things on the page, I let my heart control the words.
It’s not an immediate or exact process. And I don’t employ my feelings until later drafts, when my structure is there, and I more or less know how the chess game goes.
But every time I write a super cool line that came from the spark of art that beats in my own heart, I thank my super cool sister for teaching me how to get there.
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