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Tuesday, November 17, 2009

BEDN Day 17- Going on tangents actually turn into an overall theme here. Weird.

November is half over (holy crap! ALREADY?!) so I'm probably supposed to be all excited or something that BEDN is half over. I'm actually to the point where im irritated that November isnt farther along. I thought I was going to enjoy this more than I do but I also thought that I would come up with things to talk about each day. It went SO WELL for the first week or so. About 4 of the blogs or so that i've done this month I really enjoyed writing and seeing how they turned out overall. Then there are those other ones (like this one probably) that are just...ehhh. But, i guess that's part of the writing process. Being an art student I should know that not everything you do will turn out. Sometimes it turns out better than you imagined, sometimes it's just as you imagine, but probably MOST of the time it turns out worse than you imagine.

If you're at a point where you're doing something (writing, art, etc) and things are starting to turn out how you expect/better than you expect half or most of the time, you've probably been doing whatever it is that you do for a long long time and have had lots of practice to get where you art. On the whole, I believe that I do not have the patience for these kinds of things.

In my case, i guess it would be art. (since im an art student I feel obliged to say that). I'm in my 5th semester of art college (by that I mean the art program that the community college :/ ) and I have these kinds of experiences all the time. For the most point, i experience disappointment. There are a few things that I have made in my 5 semesters that I am VERY proud of, the others are basically just practice. Kind of like a learn from your mistakes sort of thing. Of all the stuff ive made at school I only appreciate about 10% of it. And only about 4% of that 10% is stuff that I have blown myself away with (that may not have been the best choice of words).

I guess im sort of opening discussion about this general topic rather than telling you something giving an opinion. What I'm mostly trying to say is that whatever you do, you're ALWAYS going to do things that dont turn out right. This is supposed to happen. Humans are not perfect and we're supposed to learn from mistakes.

Another interesting aspect of this is you might do something that is really important and amazing at the time, and then it becomes useless and lame over time.

A great example of this is YouTube videos.

When I started making videos I was trying to put as much as I knew into them. I started off VERY inexperienced. After a year I got so sick of the baggage that came along with the crappy videos that I made (which seemed really awesome at the time I made them) that I decided to scrap the entire channel and start over with my new channel PaulSaysThings. If you look at my videos in order you can literally see growth and development. I learn new things and try new things with videos all the time. The more time I spend with them the more angle I begin to think about. Something that i've found to be important now that I didnt even think about when I started was to think about my videos from the perspective of the viewer. I had some videos on my old channel that were 5-7 minutes long. When I get on youtube nowadays and see a video in my inbox that's that long, unless I really care about what the person has to say I dont even bother with the video. I wasnt even giving useful or entertaining information in these older videos. I was just talking about my week or whatever. It was horrible. But at the time, i thought it was pretty great.

So you're going to have bad ideas. It'll happen. You need to learn to embrace is and just tough it out. I have problems with this even now. I'll think of a video idea and put it off, and put if off until eventually I dont even like the idea anymore. But it is important to write things, make videos, make art, etc when the inspiration hits you. Dive right in and hope for the best. It (usually) wont always turn out but you will almost always gain SOME kind of knowledge or experience from it.


Im trying to think of a good metaphor for the creative process. I guess I could say its like hunting (?). I've never been hunting but it's like: you go out in hopes of killing many furry aminals. Sometimes you get more than you hoped for, sometimes less. Hunting actually has more chance involved than creating things but you catch my drift.

So maybe it's a good idea to dive into something with no expectations?

Maybe it's good to have NO expectations?


However you do it, if you enjoy it, keep doing it over and over again. Refine your technique. Learn. Train. Hone your skillzzzz. Eventually you may get so good at whatever you do that even the things that turn out bad arent all that bad.

Like Dream Theater's albums. (OH GOD NO DONT MENTION DREAM THEATER AGAIN! NO STOP! NO MORE DREAM THEATER BLOGS!) Their 8th album is my least favorite. However, this doesnt mean that it's not a completely fantastic album compared to other music because they have a refined technique that allows their flaws to still be above par.

I repeated myself alot in this and it's been kind of a weird blog but I hope it was somewhat interesting. By now you may be able to tell that my writing is kind of a start to finish sort of thing where I dive in with a few ideas and little to no expectations and see where it takes me. Writing is probably the easiest thing for me to do while following these guidelines I've talked about. I'm having a weird/hard time explaining myself because im in a self conscious mood because of things that have transpired today.

Even if I didnt like how this blog turned out, I DID gain something from it: I thought of a topic for tomorrow's blog :)

1 comment:

  1. the same happens to me when i take pictures. usually when ever i take pictures on a whole roll of film(24 shots) i only have a few of them that are actually good, but those few are still generally not as good as i would have wanted them. and i end up feeling very disappointed. you always say you never know what to write about but then you get something interesting out of it.

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