successfully crafty

Well done kid! It was very fascinating to look at do-it-yourself books as a kid.... In hundreds of illustrations, outlines of men and women assembled progressively more and more complex devices. Comics of growth. Everything looked really easy and perfect and every little picture story climaxed in the perfect little creation... Successful and crafty. Look a the large picture. Wow. How much did we want to have the garden to build these benches and pavillons and fountains and concert shells. (and grow the flowers and tune the cars and cook the meals.) On a slightly smaller scale, there were the paper models build (mostly started, rarely finished) with my father. Later the most fantastic LEGO contraptions, guided by step by step instructions. It was fascinating to enter and re-enter a world in which all the steps were thought of, all the parts and their connections were accounted for and all one would end up with was exactly the piece of toy displayed on the cover of the packaging. Distributed completeness. The carpet at home was not quite Legoland, the table was not exactly the historic battlefields of Poland... but hey... there was a satisfaction in having done everything... just right... In front of me, right now, "The Observation Deck", a toolkit for writers... a portable box, some tiny book, some cards with inspirational words... Again, things are laid out to be really, really easy. One just needs to read the book, pick a card, write the next great American novel. Successful craftiness is obviously not just limited to Lego, it extends into other parts of our life. There is "The artist's way" the "Natural way to draw", the ... well... (you know what...) Tom Bissell wrote a really brilliant little piece on the craze of self help extravaganzas in a recent issue of The Believer. He writes about How-To-Write books, but some of what he mentions just perfectly applies for any kind of trivialization of creative activity... Some of the pieces in the article brought tears into my eyes... for all the various reasons... Bissell quotes from one of the books by A.P. for example... "Put yourself on the page and all that you think and feel about your life, but do it with discipline; do it with skill. Then the good agents and the good publishers will get your work into their hands of the good readers." Bissell extends the quote:"And then the good fairies and elves will approach your front door, carrying bags of gold, and the leprechauns will come, and the gnomes, and the friendly talking monkeys will sing, oh sing! Outside your window!" It works every single time. So whenever I come across somebody telling me how easy it would be for me to start trying to be like them... and be it as good of a writer, a leader, an artist, a chef... My thoughts are with the singing monkeys. I am really afraid of formulas. I am afraid of the confident voice of somebody telling me what has to be done, quickly and easily, to make me a better... anything, anybody... really... I do not trust the advice coming from the pages of books, the monologues of sites, even the voices coming directly at me out of mouths glittering in all shades of pearl white... Cutting corners and finding a quick way to do anything will maybe, in a best case scenario, create the "real simple" thing intended, but it will create an empty shell of what could have been there... Just the idea of such an outcome scares me... (I guess I like to make plants grow, not jank them out of soul and dry them on pages of books.) I do not think that we should all go out and invent the wheel... every day... I just do not think that one can be successful by defining success as something that is being defined by somebody else... The greatest ones were often the ones who set up their own sets of rules... somehow, somewhere, at some point... no? It is probably quite okay to follow certain advice, certain rules... but our best teachers might end up being the ones who do not intend to illuminate the path to wherever they stopped thinking and doing... and not further... Some of our best teachers are not the ones that guide us by the hand into that little chamber that they created for themselves, to seduce us to do exactly the same thing... Some of our best teachers might be the ones who throw boulders at us, and nearly kill us, but in the process let us discover how easy things can be, once we manage to overcome that impossibly difficult stuff... hmm... now i sound like a self-help author myself... grr... Silly thoughts come to my mind when looking at the photograph below... Successful Handycrafts... well... yeah... indeed... good luck. (The other titles are packed with all sorts of inspiration as well, you know...)