I have been struggling to produce some form of artistic, or even creative output almost all my life, in different media and contexts, and I have had to learn #14 on my own. Trying hard, and I have thought about this on many occasions, I could not come up with a more essential and fundamental prerequisite to making art. There is so much "art" out there that simply does not have a story to tell. There are so many struggling artists that do not have a story to tell, and they keep wondering why they don't achieve success of any measure. I'm not going to say that realizing this made me insanely successful overnight, but it has given me a direction and hope of ever actually reaching the point at which I can be satisfied with something I have created.
However, I think that it is more important than just as a way to make good art. The quote originally reads:
"Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it."
I would say that this generalizes to:
What is the value of what you're doing?
This is crucial. A lot of people do things without value, or do not focus on the value and let themselves become sidetracked by the whole ritual of their form. What I mean by "the ritual of their form" is the often sizeable set of gimmicks you feel forced to tack onto whatever you are making. For example, every website now "needs" Oauth and social network support and other junk, which is not crucial, but it's something everyone feels they need to have. This sort of ritualistic dance happens in every form of output, be it when they create a computer program, a business (we need to be agile! be green! support the community!), a new philosophy, a new movie, a new bicycle, a new mathematics theorem, a new noodle recipe.
The generalized form does lose its potency, though. Applied literally to music, you'd ask:
What is the value of the music you are creating?
I think asking What is the story your music tells? is much more accurate. I guess I am trying to say that the word value can be interpreted in different ways, and many of them are not going to get you very far from what you are doing already. For example, when thinking of technology, value is application. So I'd ask: What sort of application can this technology bear?
If I were going to add anything to Pixar's list, it would be this:
!!!! KEEP A SCRAPBOOK, ASSOCIATE ENTRIES TO THE VALUES (EMOTIONS, THEMES, APPLICATIONS) THEY EVOKE !!!!
Yup, all caps, so that you don't scroll past. This was the single thing that boosted my productivity most in the last several years, and it out-classes everything else by very, very far.
I currently have two folders under $HOME/Documents, called "creative" and "topics". I first started "topics" where I'd save pages visited, notes, documents, and so on in a directory tree, so for example I have topics/computers/haskell/refactoring/. and topics/electronics/tubes/. and topics/health/bodybuilding/training-plan/. and so on. Later I started noticing that I also visit a lot of creative stuff that I want to keep a track on, which I cannot sort into this rigid system I built under "topics" because it evoked emotions, rather than ideas of practical applications. I guess that this is my Starship & the Canoe (and if you haven't read the book, at least read a summary). The "creative" system came into place a bit after I started trawling Youtube for music I like, and decided to sort it according to emotion. I now have 59 private playlists, with entries like "feeling of optimism and inner peace", "peril / 70s car chase", "hanging at the peak", "hyped", and "pleasant summer sun", many of those have more than 20 entries. Some of the names won't make much of a sense to anyone but me. My "creative" directory contains entries like "beauty", "inspirational", "introversion", "poverty", "trippy", and so on.
If there was only one thing they were to teach me during primary and high school, I wish it was how to do this. Sadly, they didn't. As many people, I can't really pinpoint one skill I use every day that school has taught me.
Why worry about value? I make art mostly because I enjoy the process, and don't usually care about the result at all. It's much easier to handle that way, and I pretty much never get block. If I feel tired of what I'm doing, I just resort to doing exercises or copying and analyzing other people's work. I think the point "why must you tell this story" is not about whether you should make art, write that story, draw that picture, but for you to research your inner reason to make this piece. Obviously you tell the story because you want to, this question just helps you make the intention clearer, so that you can structure your work around it in order to bring that essence out. In photography/painting, you would pick a main subject, which can be anything you find interesting, images you see or images you imagine or just abstract work, and then build the image around the reason you find that image interesting. Not about whether the image or the work of art has any inherent value, of course it has because you are making it.
> Why worry about value? I make art mostly because I enjoy the process
<black turtleneck> Because if you do something to enjoy yourself it isn't art, it's onanism </black turtleneck>
> research your inner reason to make this piece
exactly. Some people never do that, and once you look behind the scenes and try to answer this question it turns out there's no inner reason and it's just paint by numbers. I think we're just talking about the same thing in different terms: your inner reason is the value that I talk about.
