Recalibrating your taste and conviction
Contents
- News
- Pep-talk: Recovering your creative conviction
- Random
News
I’m so so honored to be in Lee Mandelo’s upcoming Anthology, Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity. Just check out that ToC! My contribution is a cozy vignette inspired by ‘if it fits it sits’.
It will be published by Erewhon and should be out sometime in 2025. Read the teasers on Reactor Mag here!
In more good news, I’ll also be a 2024–25 Reading Fellow for Tin House! The Tin House Winter Workshop was my very first juried workshop, and an amazing experience. Very grateful to contribute back to one of the communities that kept me going on my long and winding journey.
And now, this edition’s pep talk.
Recovering your creative conviction
Wonder-led creative conviction just feels good. It’s this quiet, powerful energy in my gut that makes me feel secure in myself. It makes me feel like even pain can have meaning in the end, and keeps me connected to others. It’s a high I’m always chasing.
Over time, the edges of my conviction wear down, and I have to resharpen them. Maybe this happens to you as well…
…when you haven’t had proper time to play, explore, and flow.
…when you’ve lost a piece of yourself, achieving in a soul sucking career—whether or not it was ever billed as creatively fulfilling.
…when the algo has decided to only present you one salacious, reductive slice of the internet, all bc you looked at a post too long in your feed.
…when it’s Wednesday, or it is raining.
I quit my full-time dayjob last week. (More about what’s next some other time. Wish me luck.) I knew I’d need time to unplug, but it feels like I’m unplugging the 15+ years of dayjobs I've worked, not two.
While employed, I’ve dipped in and out of trusting my own personal taste. I’m secure with regards to writing right now. I know what I like, I know what I’m doing—but it feels like I’ve fallen totally out of following my own creative conviction everywhere else. It feels like I only know how to please other people or dance for metrics.
And you know what? I’m cringing that it’s come to this for me, that I burnt out this hard. I feel as if I should have the spine to counter this, that it says more about me than anything else, but it’s okay. I accept this.
If you sympathy-cringe at the idea of losing your own conviction, please be gentle with yourself. In theory, it’s a gift to serve with your work—in design, to please, enable, or delight others by creating experiences or shaping information in a clarifying way. But it’s all twisted up. In a commercial environment, we’re not gifting anyone anything or reaching purely for communion, unless we are very privileged. We do it for dollars, health insurance, attention, portfolio pieces, reach. And we do it with an air of desperation, especially in this economy.
Sucks. But you have got to eat.
Gentle.
Despite the constant recalibration, I really believe this is one of the highest human experiences we can have: enjoying and creating meaning, that lightning rod of experience, alone and together.
Here’s how I’m planning to recalibrate my taste and conviction over the back half of this year. I hope it’s some use to you as well.
Start from the beginning
What did you love as a kid? Obsessions, problematic faves, the tapes you played over and over until the cellophane ran thin, the discs that you stored reverently in your plasticky storage binder? Watch the movies again, listen to the album, read the book. It might not hit the same, but note each thing down. Include why you loved it, or just write down the title. If you wanna be vague with yourself, that’s fine.
No one can stop you, baby! This is your time! Making the list and looking at the things is the work. Even if you did nothing else, you’ve successfully entertained your own taste and listened. That’ll mean something. That’ll rebuild trust with yourself. That’ll signal to your gut it is worth listening to.
I to I, me to me.
Crawl up through time, and keep making the list. Your twenties, thirties, and beyond if you’re so lucky to be long in the tooth.
Sit back and see
Look for what’s in common. What themes seem to drive you? What do you return to over and over again? What motifs and flourishes get your engine revving? Which subjects and settings makes you breathless, what drops your jaw?
Look for what’s missing. Have you mostly enjoyed the work of the white American establishment? Should you look into what’s going on elsewhere? Are you only into watercolor or poetry, when there’s a vast library of human creation out there? Isn’t that exciting? A whole world is waiting for your attention and this is your key.
Map your journey so far. Where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from, Cotton Eye Joe? Just in case my age was still a mystery after the cellophane and CD book comments. Anyway—why shouldn’t you have a secret resume with your real credentials? The things that make you true to yourself? Include the media you know spurred you to make something of your own, even if you hated the final outcome.
Think out loud
Think. Make. No one has to see this. In fact, I think it’s easier if no one does. Start producing again. Create hedonistically, only do what feels good. Examine what you’ve learned with corny homages, fan letters, deep questions, simple lines and colors.
In some way all creation is just homage to what’s come before. We use the same pencils everyone else has, grab color palettes from movie stills and artfully describe the petals falling from a particular cherry tree someone planted fifty years ago.
Don’t worry about novelty or whether or not your work has that arresting quality that we all want. Just worry about it being true.
This builds a baseline. I heard once that style can only be nudged: stuff comes out how it comes out. I’m interested in this idea and debating if it’s true, but that’s fodder for a bigger think.
Resist external pressure
You can’t control that things will influence you. You can only control what you surround yourself with and what influences you.
Practice making things that are unmonetizable. Without the temptation of gathering likes or dimes, you can free yourself from external pressure. This can even be a peripheral hobby. For me, it’s fiber arts. I cannot make money on a hundred hour sweater when H&M sells the polyester equivalent for $18. This teaches me to love the process, and make things only I can use.
I’ll say it again: Social should determine what you sell, not what you make. There’s a distinction between deciding what you’ll put down on paper, versus what you’ll make for production. This distinction helps me personally. Others can have a say in what I sell, never what I explore.
Your audience is smaller than you think. Matthew Sallesses has a lot of wisdom regarding audience in Craft and the Real World and in this interview. If you understand that we consume outside of our intended audience all the time, this will help. In a lecture I attended, he offered an exercise where you think of the 1 person you write for, the 100 people you will write for, and then the thousand. It’s detailed in the interview above, and shows us how little we have to dilute ourselves to be seen and understood.
Be gentle gentle gentle
This is not an act of achievement or sheer will. It is an act of re-truing the bicycle wheels. Although this is a poor metaphor, because your creativity is not a thin strip of aluminum that you have to treat lightly. It is a benevolent force that always comes back, and is always recoverable.
———
Random
Things have escalated over here. I bought a drop spindle, and then a tiny Saxony style spinning wheel to spin my own yarn. Like…an…actual…spinster. This is still hilarious to me, but I love it. Turning a cloud of wool into a garment is so satisfying. Luckily I don’t think I have space to keep a sheep [sweating emoji].
I’m also planning on reviving my DIYMFA for the next six months and studying illustration, SwiftUI, game design, and of course, writing. Mostly I’ll be looking inward as detailed above, but stay tuned…
A bit of housekeeping: I’m considering increasing the cadence of this newsletter from ~4 a year to maybe 6–8. The theme will be the same. Just a few more pep talks in your inbox.
Let me know what you think. As always, hit reply if you’ve got something to get off your chest! I appreciate every message, and thank you for sticking with me and reading all the way to the bottom.
With endless gratitude,
Ash