I was thinking today that being memorable is a hell of a lot better than being mediocre or even good.
Shoot for being amazing. That way even if you fail, people will talk about it.
Some of my favorite artists have built their whole career on a series of interesting failures.
Common sense is a good way to live your life. It keeps you away from dangerous people and dangerous situations when the stakes are high. It helps you to survive.
But common sense is a terrible thing to carry into your creative life. In fact, the best stuff runs completely counter to common sense. Common sense is sticking with what you already know works. Common sense is avoiding the unexpected.
Do you have a voice in your head, an authority figure of some kind, that tells you what to do to stay safe? Most of the time, that voice is useful, but when you enter into a situation where you’re trying to come up with something new it stop you in your tracks.
What you should do is thank the voice for being so helpful, but tell it you don’t need it right now. Then, wander into dark wilderness of your mind. There are wolves and terrible things there and you never know what you might find when you wander off the path. In fact, it’s completely unpredictable and new.
And isn’t that what you really want?
Creativity is often just a matter of trying to figure out what comes next. We try to figure out where the next brush stroke belongs on the canvas or what word goes next in a sentence.
In a sense, we almost cast ourselves as prophets as we work. When our prophecy is wrong, our next steps strike the audience as cheap or shocking. We change the established rules of our creation and take the audience out of its reality. If the next step is solid, the audience relaxes and extends its trust to you.
One way to increase the reliability of your predictions is to look backwards instead of forward. Look at what you have already done and draw your answers from that.
The simplest illustration of this is to think of a mystery novel. If you reveal on the last page that the killer was someone who you hadn’t previously introduced to the reader, your book is going to be thrown across the room. Obviously, the whole basis of a mystery novel is to make the killer someone who has always been there, but the audience didn’t suspect.
The answer is don’t keep making things up. Look to the past to find out what should happen now. Know that new elements introduced late in the game will never hold the same weight for an audience that the initial elements have.
The next time you get stuck while you’re working, stop looking forward, turn around and see what has already happened. Don’t make up something new, use what you already have. It may seem less creative, but it’s much more satisfying.
The New York Times had an article on a man,Christopher DeLaurenti, who recorded the intermissions of classical music concerts. He’s going to release a CD of them and defends them as interesting collections of sound. To him they are a kind of avant-garde music.
There’s an interesting quote from him when he explains how he sneaked into concerts with recording equipment and escaped detection:
He honed a technique of often shifting his posture and moving around. “Most people are not observant and rarely look at one thing for longer than 10 seconds,” he said.
I know that isn’t a scientific observation, but it strikes me as about right. Most people don’t look or think about any one thing for more than about 10 seconds. In our modern age, bouncing from page to page on the internet, 10 seconds feels like an eternity.
Her is my challenge to you. Every single day find something that you have never paid attention to before and give it a full minute of your time. There’s a lot you can do during that time. Make a list of distinguishing characteristics. Sketch it. Try and figure out the story behind it. Try and imagine what the design team was thinking when they designed it, if it’s human made, or what purpose it serves, if it’s natural.
Don’t let your attention shift to something else until a whole minute has passed. Break that 10 second barrier and give more attention to the world around you. You can unearth amazing things and notice incredible dramas unfolding all around you.
And, if you’re lucky, you’ll notice a guy with a chest full of recording equipment taping an intermission. Don’t stop him though, he’s making music.
Link to Christopher DeLaurenti’s site with free mp3 of an intermission
storyrobot, my favorite improv blog, points towards this quote from comedian Louis C.K.
AVC: When you’re taping in front of a live studio audience, do you find you’re playing to them as much or more as the people at home?
LCK: It’s not so much that you’re playing to them, it’s just that they tell you what’s working. It’s like doing stand-up. You would never do stand-up without an audience. I mean, no one would even consider it. It’s like they’re the instrument you’re playing. It’s that intimate of a relationship, and they’re that essential to each other.
The audience as the instrument you’re playing is a fantastic metaphor. The more removed you are from your audience, the more you tend to forget that they are even there. A stand-up gets instant feedback, but a novelist might not get a reaction for years.
Do you take the audience into consideration when you create?
One more great quote from the interview:
You also can’t afford skepticism, because it’s preparing for failure, which is useless. You don’t need any preparation: Failure’s just gonna suck.
Here’s a fun tip for the weekend.
If you are stuck for an idea, go and take a tour of a house that’s for sale. The best are houses that are open to anyone who wants to look. While in the house, examine it for clues about the people who live, or lived, there. Are they happy? Do they have children? What kind of taste do they have? What are they trying to hide from you?
Walking through someone else’s house can be like living someone else’s life for a moment. This change of perspective can provide you with topics, characters and visual stimuli. Not to mention it could provide the setting, and possibly a plot, for your movie or screenplay. I sometimes draw a quick map of a location that I might want to use at some point in the future. (Don’t do this in front of the realtor or they might think you’re coming back to steal.)
