Posts about the creative process.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
William Shakespeare
Amen. Done. ✅
[Author attempts to restrain self and stop here but must link to a related joke, a fashion analogy, and a counter-example.]
Okay, also…
Being a storyteller and not just a basic sage, Shakespeare had some amusing / ironic context around this quote, including a “windy preface”, as part of the play Hamlet.
Brevity is taken to the extreme at The McKittrick Hotel in New York, where you can experience a Shakespearian tale with no words.
I always liked the song Beautiful Day for its optimism and presence.
It’s a beautiful day. Don’t let it get away.
Sure, that’s the obvious takeaway and a great reminder that every day counts.
But the last part of the song has been inspiring me even more as I dig into a scary new skill, which I hope is the right kind of difficult for me: playing, singing, and eventually writing my own songs. 😱
I do not have a good track record here so far.
I have spent most of my life as the kind of guy who could play Stairway to Heaven on guitar and be done with it. “I’m a guitarist.” 🤷🏻♂️ Then I recorded a cover with a friend and built up some confidence.
What I really want is to do find my own voice. Literally.
Despite never considering myself a singer (and consistently receiving negative feedback whenever I have tried 😆) I am jumping into singing with the help of an expert music teacher who always sees the best possibilities.
And that’s half the journey.
Touch me, take me to that other place
Reach me, I know I’m not a hopeless case
Which brings me to the best part of Beautiful Day: the last bit, the part about forgetting what you don’t have now and feeling your way, somehow, into the new.
What you don’t have, you don’t need it now
What you don’t know, you can feel it somehow
Stay tuned. 🎤
What a beautiful day.
Continuing to pull some helpful snippets out of Show Your Work, let’s look at the “So What?” test.
I had struggled for a while on this blog with the “to post or not to post” question. I was honing in on a vague “useful or interesting” test when I read Show Your Work, which attacked this idea with a “So What?” test.
I had a professor in college who returned our graded essays, walked up to the chalkboard, and wrote in huge letters: “SO WHAT?” She threw the piece of chalk down and said, “Ask yourself that every time you turn in a piece of writing.
Now any of my own posts must pass the “Sow what?” test before I will publish it. Clearly I found this “So what?” test useful because I use it here constantly.
As always, the book explains the idea most vividly with an illustration.
I will say that this rule seems at odds (or is it just tension?) with other ideas in the book, namely share something small every day.
I mean, do you really have something interesting and useful to share every day? If you’re a professional writer, maybe. But if you’re just a guy with a blog and limited time, maybe not. 😆
So I’m letting the “So what?” rule overrule any others for now.
I think Neil Gaiman pretty well captures the magic of creation with this quote.
The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.
Neil Gaiman
Turns out the dude can also draw, at least in a sketchy kind of way that I hope to master someday as well, if only for practical purposes.
I love the anecdote about writing a short story for his daughter’s 18th birthday that Daily Inspiration added for context on this quote.
The little, square book Show Your Work has changed they way I think about blogging, processing my ideas, and has even helped me see my own music playlists differently.
And thus, my first book snippet.
Okay, it’s actually my second snippet – I just didn’t realize that the first one (also from this book) was a snippet when I wrote it.
This book says that creative people should embrace collecting as part of the creation process.
There’s not as big of a difference between collecting and creating as you might think.
Show Your Work
Great musicians, writers, and artists tend to collect and appreciate other people’s work. “The reading feeds the writing, which feeds the reading,” the book says. Or to put it another way:
You’re only as good as your record collection.
DJ Spooky, via Show Your Work
Hopefully this approach works for me as I dig into music creation.
To that end, here is my ever-growing list of new songs I like, built up gradually over the last few years, thanks to Shazam and a few coffee shops with their own great playlists. As of this writing, this playlist is over 49 hours long and could double as its own radio station.
Don’t hoard indeed. 🤷🏻♂️
Mental Break Town 