Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice, Vol 4, Iss 17: The Creative Advice I Turn to Repeatedly
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Hi friends! Shana tova to those who celebrate! Last weekend I sat on Zoom with a friend and we put together this Lego set (we each purchased a set for ourselves). It was so nice to not only have friend-time but to also do something that is purely play. Putting together Lego is not exercise, it’s not work, it’s not chores, it’s not any kind of productivity really. It also meant I wasn’t scrolling social media and it was good to just be present.
I often struggle with being present but especially this time of year. I usually start my holiday shopping and planning in summer. My wife’s birthday is around the holidays as well. I also like to send out 100+ holiday cards, which means we also need to pick a photo (or take one) and order the cards and start addressing them, preferably in October. I try to get them to their destinations before Hanukkah ends (which is December 15th this year). The nature of my bookish work means that right now, I’m already starting to think of books that will be published in 2024. I’m already also thinking about 2024 plans for my personal projects, like this newsletter as well as the things I initially had planned for 2023 before the year went to absolute shit.
I’m not saying Lego is the key to keeping me present all the time, but they sure did help the other day. We’ll do it again next month. In the meantime, help me name this guy:
My minor in college was musical theatre performance and if you are a person who has studied anything creative, you can probably imagine the endless number of workshops involved in this line of study. One of my workshops was specifically about auditioning for musical theatre and I had a classmate whose voice haunts me to this day. She had long wavy blonde hair and big blue eyes, the look of someone who would repeatedly get cast as the ingénue; however, when she opened her mouth to sing, the ghost of Judy Garland jumped out. I remember the first time she sang in front of class because I gasped, “HOLY SHIT” and our professor stopped her after a single bar and the class of ~20 of us just sat in silent awe. It was uncanny. Everyone’s gut reaction was to think of this as a blessing but it didn’t take long to understand that it was anything but. Everything she sang just sounded like Judy Garland was singing it, which was great if they were Johnny Mercer songs or Harold Arlen tunes but if it was Ragtime or Jekyll & Hyde or RENT or most shows after Garland died in 1969 it was incredibly jarring.
I think about her a lot when I think about the creative advice I learned that has never steered me wrong. My favorite singer, Audra McDonald, gave this advice in an interview with The Lincoln Center in 2016 (thanks, Wayback Machine!):
*“*Be uniquely you. I tried to sound like Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald. I tried to sound like Patti LuPone. And what I eventually discovered in trying to sound like all of these women is that they sounded like nobody else. As I got older I realized that was the beauty in what their voice was.”
I like to think this advice is 1) Not just about singing and 2) primarily for those of us who are from historically excluded communities such as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, neurodivergent, etc. I think about books that are fairytale retellings or the myriad Dungeons & Dragons Twitch streamers or even the self-help genre of books and content which I am a part of. We are absolutely inundated with content. There will always be Another White Boy With A Podcast. So what if it’s the 1,000th Romeo & Juliet retelling? Has it been told in the uniquely queer or BIPOC or [insert identity or viewpoint here] way that you can tell it? If you try to do creative work in the same way that someone else does it, you are doing yourself and your voice a disservice. You’re doing the rest of us a disservice, too.
I think about what Shonda Rhimes has done with Bridgerton. I could not give a single shit about regency-era romances until Shonda Rhimes cast Black actors. I think about Our Flag Means Death, which okay, pirates are cool I guess oh wait a fucking minute everyone is gay?! Count me in! Humans crave novelty and we also crave connection and we get that by reading stories and watching shows and following content creators who resonate with us.
The advice to do the thing in the way that only I can do it, specifically from the 2016 Audra McDonald interview, is what got me to apply to Book Riot that same year. Plenty of people talk and write about books but, I like to think, not exactly the same way I do. This same advice is what lit the fire under me for this newsletter. There is a lot of self-help content out there and it is by a lot of cisgender straight white people (or Deepak Chopra who is a whole problem unto himself). The self-help out there by Black people is still mostly cisgender and mostly straight and on top of that, it’s usually spiritual or religious, which is not my bag. So where was the self-help for me and people like me?
Toni Morrison said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
Octavia E. Butler said, “You got to make your own worlds. You got to write yourself in.”
Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.”
Every one of these quotes has the same vibe as the advice that I’ve shared. It’s gotten me this far and I’m excited to see where else it will take me. I hope that you can find ways for it to help guide you as well.
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That’s it for this week! You can shop many books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. In fact, any Bookshop, Amazon, or Etsy links in this newsletter are affiliate links so if you shop through those, it helps support my work. Or you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, Paypal, or Venmo.
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