Bending the Ending

I'm always coming up with ideas of things to do. It's not easy but I like to. That's because I like to do things. But if there is one thing I've learned over the years it's that the rest of the world's idea of "Doing something" is not the same as mine.

To nutshell it: what most of the world thinks of as doing something I think of as having someone else do something to entertain you. Going to a concert is not doing anything in my eyes. Playing a guitar yourself would be doing something. Going out for diner is not doing anything to me. Cooking a meal would be doing something. Going to see a movie would not be doing something. Making your own movie would. And on and on.

This has always been a problem for me. Whenever someone says, "Hey, do you want to do something?" they mean a totally different thing than I do. Usually people don't like my idea of doing something because it takes effort. But to me the effort is what makes the doing. Let's pay some money, sit there, and enjoy the fruits of somebody else's effort has it's place but not when I actually want to do something. Yeah, yeah, I'm misunderstood.

But anyway that leads me into my latest idea for doing something. I occasionally make art cards. I occasionally buy them too. An art card is a small baseball card sized original piece of art. A sketch, a drawing, a painting, or whatever your medium is you make art on a 2.5 x 3.5 inch piece of paper. It's kind of neat and kind of fun.

What I want to do now is make a writing card. Instead of a piece of art it has a piece of writing on it. A sentence or two. Each card would be an original piece of writing as that would make each card distinct. An individual piece of writing art. This appeals to me because I've been writing short slogan-like pieces in conjunction with my artwork for years. I've always put words and pictures together. Writing an art card the slogan/sentence would be fun for me.

Except I'm not sure what form the writing card would take. I think it would be best if it was hand written by the writer but that immediately brings up questions of aesthetics. Should it be hand written neatly? Should one use calligraphy? Or maybe just nice script? All questions of design and soon I'm pretty far away from a writing card and back to an art card. So I'm a little stuck at this stage.

I think I'm going to have to try and design something for the cards. It might have to be something that looks undesigned so as to emphasize the writing. Unfortunately this is the hardest kind of design to do and not really a lot of fun. Fancy and elaborate is much more fun than stripped down and unobtrusive. That's why there is so much bad fancy and elaborate design out there.

The writing is actually the easy part for me. I like the micro writing form of just a couple of sentences. I wonder though if other people have ever made writing art cards. I can picture writers dashing off a few interesting sentences here and there to make cards but what would those sentences be about? I ask that question because a lot art cards feature famous characters. Batman, Superman, Darth Vader, Spider-Man, The Hulk, and just about every other pop culture character is who collectors want art cards of.

Would writers make a writing art card about Batman? I don't know. I don't think so. I think most writers can find something interesting to say in a few sentences but who could find something interesting to say about Luke Skywalker in two sentences? I'm not sure. And would fans care about a two sentence card about Superman?

I think fans of, say, Steven King would love a couple of sentence hand written card by him. He's famous for his writing so that's what people want from him. But writers of movies, comics, and TV are famous because of the characters they write. Their writing isn't famous; the pop culture character they write about is. Would anyone care if the current X-Men writer wrote a few lines about the X-Men on an art card? I don't know.

These thoughts have nothing to do with me making some writing art cards but they pop into my head. Anyway, I'm going to try and do something now.