Jane of All Trades?

Up Early - wonder if I can get by on 5-6 hours of sleep per night. That would rock.

Have been pondering lately about the diffusion of creative energy. There is a general belief that we must choose one thing to be good at if we are to succeed. Michael Jordan couldn't play baseball, it turned out. The phrase "Jack of all trades, master of none" echoes in my ears.

But there are other examples. Leonardo da Vinci (not to reach TOO high...) was a brilliant scientist and artist. My friend Julia is a scientist and writer/philosopher/inspirational teacher. My friend Zadie is attempting to find a way to combine her passion for music and theatre. (this is one area where it's apparently acceptable to excel at two artistic fields). John Lennon enjoyed writing and performing songs, but also drawing and political activism. There are many actor/directors.

I've never been able to choose only one area to focus on. As an undergrad at Oberlin, I was fortunate enough to get a good old fashioned Liberal Arts Education. I took a bit of everything my first two years, then got to the stage where we had to pick a major. I literally flipped through the catalogue until I stumbled across the category "Interdisciplinary Studies." Here I found something I could live with - instead of taking 2-3 courses in one subject for my final 2 years, I could continue to try it all.

I admit it: I want it all. When my husband and I travel, we're known for "packing it in." Why visit one city/state when you can visit five? The down side is sometimes we only have time for a one-hour quickie visit. But that still feels better than no visit at all...

So it is with my creative life. Perhaps if I focused all my energy on writing fiction, I would become more skilled. But I think instead I would become bored an frustrated. Some people can apparently write for 4-8 hours a day. One to two is about all I can handle. If I can get out my 1000 words or so, that's enough for one day. There doesn't seem to be a writerly equivalent to doing scales - writing letters of the alphabet? The only activities I know that help prime the pump are Morning Pages and freewriting. So that's another hour, max.

Editing I can do for longer stretches and at any time of day (as opposed to writing, which is generally a morning-only activity), but just barely. 2-3 hours at the most.

Same with poetry. How many hours can I give to creating and editing poetry in a single day? Certainly more than I do, but I just know in my heart that I couldn't spend ALL my time on poetry. It's just Not Enough for me.

So that leaves so many hours in the day! One thing Julia's book Unfolding taught me was to follow my energy. My energy leads me to to screenwriting (a natural progression) and from there to filmmaking (another form of story-telling), but also to a very different area of manipulating digital images by making web pages and Flash animations and programming code!

I sometimes ask myself "If you HAD to choose only one thing, which would it be?" Not writing fiction - it feels like Work too often. Not poetry, as I would get so caught up in language that I might literally start to sound nuts. Film is too exhausting to do full-time. Which leaves the computer stuff - something I can do anytime of day, that gets me excited, turns my crank, uses both my geek math side and my visual sensibilities, and has endless possibilities. And oh yeah, pays the bills. And the only time it feels like Work is when I'm making a website for a client and trying to answer to their vision of how it should look. But even then, that feels like a challenge - how can I make this work?

Interesting, didn't know I was going to wax so eloquently about interactive digital media (how happy was I to discover THAT term?) when I began to write that last paragraph. Maybe I'm not as torn as I think I am... The thing about writing is that it's how I've defined myself as an Artist for the last several years. It took a long time to give myself permission to even BE a writer/Artist. I don't want to give it up, and I don't think I need to. But it's definitely NOT my sole obsession, or creative outlet. And I need to give myself permission for that to be O-K.

More on this to come, I'm sure...