Category: Thoughts on Creativity
Creative Mondays #040 – Mistakes
Mistakes. As an artist, you constantly strive to make your art as perfect as can be. We want what we produce and release into the world to be free from any flaw or error. This is a very noble cause and one you should strive for. If you aren’t happy with something, do not release it just for the sake of releasing it. Keep working on it until you get it to where you are happy with it. NOTE: You may never be happy with it, but we’ll talk about that at another time.
Striving for perfection is a great goal but you have to understand that, if you are like me, a piece of art you put out will never be 100% perfect. Striving for perfection is fine but if you keep striving for it you may never release your art. Working on one piece of art for the rest of your life chasing a certain Ideal may be fine for some but not for me. Did you know that Michaelangelo’s statue of David isn’t perfect. A flaw in the marble prevented Him from sculpting one of the muscles in Davids back. Instead of spending years trying to find a way to work around the flaw or get a new piece of marble and start over, he finished it, put it out in the world and then got busy working on something else.
When I listen to early episodes of Dr. Floyd I cringe and wish I could go back in and edit out mistakes. Tighten up the dialogue and pacing. But, as IV said on here before, the goal was to just keep making more episodes and in the course of producing over 150 episodes I learned how to tighten up the dialogue and pacing. And that’s why the later shows are cleaner. I made mistakes early on, learned form them, and used them to make the stuff I was creating better.
Mistakes you make while creating are, more likely than not, be extremely frustrating. That’s fine. The key is to learn what to take away from making that mistake and how the lessons learned there can help you improve your art.
You should never be so obsessed with never making mistakes that you don’t allow yourself to make them. Why would you want to make mistakes? Because sometimes those mistakes can make you look at your art differently and lead you to creating something even better than what you had originally started out to create. Mistakes sometimes open doors that give you a new view of how to present something. Or a way to change something to make it even better than you thought of before. I cannot tell you how many times a fumble in dialogue while reading a line has lead to a new and even better line for the project. That’s not always the case but sometimes it is and if I was obsessed with getting every line down as exact as it is on the script I would never have stumbled upon something better.
The other note I want to make about mistakes is that you can’t be so afraid of making them that you don’t pursue the art that your heart is leading you towards. If you want to sculpt (or paint, or write, or…whatever) and you are afraid to get going because you’ll make mistakes, you’ll never begin. Learn now, mistakes are going to be made and you’re going to learn from them and become better because of them.
We are humans. We are going to make mistakes. That’s perfectly fine. Be open to them. See if there’s something you can learn from the mistake to improve the piece you are working on or the next piece. See if there’s something about the mistake that makes the current piece even better than it was before. See if the mistake leads you to something new that you didn’t even think of before.
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Do you have an example of a mistake that blossomed into something better than what you had planned when you started out? If so, tell me about it in the comments below.
Creative Mondays #039 – Take a break.
Even though we all love creating, there are times when we can get burnt out. When this happens take a break. Nothing will recharge your batteries faster than taking a little time off.
You need to be careful though, you don’t want to take a break, get so busy with ‘real life’ responsibilities that you never return to your art. But taking a few days away from your current project with a set date to return is not a bad idea to help with burnout.
Another thing I like to do to help avoid burnout is have a couple projects going at once. I have a couple different longer stories that I’m working on and I will work on one for a few weeks, then take a break and work on another for a few weeks, and then come back to the first one. I find that this helps keep the stories fresh. Also I find that spending time away from a certain project will give me time to generate new ideas that I can bring with me when I return to it.
I’m not speaking of taking a break when real life intervenes. Unfortunately, that happens a lot more than we would probably like. What I’m talking about here is actually setting aside a periods where you say, “I’m bonn stop working on this for a bit and then come back to it.” You make a conscience choice to take a break.
Taking a break may tell you a little about your project as well. If you take a break from what you’re working on and find you don’t have a real desire to return to it, that may mean that the project isn’t speaking to your true creative self. Don’t spend your time working on a project that isn’t 100% what you want to be working on. That’s not saying scrap a project completely if you find you don’t want to go back to it after taking a break. Just set focus your energy on projects you do want to work on. The unfinished project may actually come in useful.
A year or so ago, I was approached by a producer to come up with some scripts for short interstitials that would, hopefully, wind up on television. I got really excited about the project and wrote out ten scripts over the course of two days. They were short scripts, about a minute long each, so it wasn’t like some big Herculean effort or anything. I was excited about the possibilities this project presented. Then, though, the producer got really busy with other projects and so this one fell by the wayside, as did my passion to create for it. I really liked writing the scripts in this style but I stopped because I knew the project wasn’t going to continue, at least nit then.
