WRITING THE ADJUNCTIVE: or CROSS-TRAINING FOR ARTISTS
In the arts, cross-training fills in the gaps in one’s practice, adds resilience, range, flexibility and renders the artist less vulnerable to burn-out and impenetrability
I scarcely need to tell anyone that to be an artist requires tremendous focus, commitment, practice.
Talent is always nice but if you can summon focus, commitment, practice, you’re more than halfway home.
You’ve heard it a million times: you want to become a writer or a filmmaker or a painter you have to write, you have to make film, you have to paint. You have to practice your art diligently, no excuses.
An axiomatic approach that certainly yields results, but which also has its limits. Single-minded instrumentalization, unless carefully calibrated, tends to backfire, often undermining the very results it seeks. We all know those folks who were so desperate for a partner or desperate to conceive and yet only achieved what they wanted after they stopped trying.
But even when well-calibrated, the narrow focus of write-write-write or paint-paint-paint is not for everyone.
Me, for example.
Maybe I just lacked talent or maybe it was just the way I was built, but whatever the explanation, my writing was always worse when I pursued it narrowly, instrumentally — when all I did was write-write-write, when my approach was limited to what folks in the sports biz call SPP — Specific Physical Preparedness, training that focuses exclusively on the specifics / mechanics of a sport.
I did so much better with my writing when I leavened my SPP practice with what sports people call GPP, or General Physical Preparedness that focuses on general fitness and conditioning.
In other words, I thrived as a writer not solely by focusing on my writing but by cross-training for my writing.
In sports, cross-training fills in the gaps in one’s practice, adds resilience, range, flexibility, and renders an athlete less vulnerable to injury. In the arts, cross-training fills in the gaps in one’s practice, adds resilience, range, flexibility, and renders the artist less vulnerable to burn-out and impenetrability, either because you think you know it or because you’ve trained yourself away from imagining other options.
Top athletes know you don’t excel in a sport exclusively through SPP; you need to add GPP to the mix. Otherwise your shit is going to break.
I suspect a lot of artists could benefit from this insight and our field would be more productive and less psychically encumbered if we pushed what I call General Arts Preparedness as hard as we pushed Specific Arts Preparedness.
If, in other words, we encouraged more cross-training.
To put it formulaically: Less SAP. More SAP + GAP.
In the athletic world there’s a vast corpus that describes General Physical Preparedness and its benefits, but while Specific Art Preparedness is pretty self-explanatory (training directly related to your art) General Arts Preparedness might need a little explanation.
Sometimes, General Arts Preparedness is literally artistic cross-training, taking up another art entirely that you ain’t trying to make your career or calling, a second art that stretches your praxis and imagination and works an entirely different set of creative muscles.
Sometimes General Arts Preparedness steps outside of art practices altogether and focuses on deepening the practitioner as a person, rendering them more vulnerable, more integrated, more attuned, and best of all more present, all of which will inevitably lead to deeper, more nuanced, more human art.
It’s this deeper GAP that I’ve primarily pursued as I suck at all other arts, an adjunctive training that don’t always seem directly related to writing or reading or narrative, but which has proven incredible generative for my writing, my reading and my understanding of narrative.
What follows are the core exercises that comprise my General Artistic Preparedness.