> Obviously you tell the story because you want to
I very much abstracted from stories in my comment above - the question I said is necessary to ask yourself is:
* "what story does your music tell?"
* "what story does your painting tell?"
* "what story does your business tell?"
You're right, asking what story does your story tell is a bit senseless. But back to value: really, what sort of person goes to people, and tells them stories with no value what so ever? If I knew that guy and he kept coming back I'd punch him in the face. I am assuming you tell people your stories because you are encouraged, because they find them cool. Here, "cool" is also of value. With time you'll notice more important things in life that can be achieved with storytelling, be it moral support, politics, philosophy. Those are values just like your "cool", but often end up working at a deeper level. Because what's "cool", really? Your cool skateboarder character might end up being "cool" because they're a defiant character who doesn't give up. He might be "cool" for other reasons that meld together seamlessly to just display "cool", but if you analyse it further you can break it down to very deep, fundamental values being displayed, and balanced against his shortcomings.
> In photography/painting, you would pick a main subject, which can be anything you find interesting, images you see or images you imagine or just abstract work
That's waiting for your work to do itself. It takes ages to come up with something good this way. That's like randomly bashing on the piano and trying to come up with a cool melody. And you know what, I did that when I was starting with piano, and I did that quite a lot, and it taught me some things. But it's not the smart way to go. Photography, painting, and music are figurative forms. This means they convey deeper meaning by use of trite objects in intricate compositions or settings. The right way to go is to find an abstract subject or meaning you want to go, and come up with a subject that will convey some or most of it, and then make it work. This makes the difference between a guy with a flickr stream and a photographer who goes out, takes one photo, and it's a hit. If you want to take ten thousand photos and only find one thing which meaning can be assigned to, that's one approach, and lots of people do it. But it's an amazing loss of time because trying to reverse-engineer meaning into one of a thousand pictures is difficult and time-consuming. Better to make the picture work for your purpose, not your purpose work for the picture.
> and then build the image around the reason you find that image interesting.
Exactly. That's the thing. You have to find an image that is interesting. You forgot to mention, but you also have to find an image that other people will find interesting, otherwise you're again just shaking your dick. Art is communication with other people, it doesn't work solo. If you come up with an idea that lots of people share, you can convey it by means of a picture. You can't say "oh, a lot of people share this picture with me" but you can say "I bet a lot of people share this value or feeling or interest with me". That's why it's easier to connect with your consumers if you first think about the meaning of your output, tune it to what they will like, and only then follow this up with form that conveys the meaning. If you first come up with form, and then try to stick meaning onto it, it just doesn't work.
Another issue with retrofitting meaning onto form is that you often come up with fairly stretched analogies, and those end up working for less and less people. If you retrofit meaning onto form, the form will be ambiguous, because there will be angles from which you hadn't viewed your art, and it's difficult to cover all possible analyses of your form and make sure they all end up conveying your retrofitted meaning. If you come up with meaning first, and create a form while keeping the meaning in your head at all times, then in every second of the form's creation you shape it towards conveying the meaning. This has much better, more coherent results.
> Not about whether the image or the work of art has any inherent value, of course it has because you are making it
Is that really so? Nowadays you can easily say 99% of all photography is throwaway. When it started out, it was pretty much art, no matter whether high art or kitsch. Would you say every photograph out there has some inherent value and meaning? Bear in mind that this isn't up to the person who made the photograph, it's up to the people who look at it, and evaluate it. Value is in the eye of the beholder, and if you can't make the beholder see the value, then you fail as an artist.
Thanks for the comment, it was very thought-provoking.
I still stand by my point of view. You have to enjoy the process first, and if you plan to show your work to other people, or publish it, then you go into the curation and editing process. No photographer goes out, takes one picture, and it's a hit. No author writes a book and it's a worthy book from the first draft. Often the meaning of the work shows itself while you're creating it. Or you will find a theme, a meaning while doing random shiznit. And really the most important part for me is to enjoy it, else why would I do it? That way I keep my productivity up, and if after discarding 99% people like the remaining 1%, good for them.
My system for being creative is slightly easier to follow:
1. Do cool things
2. Show them to people
And that's pretty much it.
