Uncle Willam's Workshop...

Okay, let's consider ourselves building bridges; in a very real-yet-figurative sense, we are. There are a lot of deep-gullied creeks where I come from -- to get across it was pretty simple to cut a pine tree so it would fall across the gap and pray you have the grace of a ballerina to walk across it. A more functional bridge, however, takes time and effort: establishing solid footings on both sides, sufficient sills, sturdy planking, and maybe even guardrails. Of course, with modern technology, you can get into steel and concrete, but that's a little much for our analogy.

The basic bridge -- connector, if you will -- in the human condition is Art with a Big A; "The arts," to use a term that unfortunately tends to isolate rather than connect, but WE are celebrating the connector, the bridge.  Okay?  Okay.

Literature, drama, dance, visual art, and music are generally considered the "arts" and are often taught as separate fields of study and beheld as separate areas of "talent," which ties "love" as the most mis-used word in the English language. The enabling currency of each is a need to communicate. Proficiency rates obviously vary among the arts from person to person, but we're all "creative" by virtue of our being made "in the image" of The Creator.

Language is perhaps the basic art; verbal communication enabled primitive peoples to live in communities, to help each other, and to pass along information so that every single individual didn't have to go through the discovery process of trial and error for every single bit of information; as more efficient ways of controlling fire were found, for example, those methods could be shared by word of mouth. Surely, pragmatic issues prevailed, but, in time, telling for the sake of telling and for the entertainment therein became a role of the storyteller. My best guess is that ancient storytellers borrowed delivery and attention-getting techniques from the wind and perhaps other indigenous sounds, giving birth to singing and moving on to the creation of music through other means and devices -- instruments, we have come to call them.

The concept of a written language gets mixed up joyously with visual art; indeed, the cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the much-more-recent symbol paintings of the American plains tribes are obviously efforts to inform AND to entertain. Many possibilities come into play with a written language: not only can the writer communicate with people who may not be in the sound of his voice but, of critical importance, with people who are not even born yet. So ancient texts, often through a series of translations, are still with us, providing stability points for the great religions as well as latter day readers for Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the proverbial many others.

Of the many books and articles on the arts I have read, my very favorite quote is from William Goldman's "Adventures In The Screen Trade:" "When I read a story for the purpose of adapting it to a screenplay, my first question is 'What is this story about?' My second question is 'What is this story REALLY about?'"

My personal adaptation of the Goldman premise is to take the other areas of Art into my consciousness as a direct creative descendant of the ancient storyteller: What is this painting about? What is it really about? What is this poem about? What is it really about? What is this song about? This melody, this screenplay, this … oh, yeah, this story? And what are they really about?

Here's the point where a good student walked out of my creative writing class (well, she didn't walk out; she just didn't come back) and it demonstrates how literal some of us become. I expressed the need of a story in good writing and she challenged the story role with poetry "where there are just moods" involved. Halfway through the ensuing discussion, I realized her hang-up. "We have bought into the idea that a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end," I observed, "to the extent that we forget that not all stories are even verbal."

It might have worked earlier on, but, alas, at this point, too late; she had already shored up her defenses against this heretic of her holy notions. Like I said, that was her last night in class. That incident inspired a slight adjustment: I still maintain good writing revolves around a story BUT I stress that moods, indeed, tell quite lovely stories. So how about the beginning, the middle, and the end? The reader's frame of reference dictates the sequencing process.

I further maintain that good ART revolves around a story and quite often the whole story rests on the beholder's frame of reference. What's the story of a vase full of daffodils? Oh, there could be many stories, as many stories, in fact, as there are people who view such a painting. The role of the artist is to get viewers, listeners, and readers involved on some subconscious level -- nostalgia, perhaps, but dreams for the future or sheer outrageous hilarity are just as viable.

Not too long after I got to working with watercolors in 1989, Mary Ellen Petrilla saw two small pieces I had painted -- relatively simple landscapes of places in my head. She held one for a long gaze, then the other, then picked up the first and pointed to it with her other hand, saying "I wish I were there."

It might not have been a life-changing moment, but it was unquestionably a life-defining moment. Wow! All those years of writing songs hoping to touch hearts, all those years of writing prose and poetry, hoping to "nail one," and the one area of the arts in which I had had the least training and the least experience enabled me to affect my friend's wishes and dreams. Ah, to be somewhere as peaceful as Bill's painting.

My best word for the process is magic. Jack Blanchard maintains that ideas come most often when we're looking for them. I like the example of radio: to hear the signal, one must have the receiver turned on and it MUST be tuned to the same frequency as the transmitter. The creative process can be overwhelmingly intimidating, but a few basics simplify the matter:

1) Remember that we are created in the image of The Creator; probably not in the physical image but obviously in the capacity to create.

2) Functionally creative people are those who give themselves permission to be so. "I need to take a class," "I need to have time," "I need to …," "If only I could …" These are all excuses, bolstered by the myth that technique determines value. Not true. Technique is important but is never more than a tool. Emotional response determines value -- oops, I don't mean monetary value here; I've worked professionally as a writer, a musician, an actor, and a painter over all of my adult life and I have no idea how monetary values are arrived at for artistic services. Maybe we'll bring in a guest writer on that topic down the way; I'm not the person to discuss that.

