Category: True Life Adventures
Creative Mondays #025 – The negative brain.
I was talking to author, Mur Lafferty the other day. Though we talk occasionally via text or Tweet, we hand’t spoken at any great length for some time so there was a bit of catching up to do. Even though Mur and I are sort of on different paths, she’s an published author, I’m a…well, whatever I am, we are both creative folks and we always find we feel the same way about certain situations that happen in our career. One of the things we have in common is the random flare up of the negative brain. That part of the brain that, even when something really good is happening, you focus on some negative aspect of it. And a lot of times, for me, this tiny negative thing will completely outweigh all the good. Mur and I spoke at length about this and I figured it’d be good to bring up here as some of you may have the same issue.
My therapist, yes, I go to a therapist, says the negative brain is a hold over from our evolutionary past. At the time when we, as early humans, had to constantly be thinking about the negative things in order to survive from day to day. We had to think about the worst because the worst was always right around the corner. What if we don’t find food? What if that wild animal attacks us? What if this lake dries up? We constantly had to worry about it. Luckily, most people, have things easier these days, but the negative brain is still lingering with us.
I’m going to give you an example now of a recent flare up of my negative brain. Unfortunately, I’m not going to get specific with the details. I hope that, even by being general, you’ll get my point. A year or so ago, I was offered a huge creative opportunity. This was one of those things where it was so big I, of course, had to say yes. And I did. I was over the moon with excitement about this. Huge smile on my face for days after I found out. Then, as I began hearing details about this project and I realized that my involvement in the project, while still a huge opportunity, was not as big as initially thought it was going to be. The project was still happening, I was still involved, it was just that tasks I thought would be assigned to me were going to be done by others.
Now this opportunity was something that people would PAY to do. It was truly a once in a lifetime experience that I was going to be one of a very small handful of people to get to do. But my negative brain wouldn’t let me see that. My negative brain was constantly reminding me that I wasn’t going to get to do every aspect of this amazing job that I wanted to do. And, in the end, it slightly tinged this incredible experience because my negative brain wouldn’t let me enjoy it.
This negative brain is something that I’ve had for a long time, as long as I can remember. I guess the good thing now is that I’m recognizing it and can now focus on trying to fight it. But the question is…how?
I’m sure that folks who are affected by this would just say, ignore your brain when it does that. That’s a good piece of advice. Easier said then done sometimes, though. In thinking about what my therapist said about the negative brain being a holdover from our primitive self I thin the best solution is to EVOLVE. Evolve my thinking to focus on the positives of the situation and not the negatives.
So if you have ‘negative brain’ know that you aren’t alone. And you absolutely must not let it get in the way of your creativity. Even if your brain is focusing on the negatives of a situation, you must keep pushing through with your creativity because not creating is worse!
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Do you suffer from ‘negative brain?’ If so, let us know how you fight it in the comments below.
Creative Mondays #024 – Don’t be precious (a lesson from Gonzo The Great)
This is one of those rules on creativity that people talk about a lot. When you are creating something, especially something you are creating with other people, you cannot be precious with your ideas. Some of them will get used, some of them will not get used. You must know this going in otherwise you’ll be setting yourself up for misery.
This rule struck me one time when I watched it happen right in front of me. In 2003, I was lucky enough to be invited to hang out on the set of a Muppet commercial shoot. It was the Dominoes Pizza Super Bowl ads that they were in. For two days I just sat, like a fly on the wall, and watched as the people behind the Muppets worked their magic. As a side note here, my favorite Muppet is Gonzo, so I kept a close eye on what Dave Goelz, Gonzo’s performer, was doing.
During one break I noticed Dave was over near the Puppet Wrangler’s table working on something. He had some items from the Craft Service table, a long puppet rod and some tools and was busily building something. Someone asked what it was and he said he felt lil Gonzo should be doing something in the background of the next shot they were filming, so he was building a stack of food for Gonzo to balance on his finger. The rig would have made it appear like Gonzo was balancing a peanut on his fingertip, then balanced on that, a soda can, and then a bag of chips and so on. It was really a great looking rig and it was built out of actual stuff! He drilled holes in a REAL peanut in order to slide the rod through.
