Tag: Inspiration
Creative Mondays #043 – A bedside notebook.
This one is going to be one for the ‘duh’ column but it’s an important reminder for creative tyoes and our scattered right brians.
Keep a notebook and pen or pencil next to your bed so that when you have a inspirational thought (or dream) in the middle of the night, you can jot it down.
No matter how much you think to yourself that you’ll remember the idea in the morning, YOU WILL NOT. Okay, maybe you will every now and then, but do you really want to risk the possibility of losing a REALLY, REALLY good idea? No. THen keep the notebook by your bed.
Every year around the start of fall, stores like Rite-Aid, CVS or Walgreens sell those 70 page spiral notebooks for under a dollar. Usually something crazy like 60 cents or so. I usually pick up a few. Then, on my nightstand I put one of those notebooks, opened to a blank page with a pen resting right on top of it.
If inspiration strikes in the middle of the night, I reach for the notebook and pen without even turning on the light. Then, I slowly start writing down the idea on the page. I don’t worry about writing on the lines, I just try to write as deliberately neatly as possible in the dark so that in the morning I can read what I’ve written.
I write in big letters, turning the page if I get to the bottom. Again, the main goal is to get the idea down, not write a report you’re turning in for a grade. The reason for doing it in this manner is so I don’t have to turn on the light. Personally, if I turn on the light, I’ll be awake. This method really works for me.
In the morning I read through what I wrote and then transfer it to my Creative Idea Journal for further action. Once it is safely transferred, I will tear out the pages from the nighttime notebook and then place it back on my nightstand, ready for the next late night inspiration.
This is my method but you may have some other way of doing it. I’d thought about jotting the things down on my iPhone, but if you think light wakes me up, the iPhone would have me up answering emails.
This bedside notebook does the trick.
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Do you have a method for recording those late night ideas or dreams? If so, let me know what it is in the comments below. Have a creative week!
Thanks Robin
I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t already been said a million times over.
When I was little, I had Mork suspenders from Mork & Mindy.
In junior high, my grandmother bought me a cassette of Live at the Met that I listened to over and over and over and over.
I can still, to this day, quote quotes from Good Morning Vietnam. “Hot enough in my shorts I can cook in them. A little ‘crotch pot’ cookin’.”
In high school, I cried at the end of Hook. When the little girl wakes up and sees her parents. If it was on right now, I’d cry.
When I first started working at Disneyland in 1993, merchandise with The Genie from Aladdin on it was the majority of what I used my cast member discount on.
After college, into my stand up years, I always totally respected the stories I’d hear of Robin just popping in to small hole in the wall places (The Mock Cafe in San Francisco) and watching comedy and doing a set. So amazing that a star would do that.
Thank you Robin.
Thank you for a lifetime of laughs.
Creative Mondays #018 – The right people will get this.
“The right people will get this.”
This one one of my all time favorite quotes. It is a quote by Joel Hodgson, creator of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Cinematic Titanic. If you have followed my blog or Twitter feed or whatever, you have no doubt read it before. Joel was said it in response if someone asked him if he worried that some people may not get all the jokes on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. His response was, “We never ask, ‘Who’s gonna get this?’ We always say, ‘The right people will get this’.”
To me this statement boils down to not trying to create art for a specific audience. Create art that is wholly and truly for you and it will find an audience. This is what I’ve tried to do in the art I create.
When I came up with the idea of The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd based on characters that Doug and I had created, I never had an audience in mind outside of the idea pleased me. I don’t even think at the beginning Doug was all to sure why I wanted to create a silly little radio show based on these characters. But once we got going he got on board full force and the show soon became something that in it’s base elements, just made the two of us laugh. This is how we made the show and the show found an audience.
I will say that we did make a small change in how we wrote the show at the very beginning with the audince in mind. In the beginning we were fine with double entendre. In the Wright Brothers episode the joke was that the Wright Brothers wanted to invent the plane because they were secretly peanut farmers and if they invented the plane, they would required peanuts be served on every flight. One of the Brothers had the line, “Someday the world will know the wonders of our nuts.” (A tip of the hat to the line in the Ren & Stimpy Show’s Rubber Nipple Salesmen episode.) We found this funny, but once we began podcasting and we received emails from families saying how much their kids loved the show we thought twice about doing jokes like that. Other than that though, we did a show that made us laugh.
When ‘Hollywood’ stared calling us talking about the possibility of turning it into a TV show, one of the first questions we would be asked is, “What’s the demographic?” This was so hard to answer because we never, ever, thought about it. We would say it’s a kids’ show or a family show, but we’d never have a specific demographic in mind and that’s what Hollywood wants. A specific demographic. We would say, “Our demographic is everybody.” Because we’d get phone calls from people ages 3 to 80. But Hollywood wanted a specific age range. Did THe Muppet Show have a demographic when it was pitched? If so, I’d say that’s the demographic. Everybody.
With Dr. Floyd, the right people ‘got us.’ They got our sense of humor, our references, our jokes and for a little radio show that was recorded, mostly, in the living room of my tiny, one bedroom apartment, we did pretty good.
So create art that excites you and put it out there. The right audience will find you.
Creative Mondays #017 – Keep moving forward.
Keep moving forward.
Like Dory from Finding Nemo says, “Just keep swimming.” I think this is great creative advice. Keep creating and by this I mean, yes you should create every day, but also work on something, complete it and then move on to the next project.
When we started The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, the first episodes are not really amazing. The sound quality, the pacing, several other little things could use a tweak here or there. But early on in the process we came up with the unwritten rule, just keep going. Get the current episode so it’s the best it can be in a certain time frame and then move on to creating the next episode. This is still a rule I employ today on all the projects I work on.
We could have spent forever tweaking ten different episodes of Dr. Floyd until they were perfect. Instead, when an episode was as good as it was going to be right then, we released it and moved on to the next episode. In the end we had over 150 episodes of the show and that large number of produced episodes impressed people when we went and pitched the show. There were over 150 stories that could be converted to a new format from the start.
Now I’m not saying rush through your project to get a big number, not at all. Wheat I’m saying is know when to say, “This is good enough, let me start the next one.” The great thing about this is you will only get better with each project. Mistakes made on one will be ocrrected in the next. Something that was ‘just quite not right’ about one, will push you to make it more to your liking in the next one.
Being in Los Angeles as long as I have, I’ve known a handful of people who have one script they are constantly working on, tweaking, polishing to get ‘just right’ to pitch. They work years on it when, instead, they could be writing more and more scripts and, with each one, becoming a better writer and building up a great ‘back catalog’ of ideas.
So, just keep creating. Don’t stop. Know when to move on ot the next project and don’t stagnate on one project forever.
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Do you have a project that you’ve been languishing too long on? What can you do today to start wrapping it up and move onto a new one? Let me know below.