3) There is such a thing as talent, but it is not necessarily what we see when we are awed by an amazing performance. More often than not, what we see is skill. Talent is essentially a propensity for learning something, while skill is the learned ability to do it. Okay, how about these prodigies who sit down at the piano and play Mozart before they can read? I don't know. But there are many more of us who have to learn than there are of them, so I don't lose a lot of sleep over that phenomenon -- I simply enjoy and appreciate the manifestations.

Wanting to do something doesn't always guarantee a propensity, but it's a good start -- I didn't know why until I was sixty-one, but my singing voice and guitar playing have always been inconsistent at best. Turns out I have a congenital connective tissue disorder -- there is a specific protein which enhances connective tissue elasticity and my body does not absorb that protein proficiently, thus my stiff fingers and often-squeaky vocal chords, but, hey, I've wanted to play and sing hillbilly music since before I could read and, by golly, I've done it. I may not be a whiz but I'm a good performer. Why? Because I know my limitations and I select material that fits those parameters, not to mention the extra effort I put forth because I know it's not as easy for me as, say, Vince Gill or Roy Clark.

The greatest limiting factor in artistic expression is the myth that there should be money involved in anything that takes time. "If you're not good enough to play or paint professionally, why bother?" to condense many perspectives. Anything that brings me joy, tranquility, and a stronger sense of confidence and achievement is no bother. I tried really hard at professional music and I'm not exactly out of it even today; writing came quite easily, yet my real dreams of getting fiction, poetry, and songs "out there" have not materialized. The non-measurable factor, however, is a big deal to me; I know the effect being able to play a major scale with my eyes closed has on how I feel about me, which has no small effect on how you feel about me. Having talked to audiences, I can talk to individuals, quite entertainingly, in fact; individuals I've never seen before in my life.

A list of my Art-related assets would be long, but the most important is what I call the Diminished Fear Factor. In brief, I've learned why pencils have erasers, why audio tape has a re-wind button, and why watercolor paper is, after all, just paper -- mistakes are part of the learning process and a certain portion of my writing, of my music, and of my painting is deliberately a stretch of what I know I can do. We'll get into some of my exercises (and maybe yours) later. If my fingers won't reach a certain chord or execute a certain riff, I push those limits in practice, not in a public performance. I could paint flowers and grass and trees all day long literally with one hand tied behind me, to use the old expression of something being easy, but the more I try buildings, animals, and --- oooooh -- people, the better my flowers and grass and trees become.

Next time, how my flowers make my music better and why I've always listed two painters as my primary writing influences. Meanwhile, feel free to use the e-mail button on the home page to contribute comments and suggest topics or leave them on the guestbook.

Here's Part Two:

My first ten or twelve years with PERFORMANCE Magazine was an exhilarating swirl of music, people, places, more music, and more people than I could conceivably remember, especially considering the need for compassionate press and my innate knack for literally standing out in a crowd (if you don't know, I'm 6'5" and, during most of that time, weighed under 180 pounds -- I'm now some twenty pounds heavier). There were conversations at parties, between shows, on planes, on busses, at festivals, on the street, in offices, in my office … many, many conversations. Maybe the one question -- no, there were two; one at a time -- I got asked most often concerned my writing influences. William Faulkner was a frequent guess, obviously due to my sentence flow, and another was John Dos Passos, which surprised me.

My official answer, however, was: "Actually, two painters have had the greatest impact on me as a writer: Auguste Renoir and Charlie Russell -- I love their textures and their gentleness with color and I try to generate those responses with words. It's not something that works every time, but my conscious effort makes my writing more interesting than if I just used the same words everyone else uses."

The other FAQ: "What is your all time favorite country song?" What a wonderful question, considering where it took me in my creative quests. The first bunch of answers were all different, usually with "Wildwood Flower" or "Home Sweet Home" or "Making Believe" in there somewhere. Down the way, however, I gave it enough thought to say "The Twentythird Psalm," which led to the writing of "The Greatest Country Song."

"Oh, the greatest country song," a verse goes, "has been repeated through the ages, far longer than there's been a waltz in Sunny Tennosee; I'm glad I live in the land that sings the songs of Hank and Lefty, but the songs of David I do believe caused it all to be."

That song, along with such strange notions as "textured writing," accomplished two feats: it gained respect from people who respect honest, original thinking, and it earned disdain from those who don't. It also garnered a handful of promises to record it, none of which have been fulfilled, but I'm looking at it seriously for a project in the near future, depending on how much other material fits the concept we wind up going with.

Aha, another topic of value in the creative process: it would be easy to look at my songwriting track record and write me off, period; hey, if nobody records Littleton's stuff, then Littleton's stuff obviously isn't very good, right? Not necessarily. Marty Robbins wrote "My Woman, My Woman, My Wife" some ten years before it was recorded and every successful songwriter can show you really good songs that have never been recorded -- for any variety of reasons, ranging from where would it fit on radio to who needs that particular song at this particular time.