I remember one house I toured, the owner, a life-long bachelor, had recently died, that had a basement full of unopened boxes of model train supplies. There were tiny houses, cars and engines that had never been touched. Most were still wrapped in the same shrink-wrapped plastic they had been wrapped in at the factory. I asked about them and the real estate agent said, “Well, the family said that he always wanted to start building model train sets like he had when he was a kid, but he never had the time.”
Why make up details when they are right there in front of you?
Most creative people are familiar with their limitations. They know that they aren’t great at drawing noses or they are self-conscious about their ability to write dialog. But, if you look at the people whose work you enjoy, aren’t their limitations one of the reasons you enjoy them?
Liking a work of art is a lot like having a friend. You have standards for friendship, certainly, but you don’t expect your friends to be perfect. In fact, you probably like your friends more because of their faults. Maybe you share a similar fault and it makes you more familiar. Maybe you make up for one another’s faults and can depend on one another to make each other better.
If you make the same mistakes repeatedly and anything you repeat becomes a pattern, then patterns in your work are what constitute your style. So, your limitations are a big part of your style.
As long as you recognize the flaws and present what you do well confidently, your audience will find you. And who knows, some of them may love you more for your imperfections.
Have an idea.
Pursue that idea with every ounce of will and strength you have.
If you don’t succeed, take what you’ve learned and apply that to the idea. Make the idea better and try again.
Repeat until you succeed.
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I was talking to a friend of mine and she compared succeeding (in acting and writing but I think it applies to everything) to hitting your head against a brick wall until you finally break through it. Most people just coexist with the wall and learn to lean against it for support. That wall is a great excuse for staying right where you are.
But, she said, it’s totally worth it to keep slamming against it. The people who make fun of you for doing it are going to be asking you for work as soon as you get to the other side. They’ll also be talking about how much smarter they are than you and more talented and how they deserve what you have. But it doesn’t matter, because you’ve already found another brick wall and you’ve already started slamming your head against that.
Repeat.
If you want success, especially financial success, learn to love slamming your head against that brick wall!
A King obsessed with giants so deeply that he had an entire regiment of them in his army? I saw a brief reference to King Frederick William’s obsession with giants in a book I was reading about circus sideshows and immediately had to track down more information. How could I not have heard of the Prussian ruler who had an entire regiment of giants? It sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s true.
There are plenty of references available on the web, but the most complete I found was this one. Frederick it seems collected giants to be in his special giant regiment, the Potsdam Grenadiers. He would send agents to other countries searching for giants and offer them great sums of money to come and join his unit, if they refused he would often order them kidnapped.
His obsession made him the laughing-stock of most of the royal houses of Europe. His judgment was so clouded in this area that he would bring his nation to the brink of war while attempting to kidnap a seven-foot tall man from another country. In fact, other countries could easily gain his favor by presenting him with a gift of giants. The poor giants were paid well, but there were many attempts at desertion and suicide as they were separated from their homes and families.
To get around the trouble caused by his illegal giant activities, Frederick hit upon another idea. Instead of capturing them, he would breed them. He then started forcing the tallest men in his kingdom to couple with the tallest women to produce giant babies. Of course the effects were not immediate, but in a couple of generations there was a much larger proportion of giants in the city of Potsdam, especially very tall women.
In his deluded way, Frederick loved his hundreds of giants. He spent hours drilling them into one of finest precision military units in the world. They were dressed in expensive and detailed military uniforms topped off with tall red caps. He could paint their faces from memory and often did. In times of deep depression, he would have them march, preceded by their huge bear mascot, through his room to cheer himself up. It is said he treated them as a boy might treat his toy soldiers, and at five foot five, he was proportionally a child in their presence. Draw your own psychological conclusions.
In improvisational acting there is an often quoted sentiment, “Jump and a net will appear.” The idea being that if you take a big risk, the rest of the players and the audience will catch you and make you look good. You won’t look foolish. You won’t stick out like a sore thumb. The very fabric of reality will bend to make you look great.
There is a secret to this statement. I could list a bunch of instances where it has been true. Someone took a huge risk and it paid off even though they had no idea how it would work out. The universe conspired to make them look brilliant. But, the secret is that the statement is not always true. Taking risks is, by definition, risky.
However, if you want to accomplish anything or create something interesting and exciting, you have to act as if it is true. That’s right, it doesn’t matter if you believe it or not as long as you act like you believe it. Acting as if it were true will make you happier and give you a better life.
Now, if you’re like me, you’ll have trouble using obviously false statements to drive your behavior. Here’s the modified, and less catchy, phrase that lives in my head. “Jump and a net will probably appear. If the net doesn’t appear, the consequences are still less than what they would be if you never jumped at all.”
Truthfully, promising you the net is just a way to get you to jump. If you don’t jump, nothing will happen. So, jump into the abyss. If the net doesn’t appear, jump again into the next deeper abyss. Eventually you will be caught and lifted higher than you’ve ever been before.
And that, to me, is 100% true.
Creative Creativity 