15. To me the most profound point of integration between experience and art is in rendering faithfully and resonantly a well-known trope. To do so is to surrender, to submerge the ego in something greater than itself. The ego wants to be iconoclastic and “experimental” and puts up a hell of a fight. If you can allow yourself to commit the pedestrian sin of employing a recognizable trope, or somehow sneak a recognizable trope into your work by accident (then, upon seeing it, realize you like it, and feel reluctant to strike it), the reward of seeing something universally understandable drawn by your own hand, which then becomes not recognizably your hand at all but a vessel of culture and humanity, is one of the sovereign experiences, I think, of being alive.
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27. One of the many reasons why “giving up” and “being lazy and insincere” is necessary to create good art (cf. Wilde, Nabokov) is because once you have internalized a trope to the point where you can employ it at the drop of a hat with no effort, it feels to you fake and insincere. But if you maintain your precious allergy to something that feels easy and understandable, you’ll never allow yourself to employ this trope which, despite being pure math to you now, once meant so much to you, and still has power for others who don’t spend all day every day dissecting art.
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93. You find what works for you. However, you cannot choose what kind of (good) artist you will become. Be humble enough to share the gifts you actually have with the world (even if they don’t feel cool), be nimble enough to follow your genius, and be open enough to dabble and discover it.
- Three of Stephen Thomas' "14 Notes on Tropes" (itself an excerpt from a presumably much longer essay) over at The Puritan's Town Crier blog. You can read the whole thing here.
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