Crisp Precision

If you watched the Olympics, or if you watch any kind of dancing competition, you've seen crisp. You've also seen the antithesis. I wish I had videos to show you to illustrate crisp and - you know - not. However. Speaking of not so crisp, since I'm posting late and I still have word count to rack up today, me surfing the interwebs isn't going to happen. I know my weaknesses.

So I describe. 

Crisp is during a football game, some guy leaps into the air, hangs there, and plucks the ball out of the sky as if he had all the time in world to wait for it. He lands, there's a beat, and then he takes off down the field. He makes it look easy.

Crisp in this context describes physical precision. When it's lacking, you look at someone's performance, nod and say, "Eh, not bad." If the performance is crisp, it becomes one of those cheesy "OMG You Have to Watch!" videos that makes the email and social media rounds. I know a little bit about it because of Stage Combat training. Without at least a little bit of physical precision on your part, your fight partners didn't last long. What?? Mine are all fine. I swear. Though I won't make any claims about having made swinging a broadsword look easy. It wasn't and I didn't.

Oh, look. It turns out I lied. I do have videos. This is music. In the first one, watch how Bing Crosby belts out his show tune while making it look like the easiest thing he's ever done. In the second, Bing is much older. Same song, but all the ease is gone. The song and the performance are as muddy as the river he sings about. I can't watch the second one all the way through.

 

Well, dang it YouTube. I don't guess there will be any kind of contrast/compare. YouTube won't play nice.  (Here's the URL, but YouTube won't let me put the video into the post. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2GFxVCE5pQ) But really. If you're watching a performer make hot, sweaty work of whatever they're doing - unless, of course, hot and sweaty is the *point* - the performance isn't crisp.

 

What does it matter? Very little, probably. Some people like to see the work that goes into something - whether an athletic performance or a piece of art. Other people (I find I'm one of them) value the mastery demonstrated when someone makes the difficult or the impossible look like a cakewalk. Think Jackie Chan. He can't possibly be human. He has achieved a stunning level of physical precision and mastery. And he makes it look not only like it's easy, he makes it look like it's all an accident.

 

Is it stupid that I want that kind of mastery over storytelling?

Crisp

by Allison Pang

I think for a number of these topics, I'm going to start writing flash fiction as a bit of a warm-up to other things, particularly if I don't have much else to say on the subject. (I've a number of other little projects I'm working on, and I figure I might as well pop into some character heads to get to know them better. Which could be a good or bad thing.)


Crisp

The apple is crisp the way her bones are crisp – crunching between pale teeth, skin splitting to lay bare the sweetness of the flesh within. It drops from her fingers; such nerveless appendages no longer have use for fruit. The juice stains her lips, even as her blood stains mine.

Beneath a coating of dew, the apple glitters like snow in the sunlight.

On the Perils of Creativity

I am crisped.

In the slang sense of the word. As in fried, cooked through, no juice left.

And not from a sunburn either. Yesterday, I spent the day in the sun, reading. I didn't work at all.

At ALL.

Which is noteworthy, because I'm not sure when the last day came about that I didn't work on a draft or edits or a blog post or household chores or work on one of my volunteer activities. I didn't go anywhere. I sat and read. Not for contest judging, either.

Just for fun.

On Friday morning - right on schedule, I'm proud to say - I finished the draft of Rogue's Paradise. And, you guys, I know this is bragging, but I think it's oh, so yummy. Finishing a book always takes so much out of me, in ways I don't quite understand. I know I've written about it before, but it's like putting the seal on the story somehow carves a chunk out of me on some metaphysical plane.

The scientist in me gets all irritated when I try to describe it.

The creative part knows it's true.

Last night, we watched a segment from 60 Minutes that Stepdad Dave recorded. They replayed a 2008 interview with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, as part of a reflection on his recent and tragic death. The interviewers gave him a little shit about how he was dressed - scruffy - and the interview circumstances - 8 am on the deserted NYU campus - and he responded with that self-effacing, yet wry intelligence that seemed so characteristic of him.

At one point the interviewer quoted one of Hoffman's friends who said something along of the lines of that Hoffman always works himself into a frenzy of self-doubt and obsessiveness, trying to make ever role perfect.

Hoffman looked away, abashed, said, "He talks too much." Then he looked back at the interviewer and said, "You always worry, that this role will be the one to end your career."

Oh yes.

I hear other writers say that all the time, so it must go with the territory. We all live with the plaguing fear that we won't be able to do it again. That this book will fail, that we won't be able to finish it, that it will be so flawed that it will be universally reviled - and us along with it.

After all - it happens, right?

So, it's a bizarre kind of comfort to hear someone else give voice to that. To share that pain of being creative for a living. Which is something I rarely do - share in that community.

Which made me think about why. I came up with a few thoughts on this:

1) I really hesitate to identify as a creative person. This strikes even me as odd, because I don’t hesitate to identify as a scientist or writer or many other designations. The concept of creativity, however, seems special and magical – and I feel uppity laying claim to it. Arrogant, even, as if I'm pretending to be more special than I am.

2) At the same time, hearing creative people talk of their struggles or reading studies of how creative people behave, hits home with me in this profoundly visceral way. It's good for me to know that being creative is such a huge part of my life now and drives much of my behavior and energy cycles. 

3) There’s a kind of desperation that arises from making one's living via a creative act. Maybe it arises from the certain knowledge that the art is not ours to control. It’s a gift that comes from elsewhere. We can create the rituals and habits to facilitate the flow – but ultimately, the art is beyond us. In this way, we are forever on the edge, at the mercy of a greater power.

4) I think sometimes of Geoffrey Rush’s performance in Shine, and how the musician ultimately lost his mind trying to play that one Rachmaninoff piece. When I’m finishing a book, I am stressed and I do feeling like I’m losing my mind. And the people who love me become concerned and remind me to care for my health. Which I try to pay attention to. At the same time, I’m looking at this chunk of my heart I’ve torn out and painted into a story and wonder how anyone thinks I can do what I do without this gradual cannibalization of myself as a human being.

The scientist is rolling her eyes at that last one. 

And this is something of a vomit of ideas. I should massage it more, but I'm not going to. I thought about holding off and writing something else today, until this gelled more - but when I saw "crisp" was the word of the week, this was what I thought about. 

So, here's my mess of thoughts. Now I'm going to go have brunch in the sun and maybe have a mimosa.

You all have a lovely Sunday!