Dmitri Shostakovich composed extraordinarily quickly. Once he heard the piece in his head, he would pour the notes onto the page. He could manage 20-30 pages of score a day and rarely made corrections.
I can’t write that fast. I can’t write music at all, but let’s leave that to one side. Words vs. music may be an indirect comparison, but even with the benefit of technology I can’t come close to that speed (or endurance).
Shostakovich, however, constantly worried that he worked too fast. He wrote a letter to a friend saying, “Undoubtedly this is bad… composing is a serious business.”, an idea that is so clearly ridiculous that it left me hoping his friend wrote back to tell him as much.
We must never get caught up in the idea there there is one right way to do something – a proper way or, even worse, the “done” way.
My wife and I make tea totally differently, but they usually taste the same.
Lee Child’s writing process is totally different to Haruki Murakami, but they have both written bestsellers.
Clint Eastwood, when he directs a movie, shoots as few takes as possible, while David Fincher is renowned for shooting 20, 50, even 100 takes of a single shot before moving on. They’ve both made masterpieces.
The way we succeed is not by doing things the way someone else does them, but by finding the way that suits us and owning it.
After all, for all his worrying, Shostakovich was a pretty solid composer all things considered.
Does it upset us if the art we create isn’t seen by other people?
Does it matter to us if it isn’t?
The truth is, for many people, the act of creation will be enough. But for just as many people, there is no point in creating something that will never be consumed.
The difficult part of making art is to act as if creation is all that matters, because only then can you make something personal and emotionally connected.
Being desperate for your work to ‘matter’ just makes us create what we ‘think’ people want, rather than creating authentic work that really matters to the only person that matters: ourselves.
Finding time for creativity is hugely important to me, but it’s not always easy. Reorganising and relaunching the blog has taken me away from my usual creative endeavours for the last few weeks and now I have to get back into the habit.
I’m hoping that keeping to 3 regular posts will help keep my creative brain ticking over nicely, while giving me the impetus to push forwards with other creative projects.
Every creative person works in a different way, but for me creativity stems from habit. I’ve always liked to believe that my creativity is able to be summoned at will. I now understand that it bows to no master, but I also recognise that it enjoys routine.
I don’t know if its the writer in me, or just the base level of habit-former in all of us, but if I can get myself into the right routine around my work day and my commute, I know I’ll be able to engage my creative brain and start creating things that matter to me.
We’ll just have to wait and see if they matter to anyone else…
How do you create? Are you a ‘do it while the inspiration strikes’ kind of artist, or a ‘head down, crack on’ type. Do you have triggers that set you off on a creatie journey?
Sometimes knowing when to stop trying to be the market leader is good for you.
Everyone wants to be Top Dog and we all want to be known as the go-to place for people to find our products or services. But there are times at which accepting that you’re not the biggest can be a distinct advantage.
Take MySpace, for example. Yesterday, I tweeted that they have release a new app to help musicians maintain their MySpace page and update their Facebook Fan Page at the same time. While I’m sure that MySpace is still smarting from being the go-to social networking site for a good couple of years way-back-when, they have now accepted that the vast majority of people use Facebook as their primary social networking tool.
The problem that MySpace faces is that while it’s ingeniously designed for musicians in particular, it’s fairly useless to those individuals and bands if the only people using the site are the musicians and bands themselves. The artists want to connect with their fans and the easiest way to do that is through Facebook.
By effectively helping their members to advertise themselves on Facebook, MySpace are helping to ensure that those who prefer the interface and usability of their site over Facebook can still use it to reach millions of fans who may never have discovered them if they had stuck solely to Facebook.
Biggest isn’t always best, especially if you know how to piggy-back on the success of a larger player to give your core customer base exactly what they want from your product.
My regular schedule of blog updates has been interrupted this week. I’m ashamed to admit I’ve neglected the blog in deference to other things.
I was going to post a list of reasons why I’ve been a little lax since the weekend, but rapidly realised that work commitments, the beta-testing and site building of the new website and writing the eBook were nothing but excuses. I could and should have made time for the blog, just as I’m doing now.
There’s a lesson in this for all of us, especially in this time-pressured world many of us inhabit: excuses are exactly what they say on the tin – an explanation offered to justify or obtain forgiveness1 – and we don’t need forgiveness, we just need to do what we’ve said we will.
Whether it’s through workload, procrastination or fear of over-committing, we all make excuses for the things we can’t do. The answer is to stop making excuses, stop asking for forgiveness and just do them. You’ll soon find it’s far quicker and easier to get things done than it is to run around seeking forgiveness for not doing them.
As a happy by-product, you’ll also be far more organised, far more productive and be seen as far more reliable. No need for excuses.
What have you been making excuses about this week? When are you going to set things right on them?
Welcome to another new LOWDOWN, that part of the Production Office that brings you tips and tricks on all the tools you need to enhance your career as a filmmaker and creative.
Today, it’s Productivity.
Anyone who follows my blog will know I’m pretty hot on productivity. For far too long I spent my days being busy, but rarely productive. Since harnessing some of the tools I’m talking about today and putting some best practices of getting things done into place, I’ve become much more focused, much more productive and much more successful.
Let’s have a look, then, at some of the tools you can use to make your life easier.
EVERNOTE
Evernote comes at the top of the list today for two reasons: number one, it’s the tool I was most recently introduced to and two, it’s the tool I now find the most invaluable.
