Honest and unmerciful
This summer feels very insignificant. I feel like I'm just floating around, going places and doing things and talking to people but my mind is somewhere completely different. I'm very much between two places and it's off-putting. I've been doing fun stuff, like having picnics and coffee and cooking yummy vegan food and learning the ukulele, but I've also been doing not so fun stuff like fighting and crying and wanting to go back to Scotland sooner than September. I foolishly didn't think that this summer would be that hard. Turns out not seeing the people you're used to seeing everyday kind of messes with your sense of loneliness. Not saying that my friends here back home aren't dear to me too, but having been gone for a year I'm more of a visiting guest now. I know I'll never be able to go back in time and experience the stuff they experienced together without me so I'm happy just going along and experiencing things with them now.
That monster of an intro paragraph later, I do actually have a tangible subject today. After like four drafts of this same blog post I've realized I can't just "muse" about creativity without boring you all to death. So, I'm going to talk about age in relation to achievements and see where it takes me.
I know many of you will agree with me on this; it's kind of horrible when you hear about people your age or a bit older or younger who achieve wonderful things like write best selling books or act in Oscar winning movies or come up with something that rocks the science world. Because it creates pressure. Not exactly societal pressure, because I know most people understand that these child-wonders and prodigies are less than common, but more personal pressure.
Specifically in the film industry, because it's something that you can get into without a lot of formal training, there's always people who've never been to film school and just make wonderful movies. Then there's people who've had loads of formal training and have also become wonderful creators. It's a bit scary thinking you might be "wasting" your time being educated in your field when there's people making actual things in the industry that haven't studied at all. It raises a lot of questions about how much can be taught and how much do you just have to learn by doing. I know there are different methods for doing things and neither has been proved as being more effective in terms of the quality of films made. But it's something I think about regularly.
I also keep thinking about how far passion can take someone. Listening to Jeff Goldsmith's podcast with the writers of Deadpool (Rhett Reece and Paul Wernick), I really started understanding all the passion that went into finally making this project. The only thing that kept the movie going despite the years and years it spent on hold or being rejected was the passion of the writers and the people who believed in the project. People who would not take no for an answer. As someone who gets frustrated at things I'm trying to write before I even begin writing them, imagining people sticking with something and rewriting and modifying it for years and years seems impossible. Despite how much I don't want it to be true, the secret to writing good things seems to be writing even when you don't want to write. And yes, examples like Deadpool where passion for the film finally drove it to be made don't exactly give a realistic picture of life or the film industry in general. We are taught in movies and books that as long as you believe in it, you can make it happen. Sadly, you can really believe in something and still never achieve it, or achieve it and it'll still be shit. Not every passion projects ends successfully.
I remember doing NaNoWriMo in 2013 (stands of National Novel Writing Month, where you attempt to write 50,000 words in November), and struggling so much with creating new content every day. I loved the daydream that being a writer is just sitting in cafes or at home wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea and writing stuff you absolutely love. In reality, writing is less about that and more about just pushing through even when everything you're putting on a page seems like shit and you want to give up on the story and just forget about it. This happened to me a lot while taking part in the challenge, so much that I started not even reading what I'd written the day before because I'd start to criticize it too much and never want to continue.
My high school art teacher told our class that inspiration is a myth. This was likely his way of getting us off our asses and actually make something, as 80% of our art classes were spent sitting around waiting for inspiration to hit us. And while I don't really agree with his statement, as I have experienced what I understand as inspiration, I do see what he was getting at. It's the same advice Simon Kinberg was giving in his edition of the podcast I listened to recently. Just create, even if it's shitty. Because then the process of making it better is less creation and more editing and modifying and that is a less daunting task. It's amazing making stuff when you're excited and bursting with ideas, but all writing being like that is a very juvenile and naive way of looking at it. And yet I know that writers downplay the horrible suffering of writer's block and the struggles they've been through while creating a project, because when it finally works out and ends up being good, it all seems worth it. I only hope to make something some day that makes me feel like all the suffering that went into the creative process was worth it.
As I'm writing this I'm seeing the technique kind of works. I started writing about two hours ago with no clear direction, restarted this piece three times but as I just kept going it kind of formed itself and my thoughts formed the bridges I wanted them to form and I could create something that seems coherent enough. I've ended up including most of what I wanted to include originally, but just in different form and in a different order.
