Category: Thoughts on Creativity
Creative Mondays #023 – Doodle
Doodle. Sketch. Draw. Even if you aren’t someone who can draw. For the creative person there is benefit to spending some time letting your pen or pencil roam freely around a piece of paper. Even if you practice a form of creative art that is not a visual medium such as writing.
First of all, just sitting and doodling can get your mind to wander for a bit and open your brain up to let some fresh ideas flow in. Doing mindless tasks is great for sparking creative ideas and doodling is a great mindless activity.
Secondly, it’s good to get into the practice of doodling or sketch for you art. There will be times in your career when you may have to sketch something out to get your creative vision across to someone else. For example, I’m currently working on a puppet project and while the bulk of my work on this project is me writing out scripts, I had to draw a few sketches of my vision of the puppets to give to the puppet builder Russ Walko. Now, I am no artist by any stretch of the imagination, but I was able to doodle my thoughts well enough that I could get the point across to Russ. This is a good skill for all artists.
Finally, doodling is just plain fun. I don’t have any statistics on this, but I’m sure, for many people, they doodled a lot more as kids than they do now in their adult lives. So a return to doodling, a return to doing something a little more kid-like, a little more fun, jump starts our creative minds and that’s never a bad thing.
No need to worry that your doodles aren’t good enough to hang in an art museum or graces the pages of the Sunday comics section of the newspaper. Just doodle. Experiment. You may stumble on a new creative act that will inspire your other work. So spend a few minutes this week just doodling.
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Do you doodle? If so, has it helped your creative work in any way? Let us know in the comments below! Have a creative week!
Creative Mondays 022 – Fake it until you make it.
More and more, recently, I’ve been hearing the phrase, ‘Fake it till you make it.’ It’s popped up in discussions and on the radio in news stories and there’s a very famous TED Talk by Amy Cuddy that explores the concept of ‘faking it’ until you ‘make it’ in terms of body language and success. (It’s a good watch, and I’ve linked to it at the bottom.) I have heard it so much, I thought it might make a good topic for a Creative Mondays post.
I agree that faking it until you make it is a good practice, with a few exceptions. You never want to flat out lie to people, especially people who may give you a job. This can come back to bite you in the hinder so bad, it’ll make your head spin. But, I do feel it’s okay to, shall we say, stretch the truth a bit, if you are confident that you can handle the end result and back up your promises.
I have a prime example of what I’m talking about in something that happened my freshmen year of college. Now, while freshmen were told that they should audition for everything that came along, they were told they shouldn’t expect to get in plays their freshmen year. Well, in my first semester of my freshmen year, I landed the bit part of Jaques DuBois in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. If you have read the play you know that the character comes in at the very last minute of the play and, sort of, ties up all the loose ends. It was a tiny part, but I felt totally badass because I was a freshmen who had landed a role in a University Players production. When the second semester rolled around, I was feeling cocky and I decided that I was going to get a bigger part in a play.
Auditions for YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU came up and after reading the play I started to think of who I could play in the play. I decided I was going to go out for the role of Ed. If you are unfamiliar with the play, it is about an eccentric family full of ‘nutballs’ who all have their weird hobbies. One of Ed’s main hobbies is playing the xylophone. On the day of the audition, as I was filling out the audition sheet, there was the question: Can you play the xylophone?. Now, I did not know how to play the xylophone. No idea whatsoever. But I was a drummer all four years of high school and I had been around xylophones enough to know a little bit about them. So I just wrote down yes on the audition sheet.
Now, let me say, this could have backfired HUGE on me. I could have walked into the room and there could have been a xylophone sitting in there and they could have asked me to play.
Luckily, that did not happen. I went in, did my monologue and spoke to the director for a bit and just as I was leaving he asked, “You can play the xylophone?” I said, confidently, “Yes.” He nodded, said okay, and thanked me for coming in. A few days later when the cast list was posted, I had landed the role of Ed. Of course, this meant that I now had to learn how to play xylophone, which I was able to do, at least well enough for the play and no one was ever the wiser.
If you can confidently ‘fake it, until you make it’ I see no problem in doing it. I certainly wouldn’t tell someone I could fly a plane if I couldn’t, but I was confident I could pull of playing xylophone enough for this play, so I saw no problem in stretching the truth a bit. ‘Faking’ it, if you will. It got me the part.
So, it is quite possible to ‘fake it until you make it’ in our creative lives. Just make sure you can confidently learn to play the xylophone if you say you can.
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Has there ever been a moment in your creative career where you had to ‘fake it?” Let us know in the comments below! Have a great week!
What Others Are Creating #004
Happy Friday! Welcome to another edition of What Others Are Creating where I look at some of the creative projects that I’ve seen various artists working on this week. My hope is to share them now with you and perhaps you’ll find one or two to check out further and possibly support.
Decoder Ring Theatre – http://decoderringtheatre.com – As someone who has been podcasting in one form or another since 2004, I’m often ask which podcasts I listen to. Decoder Ring Theatre is one of the best and one of the longest running audio drama podcasts on the web. It’s got action, adventure and laughs for folks of just about any age. And not only is the content amazing, their production schedule is something to aspire too. I will always mention Decoder Ring Theatre and the Adventures of The Red Panda as one of my favorite podcasts to listen to. I’ve been subscribed since the day I found it! Check them out.
