The Art of Adaptation

If when I was in college studying the poetics of O’Hara, Plath, Creeley, Cummings, Olson, Kyger, Guest, Hughes, MacLow, adnauseum, you would not have been able to convince me that I would (at the age of 32) be spending more time making wine than writing poetry, I would have guffawed and probably written a poem about it.

Ah, youth. That inflexible persona of confidence now seems a bit immature, considering the adaptations I have made in my life so that I might be able to continue writing, and maintain some level of balance in my life.

Writing can develop into an obsessive process, for me. I know it can be that way for others too. Research and character/story development, series of poems or paintings – for glorious amounts of time you are invested in presenting certain qualities to the senses: words, images, three-dimensional structures, etc.

Then, when the project is finished, (if you’re like many artists who are “trying to make it”) you begin promoting your work, selling it (or trying to).

But what happens if you don’t sell it? What happens if it lands you in the big-time and ten years later the fame and money have begun to bore you? What happens if you are not interested in selling it, and you’re only interested in doing it? What do you?

You adapt. You make changes to your life so that you can either continue doing the work or you find a way to walk away from it.

I know some of you have seen the movie Sideways. The movie was based on a novel of the same name by Rex Pickett. Whether it is a great story or a mediocre movie, we will leave that discussion to the critics.

What I would like to address about Sideways is its theme of Adaptation.

What some of you may or may not know is that Rex Picket had been trying to sell his screenplays and story ideas in Hollywood for years, without success.

I have it on good authority that there was a breaking point for Pickett. After a meeting with a development executive who wasn’t interested in another of his projects, he was asked what he would do next. Whether Picket knew it or not, his answer to that question arrived in the form of a novel.

Unexpected as it might be for a screenwriter to write a novel, that’s what Pickett did. He got the unpublished novel in front of the right people. They loved it. They made the movie and the novel was published.

In other words, Pickett adapted. He changed his strategy and found a way into the big-time. Thus the name of the movie – sometimes in life you can’t always go forward, sometimes you have to go sideways.

Of course there are other ideas out there about what "Sideways" means. For example, in the book, there are references to “sideways” as a metaphor for being drunk.

I’m sure there are other interpretations as well. I am willing to adapt my personal beliefs about what sideways “means” if you are able to comprehend the matter as a variation on the theme of adaptation.

In my experience, adaptation has included learning how to cook, work construction, write and design newspaper copy and books, start businesses, design web sites, make wine, be friendly to strangers who are rude, clean up the trash the raccoons have dumped all over the yard, prune plum trees, restore classic cars, paint, in order to continue to write on a regular basis, whether I was trying to sell myself or not.

My life has given me a lot of fodder for my craft, indeed. But more importantly, learning to adapt to change has been about maintaining a balance between the necessities of reality and the pull of my dreams.

In the end it’s not about the success you may garner from the work that you do, but that you do good work. Keep doing good work.