The Guardian got 29 professional writers¹ to offer some ‘tips for successful authorship‘.

via The Book Bench

1. Including Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Frantzen, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood and other favorites.

Draw every day all day and then some more. Get a sketchbook, use it. Use it often.  Set up a space for the sole purpose of art. paint there, draw there, live there.

Study

Workshops, how-to videos, art books, galleries, clubs, magazines, life drawing classes, Art history books. anything with the word art in it really. The internet is chock full of information. USE IT!

Do the groundwork

Paint what you know and if you don’t research the subject, by either studies or references.

Get better equipment

Go ahead and splurge on that nice new tablet, or that nice set of paints. If you get a new corvette, you aren’t exactly going to leave it in the driveway!

Composition and Design

Use thumbnail sketches, lay out values, use the rule of thirds (if you divide the painting in 3, each third is interesting enough to look at.) Use perspective in any sort of “realistic” paintings. Use the entire page, nothing is worse than looking at a floating head if you painted a portrait.

Teach Somebody

Teach somebody else to draw or paint, or even sculpt. You will find yourself telling them to do certain things that you know you should do but don’t. By doing this, you might make an effort to follow your own advice.

Experience EVERYTHING

Don’t just look at art books and what others have done. Watch the northern lights yourself, go to a zoo, see earth and all it has to offer and THEN throw it on a canvas for all to see.

A clean room is a clean mind

Make your space comfortable and clean and easy to work in and you will find it a lot easier to be motivated into doing something.

Be different

Try something different. You are a landscape painter? Well too bad, now you paint space ships and dinosaurs, or dinosaurs in space ships. Do whatever it takes to get yourself out of the rut you are in. Sticking to the same style can often lead to unchanged progress.

Improve your technique

Limit your strokes, start BIG and end in detail. Use dynamic lighting and keep things interesting.

PRACTICE!

Just like anything else in the world, the more you do it, the better you will be at it.

I know this was listed twice and makes the list 11, but it really is the most important part of becoming a better artist. Learn something new in a study and then try it out in your own work, then go back and do a study of how ducks are drawn, then go and make a landscape painting with ducks by a pond.

Art is what you make of it.

As somebody who has crashed and burned with index cards—pathetically—I am eager to see if any of these work for me.

Via Airbag

Once you get past how much you wouldn’t want to hang out with this guy, though, you’ll find that he’s actually got some great advice to give. So read his fucking piece.

Follow this advice and you’re sure to fulfill your dreams of Broadway stardom in no time, without all of the trifling effort and emotional sacrifice.

Playwright Llewellyn Hinkes dispenses with a hapless write-in question. Sure, there’s a lot of snark in there. But there’s also seems to a good point buried beneath all the shrillness. Plus it’s hilarious.

Here’s a recording of the speech and Mann’s writeup. Listen, read and be moved.

We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.

via Ideas.

Now, if I could just find a way to harness this awesome power for the good of all mankind…or profit.

In the course of Making Things there is an undisputed, torturously difficult first step: getting started. Whether it’s because you’ve got a whole heap of self-doubt, little spare time or inferior – you call them unworkable – tools, there are some serious barriers to entry for creative work.

Merlin Mann has made a career out of advocating ways to cut through personal apathy, excuse-making and general procrastination. Though I have only read a relatively small slice of what he has written – reading it all would be a pretty arduous task considering the wide scope of his internet presence – it’s the above quote that really got me. If you’ve ever experienced a creative block, I’m sure it’ll get you too.

Brute Force

Mann is, of course, referring to the Brute Force school of thought, the key dictum of which goes something like this: sometimes you can’t hop over those barriers to entry – sometimes you’ve got to push through them. A binary choice: do it or don’t. Easy, right?

Let’s pretend it is. You suddenly find yourself at that most crucial of all junctures – the painful first step, the point at which all energy is just potential.

To your left is a torturous path of self-consciousness, repetitive stress injury, possible dysfunction and, perhaps ultimately, self-respect and absolution. This is where you want to be, but it’s certainly not going to be easy (and never claimed to be, either).

To your right looms whatever it is that you’ve had all along. And the way there is all downhill. Heck, you can lie down and roll there, if you want. ¹

Presented with this maddening choice, how’s a rational human being supposed to act?

1,000 Words Per Day

To this end, I resolved over a month ago to sit down every day and write 1,000 words.

The inspiration came in the form of a blurb on author Michael Chabon’s Wikipedia page describing his own writing process: write Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. I had never thought of approaching writing that way before – as if it were a job, with clearly delineated hours and overtime. I mean, was I supposed to clock in or something?²

Chabon, of course, had his first novel published when he was just 25. Clearly his discipline was, and continues to be, a powerful asset.

The simple truth is that nobody is born with a fully-developed writing muscle; it’s slowly sculpted, Schwarzenegger-style, over the course of years of backbreaking work. This is the second-most important thing to remember when it comes to creativity (the most important being, of course, the quote at the top of this page).

What Happened Next

As it turned out, 1,000 words per day was a tall order. I managed to keep up with it for about a week before I got my first lousy post-college job and the bottom fell out. Since then, it’s been snatches of 200 words here and there. In the month of July, excepting this blog and all the writing and coding that I’ve stuffed into its craw, I have written a total of 2,722 words³.

By most accounts that’s a pitiful figure for a person who was hoping to make a serious commitment. ⁴ And, to make matters worse, I tend to cite all of the barriers I mentioned in the first paragraph – no time (I have a job!), extreme self-doubt (what do I have to write about, anyway?) and a complete lack of tools (if I only had a camera-a nice one-I’d be the greatest thing since Hitchcock!) – as the reasons why.

With this blog I hope to redouble my efforts. Even so, I consider it fairly emblematic of my worst tendencies (it took me nearly two months to design and code everything – a period during which I did very little writing, citing the fact that I was too busy working on my imminent vessel of true expression and would start as soon as it went live, etc etc).

Rule #3: only lousy workers blame their tools

Think rationally. Understand that, objectively, there is absolutely nothing standing between you and your first novel. Or your first painting. There’s just tons of hours to get through and some bad habits to slay.

So get going. We’ll do it together.

1. Whether you like what you’ve had all along is out of the question, as far as this hypothetical is concerned. The point I’m trying to force is that it’s simply familiar, a place where gravity will deposit you by default.
2. But, then again, the longest writing project I have ever been able to finish, or even get off the ground floor, was a screenplay. And even then, that was only after a tortured semester of countless manic, after-midnight writing spats. In the absence of all outside forces, this seems to be my natural tendency. So maybe clocking in and out isn’t such a crazy idea after all.
3. Plus perhaps several thousand more that disappeared forever when my pocket notebook went through the wash. With great reluctance I decided not to include them in my calculation, because I can no longer prove that they even existed.
4. This is doubly true when that person also hopes, one day, to make a living from writing.

Spun off from a post by Jason Kottke.