What I Do when I Can't Do Creative

When last we met, I was trying to animate a slightly more horse-looking horse than what I could manage when scribbling. Well, you can try as much as you want sometimes and all you get is something ... more purple.




It wasn't just the horse that refused to work. For three days, virtually everything I touched frustrated. By the third day, impatience had grown into crankiness - a really good sign that I had to do something about it. I'd have worked on it even sooner if I'd realized where I was heading.

Anyway and luckily, I've done this for a long time and have learned to check in on a few possible culprits. (They were downgraded to 'possible' from 'probable' years ago, but those little bastards know how to dig themselves in.) Because I invented them, invited them in, it's easiest to ask myself the following questions straight out:

1. Is there any - and I mean ANY - part of me focusing on applause or admiration or flickering daydreams of them gasping and grasping, finally, my genius?

This is a very private thing and no amount of talking about it in a pub will clear it up. I obviously really like sharing my work and want to do stuff that's good for my career and I even have visions of doing projects that speak to a big old audience, but I have to do that from the business part of mind mind, not the creator part.

2. Am I holding on to stuff just because I did it?

Oh, THIS was a problem when I first started animating. I told myself - PROMISED myself - that I'd just 'try it out' but after hours and hours of work, my brain's hands would wave all over the place while it shrieked: I can't! I can't do any more! Oh, those were some ugly moments. When I started teaching Flash to kids, it's one of the first things I tried to impress on them: let it go.

If the computer blows up, you haven't lost anything at all. You've been teaching yourself SOMETHING, guaranteed, and often, if what you had was great and wonderful and wanted desperately to be in the world, you'll be able to recreate it - only better.

The thing is, some things need marinading, need revisions, need re-doing. It's a good thing, to throw stuff away. To stop and start all over. Clinging to what doesn't work is making a contract with a poverty consciousness. When I hear any echo of 'I can't,' I know it's true.

I'm pretty committed to 'I can.'

3. Am I paying attention? Am I receptive? Am I loose?

Or am I letting some irritation nag at me, some tiny resentment I thought was hidden away scratch its way to the surface? Sometimes, it'll just distract. Sometimes, I'll find myself overcompensating.

I take the time to set it straight with some spiritual exercising. This is probably why I'm addicted to forgiveness and being really big grateful for all the creative juice I can squeeze out. THIS is where I want to be, buoyed by bliss-y stuff.

4. Am I doing the work? Am I pushing my boundaries and edges and DOING the work?

This last one was the gangster that came to stay for three days. Jeeeeeze.

Although I'm a self confessed not-looker-up of reference material, I'm otherwise typically all about the work. I like it. Everything I do, even the tedious stuff, informs the final outcome. To know more is to have a richer vocabulary I can access (and I don't mean a vocabulary of words, but of ideas and techniques). I'm not anal or fastidious - I just enjoy the sensation of discipline and the results (even if the process can be difficult - see this new program I'm learning. It was hell, it was hell, it was he- Oooh! Suddenly, all the pennies dropped and stuff started working!).

BUT. Sometimes, I'll decide to try something new. And I'll forget that I only got where I am after work. Some how, I allow myself to be deluded into thinking that by sheer force of wanting it, it'll work out.

It's bad enough when it happens on one project. I was doing it in three - a script, a horse animation and a painting.

So. I let the script go and started new. Yesterday I painted alllll over the increasingly terrible painting and got at least a sketch up of my happy woman. And the horse? Well ...

of course it's a horse

You might remember I can't draw a horse.

At least, I can't draw one from memory. It's as if I've only seen them in a block, a block painted in primary colors with a big H for horsie.

Here's a horse I scribbled last night just to get it out of my system:



In spite of knowing this about myself, I still will not consult a reference - not for a horse or money or plane or fish or bird or most other things with mechanical details that contribute to their locomotion.

Not entirely true. I WILL eventually look them up, just to take a peek, but not before I've wasted a whole lot of time doing it my way.

I'm not the only one who forges ahead without facts or a solid foundation. (I'm undecided whether or not that's a comfort. For now, it's just an observation.)

I wonder - don't you? - if Haiti will be a case in point. There's going to come a time when relief has to turn into recovery, restoration, re-building. It's easy breezy to find people who know stuff about Haiti expertly sighing that Haiti's half of the island didn't get into sad ass conditions without a whole lot of trying by a whole lot of people to get there.

Maybe this time around, someone will at least google it.

A Snack until Dinner

She dabbles, she fiddles, she edits, she revises and still - STILL - she doesn't have anything finished enough to pop it on a blog. What the hell is UP with her?

I don't know. It's a good thing it's not a dinner party or there'd be some mighty testy people milling about.

In the meantime, a little something because it's the middle of January and doesn't that really say it all? Yes, I thought so.



In Haiti news, my friend, Innkeeper to Go, posted an elegantly simple way to help. Give up the shoes; buy new ones. Either way, there are people who need them. These are the things that are tucked right in there, on Maslow's hierarchy of needs (well, unless you come from that tribe that goes barefoot but there are loads of romantic myths surrounding them. Can we just agree that a shoe is not a bad thing? Okay, then.)

Here's the page to kind drop off locations in your zip code area: http://www.soles4souls.org/about/locations.cgi