June 13, 2012

A parfumier I shall never be

Spider Mums by vicci

Spider Mums by vicci -- click image for more information

In my mind’s eye, I can still see it: a glass jar filled with water speckled with bits of dirt and spices. Various flowers and grasses float in the water and stick out of the top of the jar. It smells ever-so-vaguely floral but mostly like dirty water. In reality, it is nothing at all like the magically pungent potion I had imagined making from all the ingredients I lovingly collected and thoughtfully mixed.

And that was that. A child’s experiment failed and a life’s work in perfumery easily abandoned.

Thankfully I did not give up on songwriting quite so easily even though the songs produced by my earliest attempts bear a strong resemblance to that jar of dirty flower water. Each overly long song resembled a jumble of too many undigested and indigestible ingredients swimming in a watery soup, never releasing their truest scents.

Here the ingredients were images and story snippets that each meant something very complex and important to me as an adolescent. I knew how to collect them, like so many bright dandelions, but I had to put in my now-proverbial 10,000 hours in order to learn how to cook them to get them to yield their essence.

The best perfume travels lightly on the breeze, touching our senses without overwhelming.

Most importantly it communicates between people: floating with the heat off one person’s skin until it reaches the next person’s nose. My early songs didn’t quite communicate. Perhaps I was afraid of stripping my precious stories and images of their original forms. But this kind of processing is an important part of turning such ingredients into song. I wasn’t willing to play with the ingredients and then play with them again.

As I continue to grow as a songwriter, I want to honor both parts of this process: the child-like instinct to collect a song’s ingredients and the hard, if playful, work of mixing and processing those raw ingredients. The dreaming and collecting part of the work is where the wonder comes from.

The girl who collected the flowers and the grasses was fully aligned with her own “What if?”

Process song ideas too soon and I end up with the musical equivalent of processed cheese: a song that sounds cheap and disconnected from its deeper source. But leave those collected words and melody snippets overprotected and under-processed and the song is a dud – it can’t quite float from my heart to another’s.

What lessons do you learn from early – if failed – attempts at your art? And what helps you keep both these parts of your creative self alive and well?

Filed Under: Finding Your Voice, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , , 1 Comment
February 7, 2012

What are you sweating?

The week before last I began the annual slog through receipts and invoices and interest income statements, organising and spread-sheeting and preparing for our annual visit with the accountant. This week also happens to be the annual event where I berate myself for not having kept up with logging the receipts and the income, and the mileage. The week that I promise myself that THIS year it will be different.

And yet. It never is.

Each January/February I participate in this week of regrets and recrimination for how I’ve handled (or not handled) preparing my tax papers, and each year I promise myself that I will do a better job of keeping up. I will stay on task. Each first of the month I will be sitting right here recording all my monetary deeds. And I do. Until about March or sometimes I stretch it into April. And then it just stops. And I don’t think about it until sometime in October, with a grimace, but I rarely ever sit down to catch up.

Perhaps I can attribute it to nicer weather in spring. Perhaps I am busier in April than in the more wintery months. And perhaps whatever free moments I possess I just don’t want to spend sorting receipts between what is a write off and what is a household expense.

So this year, as I sat down to sort receipts from the last 9 months and that voice in my head started in with, If you had done this each month it would be so much easier to take care of now, I decided that’s it. I need to re-work my approach to the whole tax organising job. Clearly, I am not going to take care of logging all the stuff I need to do for my taxes every first of the month because I’ve been not doing it quite successfully for quite a few years now, no matter how much or how loudly I scold myself.

So I asked myself: how can I re-frame this, leave out the guilt and recriminations I hand myself every year, and just get the job done?

My solution: Schedule a week in late January to pull all my papers and financial info together. Make the appointment with my accountant to keep myself on task, and there, voilà, it’s done.

So of course, I got thinking about how many other areas of my life this approach could work on:

  • What are the places and situations in my life that I consistently don’t come through in a way I’ve decided I should do?
  • What are the tasks that I consistently avoid until it’s deadline time?
  • Where and when am I berating myself when there might be a less painful and easy solution?

I came up with my list, and it’s actually not too long, and I’ve also come up with solutions for just about all of the scenarios. Now get this: in all these situations, I am just re-working what I need to do around how I am already doing it. No re-teaching myself new behaviour that I will potentially resist. No setting rules for myself that I won’t follow. No telling myself I have to do it this way, because so-and-so or such-and-such said it works best that way.

My best solution is to do it the way I always have and build in some checks to keep me on task. That’s it.

My tax spreadsheets are almost done, and I have to say I feel lighter, and happier, and am looking forward to finishing up the tax stuff and feeling that sense of accomplishment. And, the process has gone much more smoothly without me berating myself the whole way through. In fact, it’s taken about half the time it usually does.

So what are some of the tasks in your life that you might avoid and then repeatedly get down on yourself for? And, how can you reverse the trend, get the tasks done in a way that makes sense to you AND not be irritated at yourself?

Filed Under: Buy You, For You, creating action Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
December 8, 2011

Creative Call to Action: Process in Process

A few weeks ago I wrote a big piece for my blog and oh, it was wonderful. The words came so easily. I knew without thinking just how to make each transition from thought to thought. I needed to do some revision, sure, but the whole thing arrived like a fully-formed dream and got a great response from my readers. So I knew that I hadn’t been mistaken – it was good, and it was easy. The best kind of work.