It's scarily easy for new material to pile up on top of something that got passed on this go 'round, often to the point of its never being pitched again. Good songpluggers are more organized than that, but the really good ones get better job offers, so the same song may go through a series of custodians, not to mention owner/publishers, and the further that team gets away from the original passion of and for the song, the less likely the song will ever experience exploitation.

I'm sharing these songwriting war stories with you because they are applicable to every endeavor -- "good," "better," and "incredible" may be levels of quality important to us, the creative crew, but the consumer is looking for "functional." I may write a four-hundred page novel on one person's journey through grief, but the guy who writes a simple little four line a/b/a/b rhyme for a sympathy card will get his work in front of the public before I do, simply because more people are looking for a simple little sympathy card than a massive-no-matter-how-moving novel.

Bob Ferguson was among the number of great minds and bright spirits I got to hang out with during my early years in Nashville; few people I've known had as good a handle on who they were and why they were where they were than Bob. As a producer for RCA during the explosive excitement of the Nashville Sound era, his job was essentially to sign hit recording artists and cut hit records. "I never let myself get involved with whether or not I like something," he explained; "I concern myself with whether or not I can use it."

Obviously, one cannot totally remove one's personal tastes from such a decision process, but I know, thanks to Bob's influence, that taste can be controlled as a factor -- during my live performance review days with PERFORMANCE, I approached the matter from the perspective that my readers were predominantly concert promoters/club owners and booking agents/talent managers; in short, buyers and sellers of live entertainment.

From that perspective, I certainly let myself enjoy the shows that I did enjoy, but, even for those I didn't, I asked, "Who could use this act," with the who being a collective -- small clubs, dance halls, outdoor festivals, small auditoriums, etc. Within a couple of years I had actually met a number of these talent buyers and I would often write my reviews sort of like a letter with the "Dear Joe" or "Dear Hap" or whomever in my imagination. The points I would make about the act at hand related to the "targeted" venues, although the entire touring talent industry was reading. My focus, however, gave the review enough personality to be of aid to both the potential buyer and to the act's support team. What really surprised me is the reputations I earned in those circles -- "This guy really knows rock and roll," someone said during a seminar. Do what? I know a lot about MUSIC and I know a great deal about stage presence, theatrical production, blocking, and such, but I've never known hardly anything about rock and roll. However, what I DID know fit comfortably into the scheme of things, because the number one thing to know regarding live concert reviews is whether of not the audience has a good time. If they do, my quaint little twist is the garnish on a cocktail; if they don't, nothing I can conjure up will pull the review into rave quarters.

Selected reviews from that era may show up as a book one of these days, which would be the ultimate explanation of what I'm saying, but the primary point is that function is always a key factor. Sometimes we need to reach in our creative bags and pull out something just for the sake of doing it -- a huge painting, perhaps, or a tune with alternate lines of 4/4 and 3/4 time (I really do try that from time to time), or a literary project totally out of step with what the agents tell you to write, or whatever -- however, some concept of function with most of our endeavors can enhance our relativeness to public support (read "getting paid").

What I learned about my own endeavors while observing and relating those of others is that good stuff can be "commercial" and "commercial" stuff can be good. Not always, but CAN be. Don't laugh, but that flies in the face of many creative people and I would never deny anyone his or her pet prejudices, but I know better.

The key word that never ventures far from any discussion of the creative process is "balance." Off the wall, left field stuff can be very entertaining but sheer novelty must be balanced with some element of substance, otherwise the work and quite possibly the career are gone as soon as the joke gets old. Maybe the most brilliant example of balance in songwriting is Roger Miller's "You Can't Rollerskate In A Buffalo Herd." The idea put forth in the title is borderline absurd yet true -- you can't do it. However, happiness is a choice one can make; hey, that's pretty straight-ahead. And the song stays with us.

Balance. I love the old joke about the farmer and the two-by-four: "A mule is a strong and loyal servant, but first you have to get his attention." Getting the attention of listeners, readers, viewers … ah, it's a tricky process, especially since the second part of that process is keeping that attention. Getting attention by two-by-four requires a follow up worthy of the jolt. I remember asking John Hartford how it felt to have a monster hit like "Gentle On My Mind," actually before it attained its destined dimensions. "It's scary," he replied; "what do you follow it with?"

What, indeed. In John's case, he followed it with a career full of good, enjoyable music, which is maybe the best any of us can do. Monster hit songs are hard to come by and probably have as much to do with timing as with the song, the session, the promotional budget, or any of the other contributing factors, but consistently good songs are the obligation of a performer. Again, the premise cuts across the board; some probably wondered what Andrew Wyeth would follow "Christina's World" with. The answer is essentially the same as for Hartford: a long, prolific career of emotional experiences lined up to emotional experiences.

So, in summation for the moment, "good writing" may not always be "brilliant writing," in a showy, flashy sense -- it could simply be the best way to say something within the prevailing set of circumstances.

There's always a chair with your name on it at Uncle Willam's Place