I’d say he spent about a good thirty minutes of his lunch break on this neat little addition to the commercial. When he was done he tried it out and the effect was hilarious, it looked like Gonzo was balancing all this stuff on his finger. Everybody loved it. They tested it out on camera and it looked great. But then, somebody decided that it just wasn’t right for the scene. The Muppets mantra has always been, “Pull Focus” but this gag was pulling a little too much focus. Ultimately, the decision was made not to use it. I guess in a commercial you don’t want to pull too much focus away from the product you’re actually selling.
So, after working so hard on this little piece of puppetry fun, what did Dave Goelz do? He just tossed it aside with a smile and got ready for the next shot. His attitude was one of, “Well, that would have been fun but, oh well, no big deal.” Now, he could have been upset or fought for it or thrown a big-time hollywood star tantrum, but he didn’t. He moved on to the next order of business with a smile.
Seeing this happen really struck me. Something you work hard on, no matter how good of an idea it is, may not make the final project. This happens all the time when creating things with others and it can happen in working on your own stuff as well. A particular exchange of dialogue in your writing may be the best you’ve ever written, but if if doesn’t work with the story, you have to toss it. You can be upset for a moment, but then you have to move on with your creating.
This is a tough one. Usually us artists go from thinking everything we do is crap to everything we do is good. Sometimes, even when you know you have something good, you have to let it go if it’s not working.
Take a lesson from Gonzo: you can’t be precious with your work.
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!
Creative Mondays #020 – Be proud of your crap.
If you are any kind of serious creative professional, you put your all into everything you create and then you put it out into the world. And as you have continued to put things out in the world, there’s a good chance you’ve looked back at the stuff you created in the past and said, “Well, that was crap. Why did I ever put that out?”
First of all, know that that is perfectly normal to look back at your previous work and think it is crap. There are lots of creative professionals who look back at their early work and shudder. Take the early, early episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. These were the twenty one episodes that were produced on the UHF station, KTMA in Minneapolis-St. Paul starting in 1988. These are known in Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fandom as the KTMA Episodes. Lots of fans want these first twenty one episodes to be released on DVD. They bombard Shout Factory, the company who puts out amazing Mystery Science Theatre 3000 DVD sets, with requests to secure the rights for DVD release. To this date they haven’t been released and they are sought after tapes on the bootleg DVD market.
I’ve heard Joel asked about getting them released and his answer is always some form of, “If people want to search them out for ‘historical’ sake, that’s fine. We just don’t want to release them on DVD because at KTMA we were still figuring out how the show worked.” Again, I’m paraphrasing, but the idea is the same. They don’t want to release those early episodes because they don’t think they are their best effort, compared to what the show later became. They are looking back at their early work and are thinking that it’s crap. (That’s my word, not Joel’s or anyone else’s who was involved in the show.)
When I first started writing comedy songs, I would put out anything that I could. I had an old MIDI keyboard hooked up to a Mac SE and would program in the lamest sounding drum and synthesizer tracks into it, then play it back and sing live into a microphone as it fed into my tape deck in my own little recording studio. These sessions produced such hits as I WANNA BE LIKE KATO (KALEN) and the hit Dr. Demento aired…once…edited…I REALLY LIKE TO EAT POTATOES. I listen back to these tracks and shake my head. These songs are the very definition of crap. And I look back and laugh because at the time I thought they were comic masterpieces and wanted everyone to hear them. To everyone who heard them, I’m sorry. They are crap. On my last comedy song release FAVORITES, I included I REALLY LIKE TO EAT POTATOES as the very last track because I thought it would be fun to see exactly how far I’ve come.
Here’s the point…it’s okay to put out crap. And even if it is crap, you can be proud of it. In many cases, that ‘crap’ leads to something very good. The early KTMA episodes of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 gave Joel and the other people on the show enough material to put together a pitch tape which landed the show on The Comedy Channel which later became Comedy Central. Dr. Demento playing I REALLY LIKE TO EAT POTATOES on his show gave me the fire to continue working on my comedy songwriting and I’d later go on to have a number one song on his show in N.R.L. (THE NURSERY RHYME LAWYER SONG).
The more ‘crap’ you put out, the better your work gets. So keep putting out crap. Crap is okay. And it’s okay to look back at all that crap and be a little proud.
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What early work of yours can you look back at and say, “That was crap.” How much better are you now? Let us know in the comments below.[ Grant Baciocco, 3/4/14, 9:19 PM]