So yes, from what you can see in this text, I'm still grappling with my creative energies and frustrated with my own lack of ideas, but I've also spent a lot of time thinking about things. I've spent half of my summer already, here's to the latter half being more productive.
Becks
(oh, and the title is from Almost Famous, which I finally watched. I think it's definitely good advice for me, especially on how to act towards myself and my own writing.)
That monster of an intro paragraph later, I do actually have a tangible subject today. After like four drafts of this same blog post I've realized I can't just "muse" about creativity without boring you all to death. So, I'm going to talk about age in relation to achievements and see where it takes me.
I know many of you will agree with me on this; it's kind of horrible when you hear about people your age or a bit older or younger who achieve wonderful things like write best selling books or act in Oscar winning movies or come up with something that rocks the science world. Because it creates pressure. Not exactly societal pressure, because I know most people understand that these child-wonders and prodigies are less than common, but more personal pressure.
Specifically in the film industry, because it's something that you can get into without a lot of formal training, there's always people who've never been to film school and just make wonderful movies. Then there's people who've had loads of formal training and have also become wonderful creators. It's a bit scary thinking you might be "wasting" your time being educated in your field when there's people making actual things in the industry that haven't studied at all. It raises a lot of questions about how much can be taught and how much do you just have to learn by doing. I know there are different methods for doing things and neither has been proved as being more effective in terms of the quality of films made. But it's something I think about regularly.
I also keep thinking about how far passion can take someone. Listening to Jeff Goldsmith's podcast with the writers of Deadpool (Rhett Reece and Paul Wernick), I really started understanding all the passion that went into finally making this project. The only thing that kept the movie going despite the years and years it spent on hold or being rejected was the passion of the writers and the people who believed in the project. People who would not take no for an answer. As someone who gets frustrated at things I'm trying to write before I even begin writing them, imagining people sticking with something and rewriting and modifying it for years and years seems impossible. Despite how much I don't want it to be true, the secret to writing good things seems to be writing even when you don't want to write. And yes, examples like Deadpool where passion for the film finally drove it to be made don't exactly give a realistic picture of life or the film industry in general. We are taught in movies and books that as long as you believe in it, you can make it happen. Sadly, you can really believe in something and still never achieve it, or achieve it and it'll still be shit. Not every passion projects ends successfully.
I remember doing NaNoWriMo in 2013 (stands of National Novel Writing Month, where you attempt to write 50,000 words in November), and struggling so much with creating new content every day. I loved the daydream that being a writer is just sitting in cafes or at home wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea and writing stuff you absolutely love. In reality, writing is less about that and more about just pushing through even when everything you're putting on a page seems like shit and you want to give up on the story and just forget about it. This happened to me a lot while taking part in the challenge, so much that I started not even reading what I'd written the day before because I'd start to criticize it too much and never want to continue.
My high school art teacher told our class that inspiration is a myth. This was likely his way of getting us off our asses and actually make something, as 80% of our art classes were spent sitting around waiting for inspiration to hit us. And while I don't really agree with his statement, as I have experienced what I understand as inspiration, I do see what he was getting at. It's the same advice Simon Kinberg was giving in his edition of the podcast I listened to recently. Just create, even if it's shitty. Because then the process of making it better is less creation and more editing and modifying and that is a less daunting task. It's amazing making stuff when you're excited and bursting with ideas, but all writing being like that is a very juvenile and naive way of looking at it. And yet I know that writers downplay the horrible suffering of writer's block and the struggles they've been through while creating a project, because when it finally works out and ends up being good, it all seems worth it. I only hope to make something some day that makes me feel like all the suffering that went into the creative process was worth it.
As I'm writing this I'm seeing the technique kind of works. I started writing about two hours ago with no clear direction, restarted this piece three times but as I just kept going it kind of formed itself and my thoughts formed the bridges I wanted them to form and I could create something that seems coherent enough. I've ended up including most of what I wanted to include originally, but just in different form and in a different order.
So yes, from what you can see in this text, I'm still grappling with my creative energies and frustrated with my own lack of ideas, but I've also spent a lot of time thinking about things. I've spent half of my summer already, here's to the latter half being more productive.
Becks
(oh, and the title is from Almost Famous, which I finally watched. I think it's definitely good advice for me, especially on how to act towards myself and my own writing.)
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