Not long after that I had to write another big piece. It was hard. Every word hurt. I couldn’t get a sentence out without wanting to revise it as I wrote. I started, stopped, and started. I thought about the piece throughout the day and at night, taking messy notes on post-its by my nightstand. I asked other people to read it and give me feedback. I formed it, reformed it, and fussed.

I feared I would never make anything good ever again.

But then, finally, it was polished and actually good. This piece also got a great response from my readers. So I knew I wasn’t mistaken – it had been forged in struggle and came out great. The best kind of work.

I don’t think any reader could tell there was such a difference in the making of the work. The end result was the same. But the the second time around, I was attached to the Easy Way as my process, as How I Do Things. I was expecting ease to lead to greatness and when it wasn’t happening that way, I got flustered.

I think as artists we are often taught, or teach ourselves, to have A Way. Our Personal Process. This can serve us well. I love creating habits, for instance; they can be a shortcut to getting in the groove.

But over-attachment to a certain process, ritual, or state of mind can just lead to stuckness and resistance.

I’ve heard (and believed myself) many of these attachments over the years. Only being able to create while sad or upset. Or happy. Or only during the day or night. Only being able to work in a tidy or chaotic studio. Only when it comes easy and inspired, only when it’s a grind. Only when at my absolute best, most healthy, or most wild.

The truth is, we don’t really need any of these states to make our work.

Each moment of making is different. There’s no one perfect state or process to deliver an idea or execute a concept.

We as creatives are multifaceted, dynamic people. It’s just how we roll. So the next time something is not going how I think it should, I’m just going to try to accept that as my process for the day (not for life). I will do, and make do. And go with it.

That’s my Creative Call to Action for you:

Accept that your process is in process.

Accept that you may have multiple ways of getting to the same place. And enjoy the ride.

Are you attached to a certain process or state of mind for creating your work? Do you hold certain beliefs about when you can create and how it should feel?

Filed Under: Creative Call to Action, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , 10 Comments
November 8, 2011

are you where you want to be with your creative work? keep working


Are you where you want to be with your creative work? Have you started working on a project or an idea and realised that what you are making and what you envision making are not on the same level? Is the vision in your mind so much better that the result right now? Are you disappointed? Wanting to chuck the idea?

Whether you are starting out on your journey as a creator, or are anywhere along your path, you will hit spots where what you’re creating might not live up to the grand idea that sprung forth fully-formed from your brain. I am going to step out on the high wire 10 stories above the pavement here, and say:

I think everyone who embarks on a journey or a life of creating has experienced those moments where their creations are not living up to their expectations and hopes. Everyone.

The not-so-secret answer? Keep going.

Make lots of work. Keep working on your craft. Create a body of work. Create a large body of work. Create an even larger body of work. Keep practicing. Accept that this is your path, and embrace it. Keep working on your ideas, keep inspiring yourself with more ideas.

There are so many things about this life, this creative life, that people don’t tell you, maybe we don’t think to tell each other. I don’t think it’s that anyone is keeping secrets, I think we stumble upon our own answers as we go. We wade through a few streams, and climb a few hills, stumble and fall a few times, and if we’re lucky we have some breakthroughs, and we keep going.

There are many times in my my life where I have wished for a training manual or at the very least one of those picture-based directional pamphlets, like you get when you purchase furniture from Ikea. But as I write that, I also realise that if someone had told me all the things I wished I had known, would I have listened? Probably not. At least not to all of them. You? Perhaps the same?

What I have learned (some of it kicking and screaming along the way) is that the only secret to getting to where I want to go is to just keep going. Your ideas may change. Your vision may shift and grow. Keep going. Your ability to express your creative idea, in whatever form, will only get better. Keep going. This is an ever changing landscape, this creating thing, and since we know that one of the few constants in life is change, accept it in your creative work, too.

Oh, and the second part of that not-so-secret answer? Don’t give up.

Think about the work that you’ve given up on in the past. I have a short to medium list myself. Think about how even after you gave up on the idea or the project, it still comes back and visits you. In dreams. In thoughts. Remember the great idea that you were so excited about but you couldn’t execute just the way you saw it in your mind’s eye, so you stopped? Yeah, that one. If it keeps returning to you, you might want to look at it again.

To get where you want to go with your creative work, to get closer to the vision that you see with your mind’s eye, you just have to work and keep working. It’s that simple.

So the work is not quite the way you want it to look, read, or be heard. Keep working. So you didn’t get the response you wanted from your partner, best friend, studio mate. Keep working. It’s going to take time, it’s going to take practice, and it’s going to take – yup, you got it – work.

This whole topic – how to get where I am going with my art work – is often on my mind. I’ve written many pieces for myself in my creative journal, and then I started working on this piece for Scoutie Girl about 10 days ago. Yesterday, when I was working on edits, a friend sent me a video with words from Ira Glass on just this topic. It’s a lovely bit of synchronicity, and Ira Glass says it all so very well.

So have a listen. Feel his words.
And then go back to your work.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Where is your vision lining up with your executions? Where is it not? Tell us your stories about how you’ve kept working.

Video from David Shyang Liu

Filed Under: creating action, Plot Notes Tagged With: , , , , , , 9 Comments