I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.  -Picasso

I’ve admitted I’m a slow learner, but nothing beats learning. Nothing, to me, is more exciting than discovering new information and using it to create new mindscapes. Nothing is more wondrous than our ability to split open our own heads with books as backhoes and art as jackhammers that shatter the concrete of all we believe we know.  Travel and conversation are the graders and rollers with which we lay fresh ways of thinking, broader and deeper, informing our behavior and our art.  Every new path laid and followed increases my chances of reaching Ah-haaa!

For my plays, I’ve ingested the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and scrabbled with her after fame, love, drugs, excuses.  I’ve listened to the language of art critics as well as the language of painters and paint.  I’ve walked as close to mania as I’ve dared and I’ve eaten my way into the mythology and science of envy, recognizing a familiar taste, as I am not a stranger to that sin.  I’ve walked with soldiers, noncoms, and officers, fearing for their safety, despising them for their weapons.  I’ve spent months with Strindberg, Munch, and Cervantes, imagining genius and failing (so far).  I’ve studied maps of London, Brooklyn, Cambridge, Afghanistan, Mendocino, and the maximum security prison at Pelican Bay, not to mention the abhorrent terrain of solitary confinement.

 I don’t agree with the sentiment “write what you know.” That recommends circumscription. I think one should write what one doesn’t know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination. That’s what it’s there for.

-Cynthia Ozick

I read everything having anything remotely to do with anything remotely connected to my project and then I follow tangents.  People have commented on my veiled procrastination.  I have no map for this part of the journey, but the long way ‘round is the way to Ah-haaa!  I know this for a fact (sort of)!   Trust the past; trust the process.

If I weren’t a writer, most information I gather, if gathered at all, would bounce off the sponge between my ears. But as I never know what will matter to my characters, those dear chimeras who search so diligently for their stories, I must gather all that is within my reach and absorb all that my mind will absorb.   I owe them that much.  More.

I haven’t yet but am just about to start reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin.

This is the young man whose father wrote about him in Searching for Bobby Fischer.  As he has matured, he’s discovered a remarkable aspect of his learning process that I am eager to learn or, at least, attempt.