Philip Shaw is king of doing the day job with gusto as well as managing the most (intimidatingly) dedicated daily writing practice I’ve maybe ever seen. Sometimes it makes me want to punch his face. 

I was handed a belief that any act of creating relies on processes that can universally be applied. The creator of a thing, whether it be house // bridge // pizza // cocktail // double shot of espresso // story or even an invention yet unheard of, must break down the variables that influence the creation of that said thing. The creator must determine, for themselves (and there is creativity in even this process of process), what variables can be influenced and what variables must simply be accepted as they are. By identifying the choices they make in influencing or accepting the variables at play, they craft the outcome. That was it: The rules I was given.

My epiphanic moment of inspiration, that simultaneously blew my mind and dashed any hope I had for mastery, was delivered by an artist that I apprenticed with right out of school. He knew the same rules. Talked about them in the same way I was taught to think about them. We had to use the rules everyday to make things that would allow us to get paid. It was my job to control a lot of the variables, at least the ones that he could trust me with. Then one day he told me that while I was taking care of the things that needed to be considered for our work, he was acting inside himself to attack what he thought were the most important variables of all. Ones that would make what we did pretty great or just okay. He called them the Variables of Imagined Truths and he broke them down into: The Imagined Truth of the Creator, the Imagined Truth of the Creation, and the Imagined Truth of the Audience. 

Since then I have heard a similar way of thinking (perhaps just less poetically described) scratched at in writing workshops, where we discuss knowing what you want to say, knowing your characters, and knowing your readers. Yet, my mind is still blown by his descriptions and so I don’t quite see those processes as the same thing.

I am still obsessed with that way of looking at things that he gave me twenty years ago. For me, this idea that I must determine what the person I am today wants to make; and determine what my characters want to happen to them (even if they are thwarted in their desires); and then influence what an imagined audience could use of my work to add to their life… that’s what keeps me going.

Watch for Philip’s work via Red Hen Press. He won their poetry contest. Also, he titles his photos cleverly. This one is PSpresso. Get it? Mine, on the other hand was called nicolecoffeeface. That’s why I don’t do what he does, for a living.