8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

A
BLOG
FROM
NOWHERE

  • Summer Break

    As much as I sometimes complain about the Monday evening drive—often through cold and snow— to our orchestra rehearsals all season, I do miss it when it pauses for the summer.

    About a ten days prior to writing this we had our end-of-the-season concert, our final show, and  (after a potluck dinner a few days later) wrapped the season.

    In the cadence of my creative musical soul I should have gone to rehearsal last night.

    There was no rehearsal.

    Again, we’re on summer break.

    When I was a kid creativity was an obligation. I would have rather parked in front of the television, or played video games or—honestly—just gone out and hung around with my friends. Being sent off to extra-curricular activities, even as few and scattered as those opportunities were for me, were disruptions to my life.

    A few decades pass by and here I am pondering how to fill the vacant summer months when the air is quieter and my creative contemporaries are off doing other things.

    I’ll get over it. I’ll find something to write or draw. I’ll find music to play on my own. I’ll prevail.

    But it does all make me realize how much I’ve internalized the creative twists and turns of my soul into the person who I think I want to be in this part of my life. Missing—craving—that creative community when it pauses is like a symptom for which the cure is just to keep making more stuff.

  • Free Pics

    I give away a lot of my art and photography.

    I don’t often or consciously think of it like that, but in the moments when I am challenged on the value of what I make I also tend to get snagged on this little reality: I give a lot of it away for free and don’t think twice about it, either.

    There is a value proposition mixed in there, of course.

    Value comes from demand and demand is not automatic: that is to say, my photos, say, only have value if someone wants them and just because I take them doesn’t mean they automatically have a corresponding someone who wants them. 

    Value, in this way is a bit circular. You need to create the value by creating an audience, and you create an audience by lowering the value, often to zero, of your work so that the audience can have it, learn to love it, and eventually want to pay for it.

    At least, that’s one way.

    I’ve never consciously done that… but I have done it unconsciously. I have taken photos on my own time and motivation and become the guy that someone has said, yes please, here’s money, give us more. It really has worked that way. 

    But maybe you have to give a lot away first.

    And maybe too, you have to be okay with something you made having a value that is something other than  a cash transaction.

  • Confidence Boosts

    I bought yet another book of sheet music recently.

    That’s what musicians probably do, right? I assume so myself. Going to the music store makes me feel like how I used to feel going to the bookstore or the record store (way back when that was a thing) and I spent hours browsing through the stacked pages of a million potential adventures through grand ideas or creative expression.  Sheet music still seems to hold that grip on me.

    I bought a book of sheet music that is probably too hard for me to play.

    Precisely, it was a thick book of classical standards, two and a half centimetres of paper bound up with literally hundreds of works by Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and a couple dozen more mostly-famous composers. Intermediate piano music.

    Don’t get me wrong.  I can read music. I’ve been playing some form of instrument for about forty-five years, most recently going on a music journey with the violin.  But having delved in a serious attempt to learn how to play the piano this past year I would still neatly categorize myself as a beginner. 

    And now I have this sheath of music for intermediate players. It’s probably, almost certainly, too hard for me to play… right now.

    Confidence is many things, often immeasurable things, but sometimes I need to remind myself that I must have a least a little bit of it: I invested in my future self this week and I bought a book of music that is aspirational, too difficult for me today, but some part of me must believe that tomorrow will be better, huh?

  • Gifts Dangers 

    For me, personally, I have often struggled to keep a clear line between the work I do for money and the work I do for fun.  That is not to say that the creative aspects of my job have been particularly lucrative in my life, but the overlap of my creative talents has often benefited employers–and vice versa, my hobbies have often benefited people and companies I don’t actually work for (or get paid by…)

    Coincidentally, I was reminded of this recently: a photo I took on a running adventure with my friends found its way through a bit of sharing in a corporate newsletter that landed back on my inbox: weird thing that, getting your own work sent back to you by a company who is using it for something they didn’t inform you about or pay you for.

    Legal blurriness aside (this is not a post about that, really, and if any company was going to benefit from my work in this way this is one of about three companies in the whole world I would look away and say, okay, you guys have given me so much over the years, blah, blah, blah, I’m gonna ignore this one… but I digress.)

    Creativity is a gift, but it can be a dangerous minefield of people taking what you can do for granted. It happens routinely. You become the guy with the camera. The dude who can make websites. The man to go to if someone needs something sketched. We all have those things: plumbers are going get asked about leaky faucets, doctors are gonna get asked about that mole on my back and chefs are going to be expected to bring the best dish to a potluck. Navigating the overlap is the hard part for all of us.

    Under the category of Gifts & Dangers, I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Idea Bank

    Case in point: I had been watching videos about creative note-booking strategies on YouTube, too many to make it worth linking to them, and thinking about my own process for tracking ideas, brainstorming and creative ideation, and I sat down to write this post.  In my notes, months ago, I had already written “an idea bank by carrying a notebook even a digital one is a foundational tool for creative” on a bulleted list at the top of a digital topic page somewhere.

    I keep an idea bank.

    It’s not complex.

    And that’s the whole point. 

    It’s simple. It’s low effort. It’s low friction, as the business gurus might put it.

    I use the notes app on my phone, keep a date-stamped note near the top of the list, and just add new post ideas to the top of the list when said ideas cross my mind. No bullet lists. No categorized planning. No grids or charts or bubble flows. Just note on list.

    Later, when I’m sitting in a cafe sipping on a tea I’ll go through them and copy-paste them into a giant living document that I have going where I write my posts. Personally, and this isn’t so much an endorsement as it is a I happen to use note, I use Scrivener on a Mac. It is billed as writing software and is the closest I’ve come to a big multi-document, cloud-synced, writers organizational platform as anything.  Results may vary, so do your own research for what works for you.

    Which is to say: keep it simple.

    I’ve gone simple and it works for me.

    If I had to put a point on this it would be merely to tell you that creativity happens anywhere at any time—you know that—and the best tool to capture that is not one that involves tapping some of that creativity to engage with it. The best tool to capture it is one that takes the absolute minimum space: a sheet of paper with a pen, a notebook you carry around with you, a voice memo, or the simplest text app on your phone.

    Bank on it.