Time is the Difference For Most Writers

It really is time. After you have the talent it is time. There are many good writers out there who will never publish and that is because they will never write. The reason most artists don’t succeed is really because they do not have the time to develop their craft. Talent must be there but so also must there be time to create and in America that time comes at a high price.

So what is your day job? The standard question has the built in assumption you must support yourself to do your writing or your music or your acting. You have to do sometning to pay  the bills. But that something destroys most artists. Their energy goes into the support and not the art. Art takes time to come to fruition and it takes time to make its way in the world.

Take writing for instance. You only have so much psychic energy and then it is gone. Most writers support themselves by teaching. This drains the writer of his precious mental  reserve and by the time he or she sits down at the writing table there is simply nothing left.  It was given away to a student who will face the same thing one day. 

So really the great dividing line of those who go on to produce songs or novels or become actors is that they had years to develop their craft. Time it turns out is precious.

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

 

The Real Difference between a Book and an E-Book

It is a matter of the way you read it. I know a man who brags he reads a thousand books on his Kindle. I don't doubt it.  The Kindle takes a book and turns it into the equivalent of an IPOD tune or a picture on your hard drive. Getting rid of the physicality of the book changes it. We no longer experience the book we experience an E File on a hard disk that is not so different from any other file on a hard drive. It has to be dealt with and then returned to oblivion. So the real difference between a book and an E Book is the experience.

One experiences a book. Literature we experience pulp we finish. In other words the ebook becomes something to be dealt with quickly. Accomplished. It goes back to that old saying that Midwesterners read for self improvement while Southerners read for pleasure. What are we reading for then with an Ebook? Is it the I better watch so many hours of Jeopardy so my brain doesn't turn to mush morphed into I better read this book so I can get to the next book and the next book so I can eventually say I read a thousand books.

Take it another way. The physical creature in our lap changes the experience. The book is experienced as a thing .The page turns slowly. It falls to the next page. The digital experience is a swipe a silent movement of a page appearing and then vanishing for the next silent swipe. Like a painting versus a picture of a painting the experience is changed. Ask anyone who prints out a picture versus looking at it on your phone. One is ephemeral the other is there for all time

So we may think we have all the answers with our Kindles and Nooks but like the IPOD the experience has morphed and changed. Digitization is all bout economy and convenience. That was never art and never will be.

www.billhazelgrove.com
 

The Dream of Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris is  A Moveable Feast. Most of us who write or read seriously know about the Left Bank crowd of writers and painters who set the bar in the twenties for all to follow for the next hundred years. It was an amazing amalgam of creative talent centered in post WWI Paris and more centered in the bars and bistros where the writers and painters cross pollinated and created literature and art that is probably unparalleled since the Renaissance. Who hasn't become a writer or a painter and think about going to Paris to live the life less certain?

I did and so did the Owen Wilson character who is struggling between art and commerce and a wife who wants the finer things. In his fantasy or Woody Allen's we meet Hemingway and Fitzgerald Dali Gertrude Stein Picasso Zelda Mcleish and are mindful of the lingering presence of Joyce and Faulkner and the many others who came to the heart of the world of art and writing to make history and live  the artist life in a world where art is preeminent.

This is the assumption and the dream and Fitzgerald is refined and Hemingway is coarse and hilarious and Gertrude Stein is the Grande Dam of writing and Picasso is conflicted and Zelda is brilliant and heading toward insanity. This is the world we dance through and of course Paris is the magical background that makes us want it all the more. And Owen Wilson wants it and when he finally throws over security for a life in Paris we say but of course.

And then the movie ends and leaves us with the dream of the Left Bank fantasy intact. And why not? Those people took a chance and went to Paris to be artists and live a life apart. Undoubtedly there was hardship and people starved and did not find literary fame. But Paris is not a dream, it is a real city, and as Owen Wilson says, just walking in the rain in Paris at night is enough. One can  only imagine.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic-- surviving as a writer

Art Alone Endures

We were doing the Chicago thing with the train and the kids and the rushing to the water taxi to Michigan Avenue to seeing Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up in front of the NBC building and then down to Billy Goats Tavern for some burgers that would kill a Tri Athlete then up and across the river toward Millennium Park to see the Bean. It was  a beautiful August night, one of those nights so rare in Chicago that feels more like Florida in Spring. We had just about reached the park when we heard music.

My wife said it looked like a concert in the park and so we drifted up to the fence and and there was a symphony. And then we heard a voice. It was an opera and the singers voice rose up across the city like a God. We just stopped and listened and all our worries and hurries fell away. We were transfixed by this man singing and the beautiful music. The park was filled as far as the eye could see with people quietly listening on a warm night on the end of summer.

And I looked around and I saw young and old just staring. No one moved. Everyone just listened and they were transfixed. And that is when I thought about our world with it's horrible problems and our cartoon culture and our grotesque politicians and the zealots who have take over our lives and I realized then the only thing that trumped all that was Art. It moved at a different speed and a different level and all these people will pass on, but Art will survive.

And they can't touch it. They can try and ban books. Wash out an opera with Rap or noise or sex or violence or whatever they can come up with, but Art survives. I saw it in the people who didn't speak, didn't move. They were mesmerized like I was. And even my seven year old who could barely see over the fence wanted to just stay and listen. It simply soothed the soul.

And then of course we left and hurried on to catch the water taxi to catch the train to get to our car to get home to go to bed to start all over the next day. But there was that interlude. It only lasted fifteen minutes but the world was in order. All was right. There is an engraved saying in the Fine Arts Theatre of Chicago. "All Passes, Art Alone Endures." Amen.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man Kindle

Mount Oprah

You should be on Oprah. Oprah would love your book. Maybe she would and maybe she wouldn't. But as a man with a book out I hear this about every other day. Strange dynamic. Publishing a book so the end result will be an endorsement by a single person. In the age of everyman fame, Oprah is certainly the lottery ticket to the sure milk of immortality if not wealth. But of course one has to get there. I received a call yesterday. Mr. Hazelgrove, we would like to publish your next book. Oh really. I can hear other voices in the background. Yes, this is blankety blank and we want to publish your book. I recognized the vanity press. Well my book has just come out I say and of course the call is terminated. No prospects here. Even self publishing is in a downturn. There is no shame in self publishing. Great writers have done it through time, but the wholesale Juggernaut of instafame is something new. All eyes on the prize we do whatever flips trained seals must to get to the top of the pyramid. I get it. I really do. The man who told Oprah he received food from a long lost lover in a concentration camp got it too. He just made it up. So did James Frey. Can you blame them? Morality says yes, but reality says they are just doing whatever they can to get to the final stop on Mount Rich and Famous. A lot of people talk about the American Dream, but of course the dirty little secret is that we are covetous old sinners who want that final branch, the one that says we are not just a blip on the radar screen of mortality but someone special, someone different, the star that flashes out of the night and we all sit in wonder. But there are only so many seats on that Oprah set, a couch that Tom Cruise destroyed his career on and another seat for Oprah. After that, it is every man and woman for themself.