A few months later, I got the idea for the Uncle Interloper Pieces and Bits segments. As I was writing out the scripts for them, I realized that a lot of the scripts I had written for the other project would work perfectly for this one. Boom! I suddenly had 10 more scripts to add to the few I had completed already. Sure, they needed some tweaking to find this project, but all that work before was now coming in handy. So, if you take a break from a project, don’t trash it! You may be able to cannibalize it for something else.
People say things work in cycles. I think this can be applied to creative people as well, especially those who, like me, practice in several disciplines. It has been a good year or two since I’ve really sat down and tried to write a comedy music song for my act Throwing Toasters. In the meantime, I’ve been busy with puppet fun, improv and other pursuits. But I can feel the urge to write songs again bubbling in the back of my brain. I’ve been jotting down song ideas left and right. Soon, after taking a bit of a break from comedy songwriting, it’ll be time to pick up the guitar again and get going. When you are truly creative, your brain won’t let you take a break for too long!
We’ve spoken on here before about how creative work is hard work. Just like any nine to five job, you’ll need to take a break every now and then. Do it. Use it to recharge your batteries, invigorate your creative mind and return to your creating with a renewed passion!
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Do you take breaks in your creative work? Do you fin them helpful in inspiring you to create more? Let us know in the comments below. Have a great week!
Creative Mondays #038 – When thrown, just do your best.
Today’s Creative Monday’s post will not be for every artist but it was something I was thinking about today, so I figured I’d write about it. This is more advice for those creative types that go on a lot of auditions or perform live, but it could have an application for painters, sculptors and other artists as well.
Last week, I got an email asking me to come in and audition for a project. I, of course, said yes and the person emailed me info about the audition. It was for a puppet job and over the weekend I familiarized myself with the person that this puppet was based on and felt pretty confident in what I’d do for the audition. Audition day rolls around, and I get there early and I’m totally relaxed and ready to go. The woman who’s running the audition meets me in the lobby and we greet each other and as we are walking to the the elevator she says, “Do you know exactly what we are doing here today?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Great!” she replies, “We’ll get you all set up in the recording booth to see the clips and then you can just do some ADR.
WHAT?! I didn’t say that out loud That’s what my brain said. What I really said was, “Okay.”
I must have said it a little weird because she said, “Did you not know you were doing that?”
I said, “No. I thought this was a puppet audition.”
“It is.” She said, but right now we are just auditioning to do some ADR over some pre-existing clips.”
I smiled, “Okay! Let’s do it!”
Now, here’s the issue. I’ve never done ADR before. It stands for Automated Dialogue Replacement. Another name for it is looping. It’s where you watch a clip from a movie or TV show and then you replace some of the dialogue. This can be an actor replacing dialogue they recorded in the scene that was too noisy to hear, or it can be replacing an actors voice with a new voice, which is what was going on here. Again, I’d never done it before but I thought to myself, “I’m here, let’s do it!” Once we were set up however, I instantly realized that none of the character prep I’d done beforehand was going to work.
This entire audition was turning out to be a complete 180 degree turn from what I thought it was going to be. At the moment I realized this I had two real choices. I could throw a big fit about it and whine and complain saying how I was mislead about what this audition was or I could just give it a shot a do my best. I chose the second option.
You know what? It turned out pretty good. Was I perfect? No, mainly because I’d never done ADR before, but I did good enough to not feel embarrassed. In situations like this I think that really is the only real, professional, choice you have.
When you get thrown, just do your best.
In my years doing comedy music there were countless times on stage where I got thrown. The first time a string broke on stage I was a mess. There have been sound issues, unruly audience members and, heck, crowds that just weren’t into me. In each and every one of those situations, there’s only one real choice. Do your best.
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What do you do when something throws you while pursuing your art? Do you have other strategies? I’d love to hear them in the comments below. Have a great, and creative, week!
Creative Mondays #036 – A job you hate.
After four years of college I was ready to get out of California State University Long Beach and get out into the world, so much so I didn’t want to go to my college graduation. Now my parents, who had had worked very hard to pay for four years of higher education for their son who was getting a theatre degree in acting and direction, had a very different opinion. They were coming down to Long Beach and they were going to see me walk across the stage, get handed a diploma and shake the Dean’s hand. I was really bummed because I really did not want to go but I did want to make mom and dad happy.
