"There Has Never Been a Better Time to Explore"

Some wisdom from Wood-working

Two passages today from a recent book I loved. Ingrained: The Making of Craftsman by Callum Robinson is about wood-working, yes. It is also an homage to craft, a business book, a family memoir, a love-story, and a creative manifesto. It is also gorgeously written. Take this paragraph in which Robinson is describing the various types of wood stacked in his shop:

There is vivid-orange yew, ancient, supple and immensely strong. Before the introduction of composites, the bowmaker’s timber of choice. In the right hands, a wood that was capable of propelling an armor-piercing arrow the length of three football pitches, making it the stuff of battlefield nightmares and tipping the scales of fate for England’s armies for two hundred years. There is hard maple, sweet chestnut, black walnut, and great wide immovable slabs of flesh-colored beech. There is tense, fretful, crimson cherry. Beautiful, but so shot through with splits and flaws that it’s next to useless. And then there is elm, the tenacious swaggering dandy of the forest. Decimated by disease, with some sixty million trees gone in the UK alone since the 1960s. But resilient. Surviving, like a forty-a-day whiskey-sipping octogenarian Highlander, for reasons that science still cannot entirely explain.

The book is worth reading for the sentences and sensibility alone, but it is sprinkled with a few “Briefly Noted” sub-sections (Healthy & Safety, Inspiration, and others) that are more directly instructive. Two of them stood out as not just resonating with my own experience, but also are often massively overlooked by those (myself included often) interested in getting into something new.

From the “Finding Your Voice” section:

Right now, today, this minute, there has never been a better time to explore the world of design…Work that, just a generation ago, would have been almost impossible to find. Use it. Pour over books and magazines, get online, read interviews with designers in different fields and discover, if you can to move them to do what they do….Unearth the things you love, the things that speak to you, and ask yourself why they work—not just how….Seek out the seeds of inspiration, hybridize, and nurture your own unique creative voice. Then grab yourself a pencil, and a sketchbook….because you are going to need them.

In the “Making a Start” section, Robinson advises would-be craftspeople to reach out to local workshops, state plainly their untrained passion and willingness to do whatever, and then do whatever they will let you do. Quietly, observantly, patiently, and then competently. And then in time, they will be given more complicated tasks, and the ladder of expertise will be assembled one rung at a time. But it his advice for those that for whatever reason cannot access this apprentice-like experience that is more generally applicable to any pursuit:

…if you don’t have any transport of free time during business hours to dedicate to sweeping floors and absorbing advice…and you know in your bones that you do want to pursue furniture making professionally, but lack the means to enter full-time education, training, or apprenticeship, you might what to try the route my father took. To get your hands on some books and some second-hand tools, to find a space where you can make a lot of mess without getting into too much trouble, and to throw yourself in.'

There are three, let’s call them inclinations in these two paragraphs that are simple, but difficult for a beginner to take to heart.

First, you have to want to do the thing. Not just have the results of having done the thing, but want to do the things that lead to being able to do the thing. That is not to say you have to like them, but you have to muster enough energy, time, and focus to put yourself in a position to get good. For creative work, this will not be straightforward, exploration never is. There might be specific skills that can be learned from a YouTube tutorial or rule-expression available in a textbook, but the deployment of those skills into your own specific project has no template.

Second, make a mess. In a workshop that might be more literal and less figurative, but it holds for a Word doc as well. Do not expect that you will create beautiful or true or sellable things any time soon. Getting the reps in, in the form of bad drafts, sunken souffles, buggy code, or whatever tossable widget you produce is an unskippable track that you must play. Probably a couple of full albums, honestly.

And third, throw yourself in. The abandoned and unsuccessful projects and ideas of my own that haunt me are the ones where I know I didn’t throw myself in. I quit when it got hard (and it always will get hard), or I got tired or impatient that it wasn’t good yet or that people weren’t paying enough attention yet or look here is another pure and unblemished idea that seems a whole heck of a lot more interesting than this tricky and time-consuming thing that I am doing now. And so I stop. Make an excuse. Take the books back to the library and let the URL expire or forget the log-in to whatever it was being hosted on.

I want to stop doing that. If something fails, I don’t ever want it to be that I could have tried a little harder or longer. Not that something can’t fail or that I can’t quit something of course, no one bats 1000%. But no more called third strikes: I want to go down with a huge swing that twists me into the dirt.