I Love This

Love Letters

I found this via StumbleUpon (my favorite internet gadget thingy ever).

This is such a strikingly brilliant and vulnerable thing to me. The way it works is that this person wrote hundreds of love letters addressing people in her life and then shared them with strangers. She ("Asia") wrote the letters, mailed the letters to strangers with the message glued to the outside of the envelope so anyone could read them along the way and then posted them online for the rest of us to read. The letters are color-coded depending on who they were written to: a crush, a former lover, a family member and so on.

I love this because it makes me think of a dream I've had for a while now to hide bits of poetry in the woods somewhere in the hopes that someone would find them. Anonymously, you know? Just little secret messages to whoever comes along. I would love to find something like that myself.

Why I Do It

It's making the monsters I both dreaded and wished were waiting beyond the hedges when I was young enough to trick-or-treat.

It's the hours surrounded by paint, glue, paper mache, sticks, wires, tape and sketches.

It's the clippings of found horrors pinned up for inspiration.

It's the dark music slithering through the air with the scent of clove and cinnamon candles and the smoke of incense.

It's the mounting anticipation as the sun drops a little sooner each day and the cold begins to rob the crickets of their inspiration and the garage door can stay open a little later because there are no more uninvited guests bouncing obsessively off the fluorescent tubes of the workbench.

It's about the family and friends who are excited to hear what I'm up to and want to be a part of it, offering their help, advice, time and effort.

It's about the kindred spirits found along the way: the folks who inspire and encourage you to go 'even bigger next year' every year simply by following their own inspiration and sharing it.

It's the reactions. All of them. The kids and the parents. The appreciation and the concerned expressions and hasty retreats.

It's about creating (re-creating?) an experience that will inspire some kid to do the same thing with their own yard some day.

The "Why We Haunt" page of the Grim Hollow website got me thinking about this.

I'm working on a new site for Halloween, horror and all that good stuff. I don't want to say much more than that right now but I'm pretty excited about it. There'll be more news as the big day approaches.

Cheers.

A Bad Day at Work

Work is crushing right now. We're all really busy and the pace isn't letting up anytime soon. In the bigger picture that's a good thing. We're gainfully employed. No complaints there. Still, the pressure of staying on top of things can wear on you a bit and when you tack on a really lousy commute you've got a classic recipe for bad mood on your hands.

That was me tonight.

Then a funny thing happened when I got home. I was in mid-rant about whatever the hell it was I was mad about (for no good reason) when I tossed my keys on the table and noticed them catching the light pouring into my house from the setting sun. Then I saw my camera.

Without thinking, I grabbed the camera and started shooting. I wasn't trying to work my way out of my bad mood or anything; I just saw the light and went to work. Within about two minutes the long day and the screwed up traffic were about a thousand years behind me.

AND I got some pretty cool shots.

That, my friends, is why I need creativity in my life.

Save It

Call it contemplations on the multitude of distractions I indulge my wary mind in on any given day.

What am I talking about? Why 'wary mind'?

The Backstory
The main ingredient in my creative process is the need to communicate something. While this need is very strong it is also somewhat lazy. Like lightning, it seeks the path of least resistance.

This "laziness" doesn't exist in a vacuum. It has a root cause and, put simply, I believe that cause to be fear and hesitation. It's nothing you haven't heard before: fear of judgment, fear of not making anything very good and all that stuff that turns a blank page into a mirror aimed at all your inadequacies and past failures. Hence, the wary mind.

I'm No Psychologist, But...
These fears cause me to seek easier alternatives: the distractions I mentioned earlier. Pacification. Things like email, video games, message boards, etc. When I busy myself with these things, I don't have to deal directly with the creative compulsion and all the ensuing angst over whether it's even worth attending to. It's avoidance.