Then, a day or so before graduation, I picked up a copy of the Long Beach Press Telegram and in it was an article on the pending graduations and it listed who the guest speaker was going to be at each departments graduation. There, in black and white, it listed the guest speaker for the College of the Arts as Harry Shearer. If you feel you don’t know Harry Shearer, you do. He is the voice of several characters on The Simpsons, he’s the host of the popular syndicated radio show Le Show, he was on two different seasons of Saturday Night Live and, most importantly to me, he portrays bassist Derek Smalls in the band Spinal Tap. Once I read that, no one was going to stop me from going to that graduation.
I’m so glad I did go because that afternoon Harry gave a commencement speech that has stuck with me all these 18 years later. Especially the loin he made about working in a job you hate. I’m going to paraphrase this next part, but his basic point was:
“A lot of people take a ‘real job’ until their dream job in the Arts comes in, in order to survive. Several years later, they are still at that ‘real job’ and are no closer to working in their dream job in the arts.”
Now, Harry said it a lot more eloquently than I just did but the main point is that many in the creative field work jobs they don’t want to be in just to survive and then, years later, realize they aren’t close at all to the job they got their degree for.
I am certainly guilty of this. For years after college, about ten in fact, I worked as a substitute teacher. It was an okay job, certainly flexible enough and I was making money, but by the end of those ten years I was starting to burn out because it was not the job I wanted to be doing. I was good at it and several times I was told I should get my teaching credential because I was such a good teacher. But deep inside of me I could feel a darkness building up because I was doing a job I absolutely hated.
The moment I made the decision to stop subbing and focus on The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, it felt like a weight was instantly lifted from my chest. I attempted, for the millionth time, to lose weight and it was actually working (lost 80 pounds). I was just a million times happier than I was when I was subbing. And guess what? I became more creative! This was the creative boom era for Dr. Floyd, because I was doing something I love.
Now, Dr. Floyd didn’t become a full time job, far from it. But working on that show lead to another job, producing a podcast for The Jim Henson Company, which did become a full time job. A job I was much happier to be at, and paid much more than, substitute teaching.
From that point on, I’ve had to remind myself of this whenever I get down about money. And even in the creative world I’ve taken jobs just because ‘I needed the money.’ To me, in the long run, it’s just not worth it. I become unhappy, miserable to be around and not really a good worker in those jobs I hate. At the end of 2013 and the start of 2014 I had gotten myself into two jobs ‘because I needed the money.’ Though I was quickly reminded why I should never do this, I finished out those jobs because I had agreed to do them. A good refresher to really think about a job before before agreeing to it. Is this what I really want to be spending my time on? Is this going to make me happy?
Ed robertson of Barenaked Ladies said in an interview once, “You can’t do what you want, doing what you don’t want.” I’m a big believer in this. You need to be happy in what you’re working on. For your health and sanity.
Incidentally a few years ago, I emailed Harry Shearer via his website asking if he had a copy of the speech still that he could send me. He said that due to an encounter his laptop had with a spilled bottle of wine on an airline flight he did not. My Great Aunt videotaped the graduation and got part of his speech on video. I should track that down.
Finally, I wanted to add one other piece to this. A piece I know a lot of people will think when they read this. You need money to survive and sometimes, a lot of times, the creative stuff does not even come close to paying the bills. I get that. So I wanted to add a short story with a piece of advice a friend of mine once gave me.
Tiffany Carboni was a year ahead of me at Burlingame High School. She graduated and was in Los Angeles for a year and when she came back the next summer we were talking about he job working with Michael J. Fox’s production company. I told her about wanting to go to LA and get into the Hollywood biz and she said (paraphrasing here), “Never be afraid to take a job that you will have no problem quitting a few weeks, or months later. Know that you aren’t there permanently. It’s just temporary until the thing you want comes along.”
This is why, for a year after college, I worked in a record store. It was an okay job and I was good at it but I had no qualms about quitting (with a two week notice, of course) when something better came along. In fact, I did quit to work on a play and then a few months after that, I got my old job right back and worked there for a little longer.
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Have you (or are you currently) working a job that you hate? Is it keeping you from pursuing your creative dreams? You may not be able to quit tomorrow and become a full time artist, but how can you start the process to start doing what you WANT to be doing?