Inspiration and Execution

So we last spoke about photographs, and my relish of the amateur experience.  You can draw your own conclusions about that; read my books! 🙂 And if you want advice about setting up the best shots – again, it’s time to go to the internet and poke around for hints and tips from the people who really know what they’re doing.   I just rely on what strikes my eye and then I take a few pictures of it.  It is very much the “throw it at a wall and see what sticks” approach…and adding to the fact that if one uses professionally-shot photos from archival sources, one gets the advantage of using a professional’s work, even if more than a hundred years removed.  The Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collection from the Library of Congress is an example that I have found tremendous value in, for both pictures and for the representation of the time and culture imbued in them.

I want to take this opportunity instead to talk about inspiration and its relationship to execution.  Indeed, this is about your narrative, how things get tied together.  With the two (so far) nonfiction books, this is about the constraints I operated with, under contract with Arcadia.  I should also hasten to add here that this was in no way a problem for me; true to form, constraint breeds creativity.  If you can only operate within a certain confined ambit, it not only engenders creativity, but creates excellent milestones and well-understood endpoints.  This is, at its heart, the combination of inspiration and execution.

Another element of execution is discipline and focus.  I generally don’t struggle with discipline, because I use attainable targets every day.  Sometimes it’s 1000 words, sometimes it’s a 100, but it’s something every time.  I don’t particularly care whether the words come easily or not, or whether the writing is any good or not (again, you can read or better yet by my books Amazon.com: These Restless Hills: 9798888193327: Penrod, Joshua: Books and Johnstown Waters: The Legacy of the Steel Industry: Penrod, Joshua: 9781467159524: Amazon.com: Books  to decide).  That assessment phase is next, and needs its own separate entry.

Focus is something I do struggle with.  I represent every bit the phenomenon of LOOK SQURREL LET’S RUN THIS DOWN FOR THE NEXT HOUR OR WEEK.  As a quick aside, going back to my dissertation brainstorming in my doctoral program, I had an idea to talk about accounting as a technology, and that I could do a dissertation on the innovation of the Knights Templar in banking and double-entry bookkeeping.  I couldn’t wait to tell my committee chair, Janet Abbate.  When I finished my breathless pitch, Janet looked at me thoughtfully for a few moments, slowly blinked, drew in a deep breath of her own and said: “Josh, you’re not doing a dissertation on the Knights Templar.”

I replied: “Okey-dokey.”

Anyway.  I think experience helps a bit with the focus, or lack thereof.  That is, with the experience I have now in understanding how a book is put together, the practice itself (particularly after working with some great editors) and I started to develop a degree of focus. I’m still not great at it, but better than I was.  Which didn’t take much.

For Johnstown Industry, Arcadia has specific goals for photos, each of which had to follow a citation convention and meet word counts for each caption.  I could write only a brief introduction to each chapter.  The word counts made me sharpen things down for each photo; often, authors just use this to describe what’s in the photo, but I figured that’s kind of pointless – the reader can see what’s in the picture.  Instead, I named it and then I tried to give it an interpretation, each image linking to the broader them of the book.  I used the prose as connective tissue among the photos and to the theme.

For Johnstown Waters, I was under a different set of constraints, but they were much more liberal.  A bigger word count was one, and I for sure used all of it.  Fewer pictures, which was both good and bad, because I did have some good shots, both historic and current, which didn’t make the cut into the book (and are utilized to some extent on this website.) It was also good, because I could use only the very best photos that met the size requirements.  I used a lot of endnotes to explain things in that work that I didn’t want to put in the main text, as I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.

I’ll pick this thread up again with the next entry, discussing theme a bit more, so this will be a multi-part discussion.  For now, the tl;dr, compressed version: the constraints can shape and guide as much as, if not more than, complete liberty.  Isolate your theme and narrative arc, and how you connect the elements you have in mind via that theme; make sure it passes the laugh test.  Now, you’re “inspired” and ready to create.  Most of creativity is in the execution of the idea, for that is when it germinates from potential to actual.  Some folks seem to be under the impression that the idea is the hardest part; it is about as hard as any daydream.  For it to be more than that, the questions of why and how are far more challenging to overcome.