Saving It
Today I started a little experiment. Slowly but steadily, I have begun to withdraw these distractions from the scenery. It's really weird, too, because I've already begun to see that I've actually become a little dependent on this stuff. Like, instead of rolling up my sleeves and setting to one task I sort of flit around and scatter little bits of creativity here and there throughout the day: a blog comment, a message board post, maybe some emails to friends with a few attempts at cleverness. Not that any of that stuff is bad, but when projects I actually really want to do are left half finished I have to wonder if I'm sort of pissing away my resources.

So, the experiment begins. My hypothesis is that once the distractions are reduced or eliminated, I might start to remember what it was like to spend a few hours with a handful of pens and a sketchpad, or writing, or playing an instrument and so on. I might make some serious strides with regard to productive creativity. We'll see how it goes.

My question to you is do you have any experience with this and what has it been?

Practicing Being Productive

Creativity vs. Productivity
Productivity used to stand in opposition to creativity in my mind. "Being productive" carried impressions of dull, repetitive drudgery or frantic work in the face of looming deadlines. It meant churning stuff out according to someone else's expectations or standards. It sounded like work.

"Being creative" meant no deadlines, no rules, no boundaries and no expectations. It was self-indulgent and all about fun, but there was a hitch: my creative “success” was measured by whether or not the result was something moving, stunning, profound, beautiful, etc. Most importantly, it had to be completely unique in every way. When the fun was over, the pen put down, the amps turned off or the files saved, the result had to be greatness (in my estimation, at least). Anything short of that felt like a failure.

This created a lot of frustration. Worse yet, each subsequent time I set out to do something creative, the fun seemed to end sooner and sooner. A lot of perfectly good ideas were abandoned. The act of creating stopped being fun because the expectation of brilliance took the passion out of it.

Getting Out of Your Light
Tonight on the ride home from work I got a reminder of how this grandiose view of creativity can be crippling, and how a healthy focus on productivity can actually allow you to be more creative than ever.

The reminder came by way of an older episode of The Radiant Vista Podcast from 2005 (Episode 4, "Workshops"). The Radiant Vista is a website, online community and education resource dedicated to photography and the creative process. This episode was about getting the most from Radiant Vista’s photography workshops, many of which involve shoots in the field. Since the shoots are often held in national parks or other heavily photographed locations, some of the attendees find themselves unable to find inspiring pictures. The hosts took some time to address this issue of creative block.

Fighting the Future
It turns out that one of the reasons people feel stuck in these situations is they come to the location and immediately start looking for that shot that no one else has ever seen. They may be familiar with the area and recognize certain angles and compositions as having been seen before, leading them to pass by dozens of shots on a quest to find something new and leaving them frustrated when they can’t. The problem is they’re thinking way ahead of the process to a disappointing end result instead of doing what photographers do: taking pictures.

The Fix
There is a way to beat this. The basic idea is that giving yourself a set of parameters, limitations or goals to work with can get you past that part of your mind that judges and get you moving on to the business at hand. An example offered by the folks at Radiant Vista is to choose a particular subject or color or theme to shoot and then just start looking for it. If you’re busy trying to find these you won’t have time to think about whether or not what you’re doing is great. The point is to take the shots and to enjoy doing that. There’s plenty of time for evaluation, critique and editing later on. This basic principle applies to all forms of creativity.

There's More to Art than Inspiration
The key to making this technique work is recognizing that creativity is not always about those moments of inspiration. Sometimes it’s about doing the work, putting in the time and pushing yourself to be productive no matter what. Sometimes it’s about bringing your mind back from thinking about the future (the end result) or the past (previous successes/failures) and into the now (the act of creating or being productive).

If you’re a photographer, take the shot. If you’re a musician, play the instrument. If you’re a painter, load the brush. If you’re writer, write. And so on. Pick a mission—any mission—and pursue it.

Waiting for inspiration to come is passive and can ultimately be self-defeating. Discarding an idea before it has even a tiny chance to become something real is the antithesis of creativity. See things through and evaluate later. You will likely be surprised at the results. To paraphrase the advice a friend once gave me, no matter what you end up with, at the very least it didn’t exist before you made it.