First, of course, is today’s action-packed thrill ride of a video :
I’m still sort of brooding over where I want to take my content. I know I want it to be more than just me talking – this ain’t TikTok – but I dunno what else it can be yet.
This is the roughest part of the artistic cycle for me – when you know there’s something wrong, that something isn’t good enough or satisfying enough yet – but you don’t know what the solution is.
So it’s like… creative constipation.
Or, if that’s too gross for you, a difficult birth.
If that’s still too gross for you, this is probably not the blog for you.
I mean, I post stuff like this:
So, ya know, you might want to just scoot along if that’s too much for you.
Weird news : my phone is malfunctioning. As far as I can tell, the base is plugged in and I am definitely in range, and yet when I go to make a call, the readout says “Out of range or no power to base”.
So at the moment I have no phone, and that gives me a weird disconnected feeling.
Even though almost all of my outgoing calls are to Julian.
I’ve been pondering art from the creator’s point of view, and the eternal question of how to make good art.
And I think I have figured out the formula. The “secret” is to make whatever art you enjoy doing the most.
Indulge yourself as deeply as you can. Get as much fun out of creating as you can. Why? Because the idea is to make art intrinsically motivating.
In art, nothing is more important than whatever keeps you trying, and fun and enjoyable things provide their own motivation to do exactly that.
Nobody needs to find the motivation to eat a slice of cake.
If you make doing your art as enjoyable as possible, you will keep doing it just for the fun of it and thus you will inevitably get better at it.
Voila, the road to effortless excellence.
Of course, I don’t exactly follow these guidelines myself. Not yet. I know the sort of writing I enjoy doing the most but I don’t yet have the courage and the wherewithal to just dive right into it.
The most fun writing for me is comedy, of course. And fiction. Writing a story always requires a very high level of activation and engagement in me and writing something funny is a great way for me to amuse myself.
The late Terry Pratchett said writing is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
That seems like the right attitude to me.
Give my proclivities, then, it would seem that I should be writing funny stories. Preferably funny science fiction stories. And that suggests I give trying to write in the Douglas Adam vein of wacky sci fi another try.
I’ve tried before but it always has turned serious on me. I can’t seem to stay in the comedic vein. I start off all cheerful and light and bouncy and before long I am delving deep into troubling emotional complexities and dark and traumatic events.
It’s like being manic-depressive.
Or like how comedic actors always inevitably want to turn to serious work eventually. It’s like once you’ve gotten the comedy out of your system other things emerge.
Not sure even I could write emotionally dark and dense comedy. But if I could pull it off I am sure there would be a market for that.
I could invent a whole new genre. Comedy noire.
I will think about it.
More after the break.
Why you can’t go home again
I sort of feel like I should save this topic for a video, though I don’t know why.
Anyhow, you can’t go home again because you’ve changed. Home has changed. The world has changed. Everything has changed.
You can’t go home again the same way you can’t wear the clothes you wore as a kid again. You’re not the same person you were back then. That space you occupied where you felt so safe doesn’t exist any more and if it did you wouldn’t fit in it any more.
We are born into a conveyor belt – a conveyor belt called time. And that belt carries us into the future and there is nothing we can do to stop that, let alone reverse it.
And all the things we know happen to everybody else will happen to us too. We will age, grow, learn, change, get old, and die. Nothing can stop that.
So it is wise for us to simply accept that nothing alive can stay the same forever – not even us. It’s never too late to try to become comfortable with the idea that we will spend our lives in the future, not the past, and we will always be in the process of adapting to the changes we made in order to adapt to the previous changes.
But fret not, my sentimental friends. The fact that you can’t literally go home again does not mean you can’t visit the home in your heart again.
That home never changes. It’s always exactly like you remember it. And it’s where the emotions you seek lie as well, and that’s what you’re really looking for anyhow.
These things don’t – and can’t – exist in the real world, the world outside your soul. any more. But do they really need to?
A lot of us have Wonderland – or Oz or Narnia or the Discworld or the Enterprise – in our hearts and we know that those places aren’t real and never were.
But that doesn’t matter because they don’t have to be real to be home. Home is a feeling, not a place or time, and you can feel at home anywhere because your real home is always right there, in your heart.
Yes, that all sounds very corny, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.