It's

hard for me to answer that because I don't have that problem. In some ways I've always I follow threads this is actually how I live I so like let's take the icon carving aspect to my life you know I started carving icons in 2002 but I only started doing it really seriously in 2000 like around 2010 so you have a huge gap in between and but the way that I function is that there are threads that I see. And these threads are like the trap door that's opening, like the opportunity that's presenting itself. And then when I see that, I just go and I move in that direction. And I hold on to the other things. I kind of hold on to them. I never forgot that I would love to carve icons. It was just part of my life for, what is it, almost eight years or whatever, or seven years. And then when all of a sudden the door was open, I was ready, and I just grabbed the thread, and I just started moving in that direction. on your opportunities. Like sometimes you just, if you do whatever it is, if you have things in front of you that are kind of glowing, even if it's not like the thing that you want to do, and you do it the best with all your energy and all your love, and it has that flow to it, you'll find your way, you know, it'll leave you. And once you find the thing that you're doing, you know, you might have thought, wow, 10 years ago, I never would have thought that this is where I would be. And that's also completely fine. I

think we all, early on coming out of school, worry about this. And one of the biggest things is you're thinking too far in the future and you're thinking too globally. And a lot of things is the amount of things that will change. Like even if you're successful beyond your wildest dreams, it won't be aligned with what your wildest dreams are now. It's not going to look like anything that you want, even if it goes well, because there's so much change. And all you have to worry about is if you have your framing right with your value system, right, in a bigger way, what is the most interesting thing for you to do right now? That's all that matters. Tomorrow, this week, what's your next paper? What's your next assignment that you're going to all write ahead of deadline? You know, because if you think out ahead, it's like you're just borrowing tomorrow's trouble. By the time you get anywhere close to that, you're going to have way more information and way more failures and dead ends and opportunities and corrections. There's going to be so much more data. But of course, you can't help to be worried about it because you're human. But think, try and concretize it here. What do you want to do right now? What's a paper you could write? What's a book you're going to read? What's an art that you're going to engage in that will consume you? And then even if it doesn't and it's a failure you get and you're not interested, that's still progress because you're carving off an option that's moving into something else. Thank you both for coming here today. I had a question about the creative process. When you start with either an image or a symbol or this kind of picture in your mind, do you know that it's going to be something much larger immediately? Does it sort of marinate until it comes to fruition? How do you go from this interesting snippet to a larger project? And do you know that it's going to succeed or if it might just kind of languish on its own? Those are you. I used to have a quicker cycle of like idea to go. Like one of the benefits that I had was I didn't have a break between, like I remember the first time I wanted to write a play, I'm like, let me just start writing a play. And I remember the first job I got in TV, which wasn't really a job, I was translating and counting animated mouth flaps for Dragon Ball Z and matching English words into a badly translated Japanese script that was largely perverse. So we had to get it around the censors, right? Because there'd be like an old guy grabbing a girl's ass, and I'd have to be like, oh, let me brush that twig off your dress. So it was like, but the first job I had, I was literally like on the plane with the producer, flying to the studio in Fort Worth, reading a book about how to format screenplays, right? So that the movement was so fast, I just was like, let me go and try it. Let me go and try it. And when you're talking about which ideas take, I think part of it was I used to move quicker into it. Like I'd have an idea, it'd be a book, I'd put all my energy in and go. And as I get older, it's very interesting. I've just been observing this in a very significant way lately. I have some ideas where I think, oh, my God, that's the next book. And I'll flesh out four or five pages of notes. And I'll sit on it and give it more time. And it's almost like stagnant. I never used to do this. I used to anything that I was aimed at next, I would just do. And I'm giving a lot more time for breathing. And I just got into a situation with the manuscript I'm working on now. This will be my 26th or 27th, where I wrote into it 30% and then recognized that the entire ending and direction I was going to go isn't what I want. And I haven't had that since like one of my first books. And so there's a weird freedom again that's happening now where I'm slowing in the creative process to take a lot more time to try and measure twice and cut once. That has been a natural process. And I think that part of it is when you first get an idea, if it grabs you, you go with it, right? It's like being carried away in an undertow almost. But also, if you write things down, you can see if they continue to live and yield. A lot of times when I think of a story, it's like when you first lay down on a towel on the beach and it's all uncomfortable and lumpy and you kind of have to adjust yourself into it. There's a form that the story needs to take. And if you can think about it, when you have some notes, you can see if your mind's continuing to masticate on the idea and settle it in more and more. And that's really worth doing, to write down a bunch of notes and see, are you compelled to return to it and to adjust it and to get into it further? And is it living and breathing? And this other thing might be four or five pages of bullet points that you're like, eh, there's no there there. Thank you.

Yeah,

thank you both. I was wondering if you could speak to this idea that an artist should maybe create what they're interested in, as opposed to catering to an audience, if you think that's accurate, or if you should cater somewhat to an audience. And then if you think that the retelling of old stories, insofar as that pertains to the previous question something that should be considered.

Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I have a different perspective on art in general, which is that I really do think that art should be useful. That's why, one of the reasons why I became an icon cover was because there was something missing in the idea of understanding art as a performer and a public that was in some ways alienating because there's a sense in which you're creating something that doesn't actually participate in the life of the person. It's like a diversion or a distraction, entertainment, right, that image. There's nothing wrong with entertainment. It's fine. But there was something about how I wanted the line, the connection to be far deeper and realizing that in fact, I wanted more an art that was like making a chair for someone where it's like, well, you make a chair so that people can sit in it and it participates in their life. And that's how I entered into icon carving, was because I wanted the line to be set. I wanted to make an object that someone will take and will be their patron saint that they were given to when they're baptized, or like a cross that a priest wears, and that it's just part of their life. And it doesn't have that structure of the artist and the public that is actually very modern. Like it's a very, in some ways, it's quite a recent idea. Like fictional stories in the past or in the Middle Ages, you know, there would be, they would still be participative in the sense that you'd have a troubadour that would come and would like tell the story and it would engage people into it. There was this whole participative sense. even our idea of the public right we don't we don't have like even or in shakespeare's days where we don't have the idea that the public can like kick the people off stage that we can yell them down that we can like make them stop because they suck like we don't have that i know like we're just like the polite public. Don't give them

any ideas. It's

like the pure, this pure like alienated, you know, passive public, right? And I'm saying like, I want to be careful. I'm not saying that that is wrong or whatever. I'm just saying that's not what I wanted. So as I come towards storytelling, I have the same approach, which is I want to tell stories that are, that enter into people's lives and will become part of their life. And that's why my first tendency is to say, can I grab things in memory that are anchors for identity? And now can I represent them in a way that is fresh and alive and that people can re-enter into them? So even when I think about the entertainment part of it, which is like, you know, I'd say I'm writing a graphic novel series, like the graphic novel series is for me is something like, yes, it's going to be entertaining and fun for your 17-year you know, guy that's looking for a kind of adventure story. But everything about it is trying to re-anchor you back into memory and become a track for thinking and for identification. So that's been my approach to storytelling. And I don't think it's the only one, but at least at this moment in my life, it's the only thing that makes me care about storytelling. And so that's why Greg and I, if we're going to do something together, for me, it was like, well, let's do Genesis. Because it's like, if we could pull that off, if we could create a narratively compelling retelling of creation and the fall and Cain and Abel. I mean, can you imagine, in some ways, the service we would be rendering in Western civilization? It sounds like it's cocky, but really, I believe that. It's like that's what Milton was able to do. Milton was able to do that, and there are very few people that have been able to do it. So I'm like, man, if we could pull that off, that'd be an amazing thing. And I don't only see it as, oh, we'll keep people happy, we'll divert them, we'll be entertainment. No, I think

it's really going to the core. I can answer this from the more... I think I'm more consistently in touch with the commercial side of things. And what's interesting is my advice holds, but for slightly different reasons. There's a lot of people who say, like right after the Da Vinci Code came out with Dan Brown, right, there's this glut of everybody writing symbology texts, right,, secret society stuff. By the time you write that. Right. That's a year, year and a half, two years. Then a book needs a year lead time on publication. You don't even know where you are. a woman on the flight out here who's a pretty renowned comedian, but she's just switching over and doing some writing a pilot. And she was talking about like, well, how do you do it? And what do you want? And everyone's, you always hear this in Hollywood, right? Everyone's buying stuff that's like this. And I said, none of them have any idea what they want. Like there's no version under which, you know, somebody thought that what we really need is a rap opera about Hamilton and that that's going to take over the world. Nobody thought that like a magic school for like, you know, little kids. I mean, Scholastic bought that book for like nothing. It was like educationally. Right. They're not a big commercial house. There's a judge who famously remarked about pornography. Like, I don't you know, what's the definition of pornography? I don't know, but I know it when I see it. And there is this notion that like you're going into this collective being like, like publishing or Hollywood that anybody knows anything. There's a very famous line by William Goldman, who's the preeminent screenwriter of Butch Casting, the Sundance Kid, a marathon man. He says, nobody knows anything. That's the lesson about Hollywood. And so to try to anticipate market or to guess or to say, oh, what's selling right now are quirky medical shows like House, that might not be aligned with your inner pattern, which means you might not be able to do that brilliantly. And the one thing you're going to have as an artist or as anything that you are, as an engineer, as a vet, as a doctor, as a diagnostician, pick your field, is that when it's aligned with you, when it resonates with you, you have something to say or to give that only you can say or give. And that's profoundly true if you're an artist. And if you're trying to go apply it to some formula of what's going to sell two years from now when something gets made, you just can't even anticipate it. And all the successes that come between now and then are going to be surprising from things that are made that are undeniable. And so I would say, again, my own aesthetic happens to be fairly commercial. But when I'm writing, I'm writing to write the best possible version of it. And I'm going to talk about this a little bit tomorrow about, you know, what does it mean to be commercial versus literary? But the best version. And so and what that doesn't mean is that you can be arcane and you can be cute and you can be inside and you can be snide and you can be intellectual and you can make a work that's impenetrable. Right. What you want is to write something that's accessible, but the best version of writing is where it's accessible to everyone high or low, and you're not playing games to show how smart you are. Like, I never want me as the novelist to be what people are thinking of when they're reading a story. I want them to be thinking about the story. And so in that way, I'm making sure that I'm guiding and in conversation with readers in a way that brings them along. But they don't know what they, we don't know what we want. of us know what we want, right? So to take it from readers who say, I'd really love if Orphan X, you know, went to the moon. It's like, no, you don't. You have no idea what you want, right? Like you like it and you're engaged with it because I'm showing you something that you didn't think of yourself. So you don't want to cede to that. Well,

this has really a wonderful conversation. Thank you for sharing your friendship and your passion and your stories of us. In closing, I just want to say how honored we are at Ralston College to have both of you here, not only as guests, as speakers, but really sincerely as friends. You both have given so much to this little fledgling institution. And I think speaking as an actress, a writer, myself, a story maker, someone who's so desperately clung to this idea that stories matter, the story of Ralston College comes at a time that I think the world is ready to hear it. And I'm curious from your perspectives if you could leave with us as a final thought. What does this place, this endeavor, what does Ralston mean to you and what do you think it has to give to the world?