The Third Thing

Natalie Goldberg: “There’s you, your writing, and _____. What is your third thing?"

It's my camera. I like to take pictures. I like angles of things, the way a building looks with a winter sky behind it. I want to know the names of clouds so I can write about the cirrocumulus and altocumulus and know the difference, but until then I’ll just shoot pictures. I took a lot of pictures in and en route to Savannah. I wanted to stop more frequently than I did but there’s a critic in the back of my head that doesn’t want to enjoy the journey. Every time I turned around and drove back to shoot something, there was a part of me rolling its eyes and saying, “This is a waste of time, don’t you have to be somewhere?” I had to keep reminding that part to be in the moment. Yes, I’m getting somewhere, just like all those fools in the traffic jams on I-26 and I-95. I chose the back roads because, well, if it’s going to take you four or five hours to get to Savannah anyway, you may as well get on the two-lane and enjoy the ride.

When you take the two-lane somewhere, especially through the South, you’re going to see some photographable stuff that you’re going to have to pull over to shoot. Abandoned school buses parked behind people’s houses; junkyards neatly organized and itemized; tractor trailers cleaned up and lined up for sale; hanging Spanish moss and swamp and that ever-changing sky.

It’s fun to shoot a million photos and then sit with my computer and edit. I edit fast so I can get down to the pictures I think are best as quickly as possible. Decision making is hard for me under the best circumstances, but creative decision making can be especially hard. So I do it fast and hard and without sentimentality because I don’t want 50 million shots of a truck in Smoaks, SC clogging my creative process. I want to be able to find the one or two versions of that truck in Smoaks that really feel good and then I want to play around with only them.

Something new I decided to do was play with saturation and color temperature on the computer. I used to think that was cheating. but let's face it, I’m not the kind of purist who’s going to set up a dark room and start messing around with chemistry. I hate getting my hands wet. Plus I’m so anti-chemical I won’t even put dye on my hair - even as I gray like a 70-year-old - so I’m not going to inhale a bunch of fumes messing around in some windowless room. If I liberate myself to play with color and saturation I can pretend I’m an artist. Some of the shots I took I imagine myself painting one day, maybe with oils, but they seem so messy and … watercolors are too watery. Maybe pastels?

For now, the third thing is just the camera. I shoot anything that I can’t describe with words. Anything that might enhance my writing. Anything that grabs my eye for any reason. And if I can't get it with the camera, that’s okay. That used to not be enough - if I took a shot and it didn’t work out I was sad about it, like I’d done something wrong. But not anymore. Now I’m okay with shooting and getting it wrong and believing it wasn’t meant to be. If you don’t risk getting it wrong, you’ll never get it right, anyway.