Evernote is a desktop and web-based app that you can also get for almost all smart phones. It’s free to get started, but if you go over a certain storage limit you have to start paying. That said, I’ve used it quite a lot and still not exceeded my free allowance.
What Evernote does is to collect together all those bits and pieces of things on the web that you want to take note of, as well as allowing you to compile your own To Do lists, projects and other notes. It’s the simplest, cheapest and easiest way of keeping track of just about everything you need to remember. The Evernote logo isn’t an elephant for nothing.
THINGS
The second tool that works hard to keep you on time and on-topic is Things. The biggest down side? It’s Mac-only. So all you Windows dinosaurs can’t take advantage of it. You also have to pay around £30 for it, which puts it a step below Evernote to begin with.
Once you get past those elements, though, Things is brilliant for tracking To Do’s, project files, notes and reminders. Most usefully, though – and what helps to elevate Things to a point worth paying for – is it’s interaction and syncability1 with iCal and iPhone. If you use Apple’s MobileMe syncing solution to share your calendar across all your home computers, like I do, Things swaps and shares data seamlessly with not only all of your computers, but your phone as well. An invaluable way of keeping track of everything you need to know when you need to know it.
BASECAMP
There are numerous online project management tools that help you and all your collaborators to keep track of all the strands that make up your project, but the best one I’ve found (and used) is Basecamp.
Unlike other, equally useful online tools like Huddle, it’s Basecamp’s pricing structure that really makes it stand out. You pay a flat monthly fee from $24 (£15) and upwards that allows unlimited numbers of people to join your project and work on things with you. Huddle, by contrast, charges you per user per month, meaning a major film or creative project would quickly rack up sizable fees.
Basecamp2 is best used for sharing documents and keeping track of project timelines and goals in a way that everyone involved can see. Not only is that a great motivational tool – if everyone know what you should be doing, you’d better be doing it – but also a great way of making sure key things don’t get missed and that everyone knows the timeline their working to and the goals their aiming for.
There are hundreds of different tools of productivity for you to explore, but I’d suggest you limit yourself to trying one or two at a time, otherwise you risk undoing all their good work by spending all day getting to know them and setting them up as opposed to using them to help get your work done.
For more o productivity, keep an eye on my blog here, as well as checking out the99percent and lifehacker, my two online bibles of productivity tips and tools.
This weekend, I caught up on the BBC’s awesome BTS doc on COME FLY WITH ME, the new series from LITTLE BRITAIN creators Matt Lucas and David Walliams.
One thought from an interview with Matt Lucas really struck me. Inevitably, there was a question about how you follow up a series as successful as LB was1. Lucas commented, on topping LB:
Can we do something as big as that? No. Can we do something better than that? Certainly.
And there’s the rub: whatever we’re setting out to create, the aim should never be about creating something bigger, simply creating something better.
Striving for size and reach will bring pressures and compromises; striving for quality will not only better ensure excellence, but also come with its own–much wider–rewards and may end up being both bigger and better.
and love it or hate it, you can’t deny its success [↩]
Low-budget movies put a wall in front of you and only creativity will allow you to figure out how to get around that wall. The less money and/or resources you have, the more you are forced to be creative.
And what is a movie anyway? A completely creative endeavour. Anything you can do to get away from the things that aren’t important, the better chance you have of being truly creative.
Love him or hate him, we could all learn a little about creativity from Rodriguez.
Creativity isn’t about the money, the resources or the box office draw; it’s about telling the stories you want to tell in any way you can tell them, even if it’s not what you originally envisioned for them.
Exercise your creative muscles and get your project made, however you can. Finding your own way around that wall will harness the true power of your own creativity. And who knows, it may just unlock the doors to the studios.
I’m writing this at an almost respectable 7am, but considering I’ve been awake all night it doesn’t feel like the start of a new day.
Why have I been awake all night, I hear you ask? Or is that the voices in my head? They crept in about two hours ago and are pretty insistent on staying there. But I digress.
I have a weird and wonderful brain that kicks into gear at random moments, which is fantastic for creative and lateral thinking, but not so good when it steps up to overdrive just as I settle down for some well-earned kip.
And so it was last night, when my head hit the pillow mere minutes after hitting on the most amazing concept for a HUGE new project. The real beauty of it, though, is that it’s not a ‘new’ project. Rather, in a flash of awkwardly-timed, knock-out inspiration I found a way of tying together no fewer than FOUR existing projects into one symbiotic whole.
For those of you familiar with transmedia storytelling, hold your groans. I haven’t just wedged a bundle of ideas together into one unconscionably complicated and sprawling hole. I have – you may be surprised to know – actually thought it through.
Some of the ideas were already concrete in my head, other were more shapeless and still others were small moments of “wouldn’t it be great if I could…”. But they all shared a common theme that I just hadn’t identified before, a theme which will – hopefully – over the coming few months, be explored through a wide range of stories and across a variety of different media; not least, I suspect, this blog.
This is going to be a HUGELY ambitious project, but one I passionately believe in. I’m going to need a lot of help and support along the way, but that’s what you, dear reader, are there for. Together we can not just explore, inform and entertain, but hopefully expand and engross as well.
Here’s to 2011 and a new world of excitement. Won’t you come and join me for the ride?
PS – regardless of project-related bloggage, there’s going to be a lot more content on the blog in the weeks and months to come, so stay tuned (or come back more often than you have been…)
