Craft / Creative Process
“I can feel jealous of David Sedaris’s fame, I can feel like I’ll never get to that point, but I should ask myself: am I doing 15 or 20 full rewrite drafts of my essays? Am I pushing myself to search for a universal feeling, for a moment of poignancy, and for a laugh, all in the same piece? Am I doing what he did, in my own way? No, no, and no. I am not. If I did that, and then did it for 15 years before getting published, like he did, then maybe I would find out how close to David Sedaris (or my own equivalent) that I could get.”
Drawing on that experience, Kent would later formulate the closest thing to a personal credo:
Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all... See more
Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all... See more
I have felt this compulsion, that my creativity of late has not channeled my true pain and truth. It has made me look at my own work with some disdain, because I am not being honest enough, or something. But I don’t want to share everything and every part of me. Alas, it’s a battle.
A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony:
Engineers had the technology to add the recording function to the Walkman and it would’ve cost only 50 cents to a dollar per unit. Morita decided against it. He wanted the device to have one function, which it performs very well. Walkman should only play
on juggling multiple projects:
it was actually the first time in my life where I’d really consciously been working on two projects. There’s sort of a nice procrastination effect; one of them is always easier than the other, so there’s always something to do.
—A Kendra Greene
Living a multi-pursuit life has kinda been my thing for a while. But I’m
... See more