The Ukulady – http://www.theukulady.com – The ukelele has become a ubiquitous instrument. Everyone everywhere is now playing the damn thing. Once relegated to hawaain shows, the Hipster wave has grabbed hold of the mighty ukelele and now it’s a badge of coolness to play the ukelele. Well, long before this current wave of coolness, The Ukulady was making the ukelel cool by singing her offbeat tunes while strumming the instrument. I’ve known The Ukulady for some years as we’ve travelled in the same circles and have always been impressed she’s built a very successful children’s act around The Ukulady. CLICK HERE to watch a fun medley of ’80s Television Theme Songs performed live in front of a raucous audience. Just three minutes of nothing fun.
Jody Whitesides – http://jodywhitesides.com/blog/ – Jody is a guy I met around 1998 while doing open mics in Southern California. He has been a friend ever since. If you’ve followed any of the projects I’ve worked on over the years, you have, no doubt, heard his name or heard his music. He produced and played bass and guitar on the Throwing Toasters album CHROME, he did all the music for The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd and his song Christmas Brought Me You is the theme for my yearly Advent Calendar. Jody is in the process of working on a new album of songs and he’s blogging regularly over at his website. Go read through some of his recent posts and check out a few of his songs. I’m sure you’ll be rocking out to one or two of them. Plus his blogs are a good read about pop culture and art creation from a musician’s point of view.
Finally this week I want to leave you with a short video clip. It’s a segment from Penn’s Sunday School, a weekly podcast hosted by Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller. It starts with Drew Carey talking about some advice he was given a long time ago and I think it’s something interesting to think about in terms of creativity. I’ll let you watch it and see for yourself. This is Penn Jillette here, so some of the words are NSFW. Give it a listen and let me know what you think about Being Great or Being Anonymous when you’re just starting out something.
That’s if for another week. If you have a project you would like me to check out, please feel free to leave a link to it in the comments below. Always interested in seeing what people are coming up with. Have a great weekend and I will see you back here on Monday morning for another Creative Mondays!
Creative Mondays #021 – You don’t need permission.
Permission.
“May I please be excused form the table?”
“May I have some more dessert?”
“May I go outside to play?”
From the time we are little we are taught to ask for permission. As we get older it seems like we’re still asking for permission.
And if you create art it seems as if you are always asking for someone’s okay before doing anything. Heck, it often seems as if all we need is someone to say, “Yes, you may make your art.” and we will be a success.
“Will you make my script into a movie?”
“Will you release my album on your record label?”
“Will you display my paintings in your gallery?”
We are still asking for permission.
I will let you in on a little secret. You don’t need anyone’s permission to create your art. You don’t. You can go ahead and create it yourself and get it out there in the world and today’s technological advances make it even easier.
When I teach my How To Podcast classes, one of the things I like to try and instill in my students is that you don’t need anyone’s permission to start doing it. You can get your message out to the world for relatively low cost. The only real investment is time.
Sure you need a few tools to record a podcast but you can now produce and publish a podcast entirely on an iPhone. You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to do it.
I think this can be applied to a lot of other areas as well. Got a TV series idea? You can shoot a low budget version of it and put it out on YouTube. Music artist? CDBaby.com will put your music on iTunes next to Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake. Visual artist? You can set up an online gallery or even sell your artwork directly to patrons via Etsy.com.
Yes, there are costs involved in setting these all up, but what we’re talking about is permission. You do not need anyone’s permission to do any of the above ideas. You can tell Hollywood/The Music Industry/The Art World to take a hike. You’re going to put your stuff out there on your own and with things like YouTube’s ad sharing, CDBaby’s payments and Etsy’s as well, you can earn money directly from the people watching, listening or looking at your stuff. No permission needed.
Realizing that you don’t have to fit your art into the demands or constraints of others is incredibly freeing. When I was producing The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, there was no censorship committee we had to run anything past. We didn’t need to ask permission from anyone else. We just created the show. We became our own censorship committee. We decided what went on the show and what didn’t. I guess, in a way, we had to run ideas past each other, but we had similar goals so there were never any problems on content.
Chris Guilbeau calls the people who decided weather or not you can do something as The Gatekeepers. We live in a fantastic time where technology lets us circumvent the gatekeepers. Yes, it would be great to have a television network, movie studio, music label or famous art gallery publicizing our art, but you’d need their permission. I say, don’t ever wait for permission. Just do it. If it is good enough, the studios, networks, labels and galleries will come to you. And if you’ll be in a much better position to negotiate with them because you’ve done it all yourself.
I feel I just briefly need to mention that if you are under 18 and still living with your parents….you do need to ask permission from them. Sorry. Also, if you are using other people’s work you, most certainly, have to ask for permission. You can’t just steal their art and make it your own without asking. My lawyer made me ad this paragraph.
So, if you are waiting to create because you need permission from someone else….forget it. Just start creating! Or if you REALLY need permission, I’ve just given it to you. No go.
Create!
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