However, I do keep a notebook in my pocket at all times to jot down interesting ideas, not so much because I'd ever look at it again, but because it makes me think about it a little bit longer.
My value evaluation system is similarly silly - if I still remember the idea a week from now, two weeks from now ... whatever. If I have an idea consistently for a long period of time, then there's probably something there. The next step is to make it and see if anyone else thinks there's something there.
Or at least to tell people and ask them if they think there's something there.
> if I still remember the idea a week from now, two weeks from now ... whatever. If I have an idea consistently for a long period of time, then there's probably something there.
Hmm, I think you're losing out a lot by not making an honest effort to work on your ideas.
Something insignificant today could be important ten years from now, that's why photographers often have such huuuuuge collections of photos.
I'd also venture a guess that sometimes your work is repetitive. If you start recording what you did when then you can notice this and 1. stop repeating yourself 2. start re-using the work that really does need to be repeated
But the biggest reason to keep a scrapbook is that quite often the best ideas work like this for me: I have an idea today, two months down the line I get something in my mind and I try to compare it to things already in my scrapbook; turns out it's that idea from two months ago. Then, a year or so down the line I'll revisit it, and come up with a tiny detail that makes the thing complete and ten times better. Ideas are like puzzles, and sometimes you get a new piece every ten years. By not keeping a scrapbook I deprived myself of the ability to solve the puzzles of my life. It was like some Kafkan nightmare where I ran around in circles with no apparent purpose and nothing to show for all my effort.
However, I think that it is more important than just as a way to make good art. The quote originally reads:
"Why must you tell THIS story? What's the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That's the heart of it."
I would say that this generalizes to:
What is the value of what you're doing?
This is crucial. A lot of people do things without value, or do not focus on the value and let themselves become sidetracked by the whole ritual of their form. What I mean by "the ritual of their form" is the often sizeable set of gimmicks you feel forced to tack onto whatever you are making. For example, every website now "needs" Oauth and social network support and other junk, which is not crucial, but it's something everyone feels they need to have. This sort of ritualistic dance happens in every form of output, be it when they create a computer program, a business (we need to be agile! be green! support the community!), a new philosophy, a new movie, a new bicycle, a new mathematics theorem, a new noodle recipe.
The generalized form does lose its potency, though. Applied literally to music, you'd ask:
What is the value of the music you are creating?
I think asking What is the story your music tells? is much more accurate. I guess I am trying to say that the word value can be interpreted in different ways, and many of them are not going to get you very far from what you are doing already. For example, when thinking of technology, value is application. So I'd ask: What sort of application can this technology bear?
If I were going to add anything to Pixar's list, it would be this:
!!!! KEEP A SCRAPBOOK, ASSOCIATE ENTRIES TO THE VALUES (EMOTIONS, THEMES, APPLICATIONS) THEY EVOKE !!!!
Yup, all caps, so that you don't scroll past. This was the single thing that boosted my productivity most in the last several years, and it out-classes everything else by very, very far.
I currently have two folders under $HOME/Documents, called "creative" and "topics". I first started "topics" where I'd save pages visited, notes, documents, and so on in a directory tree, so for example I have topics/computers/haskell/refactoring/. and topics/electronics/tubes/. and topics/health/bodybuilding/training-plan/. and so on. Later I started noticing that I also visit a lot of creative stuff that I want to keep a track on, which I cannot sort into this rigid system I built under "topics" because it evoked emotions, rather than ideas of practical applications. I guess that this is my Starship & the Canoe (and if you haven't read the book, at least read a summary). The "creative" system came into place a bit after I started trawling Youtube for music I like, and decided to sort it according to emotion. I now have 59 private playlists, with entries like "feeling of optimism and inner peace", "peril / 70s car chase", "hanging at the peak", "hyped", and "pleasant summer sun", many of those have more than 20 entries. Some of the names won't make much of a sense to anyone but me. My "creative" directory contains entries like "beauty", "inspirational", "introversion", "poverty", "trippy", and so on.
If there was only one thing they were to teach me during primary and high school, I wish it was how to do this. Sadly, they didn't. As many people, I can't really pinpoint one skill I use every day that school has taught me.