Lately I’ve been on a kick. People get on kicks. Shallow thinkers like myself, haha. We start to view everything through a certain lens and over-apply the notion. I’ve seen pundits do this, back when I read news. Anyway, my kick is “alive people energy.” I’ve been thinking all creative endeavors are improved by investing them with the sense of an active continuous idea within. Like a given scene, a given chapter, a given illustration or piece of music, at different steps within your process it’s good to step back and hold the whole idea in your head at once, run through it, ask yourself if it feels alive. Like you conceived the whole idea like a deep breath and let it out in a harmonious flow as a single exhalation. If that makes sense. You could do this on your first draft, but editing can break that energy, make stuff feel choppy and lethargic, so during editing you want to stop from time to time and make sure your art is still alive. Bring the alive people energy.
On the other hand, I have been considering recently if I might be mildly bipolar, and this feels like the kind of bullshit an art teacher would say to a class while standing on his desk, before going home and contemplating suicide, string music filling his studio apartment, his cats unfed and too weary to complain. But worry not, my Hecubus will be fed and I don’t know from classical music. Also didn’t some tech billionaire creep make an erotic message to a mistress calling her “alive girl”? This feels like a related disease.
The most important thing to come of this post, I think, will be that it takes the Thursday meme post off the top of my feed before it becomes Friday. Think on that.
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Being shallow gets kind of a bum rap. People are shallow all the time without causing any harm. I may be forgetting something but I think it only matters when you’re ducking out of commitments or trivializing what someone else is feeling/experiencing by being that way.
As far as the art creation discussion, I tend to think of that as the flow of the piece. I work mainly with words so I don’t know how well that translates to visual art. But when writing it’s a big deal. Your flow needs to work. It doesn’t have to be at full throttle the entire time, it just has to suit what you’re doing. I’m not a writer for two reasons. One, I don’t feel this flow too much anymore. Second, when I did it tended to work for shorter pieces but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it in longer efforts. Part of that is likely that I didn’t get a lot of practice with longer pieces. I never touch nanowrimo for example because it sounds like a great way to bum me out, so respect there. 🙂
short stories are legit tho, do what u can when u can