Ridiculous Opinions #225
Last weekend, I reached a low-point from a creative perspective. I finished a project in the summer and though I have been doing things since then, I haven’t had a really big project to work on since then. Of course, I am still doing my Maurice Comics (my views on Reddit have now recovered, thankfully), so I can’t say that I’m doing nothing from a creative standpoint. But there hasn’t been anything new to come along that really sparked my interest.
However, that’s part of my problem at the moment and it’s one that I should know better than to fall victim to.
I don’t believe in writer’s block. I believe that people who fear writer’s block are simply people who are afraid to write terrible things. I always write terrible things, so there’s no reason for me to feel that way. But writer’s block also rears its ugly head in other ways.
Sometimes, people write when they’re inspired. I’ve always felt like that was pretty stupid, too. If you always write when you’re inspired, then what happens when you’re never inspired? What do you do otherwise? Sit and watch TV? Play video games? Endlessly scroll through the internet?
Well, last weekend, I felt like I had reached a low-point creatively. I was writing in my daily journal about how, maybe, I should just take a month off and not be creative. Just do nothing. Watch TV. Play video games. Endlessly scroll through the internet.
But then I realized that that was exactly what I was doing! It wasn’t that I didn’t have any ideas. It was simply that I didn’t want to put the work in to bring some of my ideas to fruition. I realized that I had become lazy and I was spending more time looking for reasons not to work than I was actually creating.
So, I made a mental shift. I simply decided that I wasn’t going to do that any more. I decided that I was going to focus on the tasks that I needed to do and I was going to devote my focus to those things and get them done. And it’s been a good week since then.
I suppose that the lesson to be learned from all of this is that one can look for excuses not to do things all day long, and it doesn’t take that much effort to find them. There’s always television to watch. There are always video games to play. One can always endlessly scroll through the internet. But there needs to be a level of mental fortitude that a person has to dredge up from the inside that says, I’ve got to get this done. And the sooner one does such a thing, the sooner they can climb out of their malaise.
And sure, I may spend the next month working hard and produce nothing of substance, but at least I will be working hard. I find that I feel worse about myself if I’m not engaged in something. If I’m working on something and it’s crap, that’s okay. At least I’m working. But if I’m not working on anything, then that kind of sucks.
So, this week in my idea journal, I engaged in what I called WESTERN DECONSTRUCTION WEEK, where I took the concept of the Western and I tried to approach it from a new angle…and you know what? I’ve come up with six good ideas for movies/comics/books that would kick all kinds of butt. And I might actually work on one of them.
I wrote some fun Maurice cartoons and I’m about to engage in figuring out how to animate them. That’s a fun project to do.
And I started writing a graphic novel about my mom and my uncle when they were kids that I plan to illustrate over the next year.
These things might not be spectacular, but at least I’m doing something now instead of floundering. And I’m a little bit more jazzed about being creative, which is a good thing. Somewhere, lurking out there, is my next big project. I just have to keep looking…
Here’s a quote from the Famous-Poet Bono on this very subject…
Well said, Famous-Poet Bono! Well said!
