8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 6 – Clicking Deeper

  • Clear Minded

    I spent a whole month last year trying to meditate. 

    I read about it. I downloaded apps. I set up a space in my home and (since it was summer) I found quite places in the park to sit and find focus.

    My conclusion was not that meditation didn’t work, but rather that I had already been meditating: I had been finding mindfulness on the running trail during solo runs. So, I deleted the apps and stashed my pillow and put my sneakers back on.

    The other takeaway lesson was that meditative mindfulness is critical for my creative process. Long runs—which works for me, by the way, and everyone needs to find their own effective source of clarity—emptied my brain and allowed the ideas to come out and play.

    I am not a meditation expert, but I have done both a lot of meditative running and creative ideation. Clearing the mind—whether by sitting quietly listening to chants or going for a long drive or sinking into the warmth of the sun on a beach or putting on a pair of trail shoes and snaking through the woods at speed—seems to be a critical piece of many people’s creative process. Find yours.

  • Just Because

    This daily public affirmation has a blog.

    Oh, so you’ve figured it out? A little more than forty-odd posts into my persistent writing of these little public missives about my creative explorations  right here every weekday and perhaps you are sitting there pondering the point of two hundred words of indulgent affirmation.

    I could justify it. I could try and convince you that there was some marketable value inherent in such a prospect, despite that most pursuers of profit have moved onto bigger platforms. I could point at the personal brand value of exploratory concepts in words and sounds and images. I could brag about some hidden big-picture strategy towards a long term personal creative goal.

    I could. I won’t. It would all be a lie.

    Why do musicians play scales?

    Why do runners log training runs?

    Why do chefs trial recipes?

    Why do dogs howl at the moonlight?

    The answer is practice. The answer is habit. The answer is instinct and drive and compulsion to create and make and share and then makes some more.  The answer is doing without expectation of audience or purpose or influence or flex. The answer is accountability to self and ideas. The answer is human and even more than that, the answer is universally personal.

  • Stepped Inspiration

    I’ll be the first to admit that inspiration is not motivation, but one definitely can lead to the other.

    As I write these words I just got back from a long walk. I slipped on my winter shoes, I grabbed my headphones, locked the door behind me and stepped out into the still-snowy paths of a late-February morning. (Yeah, I’m also writing these a week or so ahead of when I post them!) 

    I went out looking for inspiration.

    I had sat down to write something before even deciding to go on a walk and I got stuck. My brain froze up. The Blankwraith crept into my head and froze up my thinker, fingers hovering over the keyboard in empty headed paralysis. 

    But then, simple as it sounds, within five minutes of stepping out the door something loosened up and the ideas started flowing. I’ll write in a future post about the importance of carrying a note-taking tool, but needless to say I opened mine, still within sight of my house, and started jotting.

    My walk lasted an hour. I did a loop around our local suburban neighborhood, trudging through the sloppy, icy sidewalks. And every couple of minutes I would pull out my notes and add another sentence or two to the stack. 

    I counted. I had jotted down thirty-two unique ideas.

    By the time I got home and walked in the door, my biggest concern wasn’t lack of ideas but lack of time to get them turned into little two hundred word essays.

    I went for a walk looking for inspiration and it turns out they were hanging out just down the street.

  • Boxed Creativity

    This might not be a particularly new idea, but it is one that I have personally been clinging to a bit lately, paradoxical as it is: creativity is often encumbered by too much freedom.

    But let me put this another way, and via an example…

    As I noted previously on this blog, over the last year I have built up a pretty respectable sound production studio in my basement. Mics, amps, cables, a recorder, an effects pedal, a looper pedal, and of course my synth. All of it is more than enough to make something interesting.  

    And despite that great setup, can you guess what I do when I get stuck creatively?

    I go online and I start window shopping for more equipment. Maybe a drum machine. Maybe a pickup for my violin. Maybe a better synth, or… gulp, add to cart: cha-ching!

    In my mind, in that moment, any of it, all of it would mean more freedom and opportunity to do more stuff with sound and music… sure.  

    And yet another truth hits bone: none of it will do the work for me.

    What I know in my heart is that I just need to sit in the seat and do the work, play the notes, speak the words, and… just create. But having too much freedom to keep looking for something better, something additional, something else—all of it is entangling the effort of actually doing the thing itself.

    I’m boxed in by being unbound by opportunity to try something else, rather than just looking at my gear and reminding myself: this is what you get, now make it work.

  • Drifting Focus

    Not that you are counting my words, but when I set out write here on this blog project every weekday I told myself I had only one rule: keep it short and sweet.

    I was going to try not to stray beyond 200 words in any given post.

    If I couldn’t get the idea out in two hundred, maybe it wasn’t honed enough. Maybe I was babbling. Maybe it should have been something bigger than a blurb herein.

    But the problem? Every post last week was well over two hundred, the last one creeping up to nearly 300 words. 

    Is that a bad thing?

    Guardrails, even self-imposed ones can be important for the simple reason that creative restrictions often create a better product. In this particular case, volume was not my challenge. I know I can sit down any day and type-type-type out an essay-length post if I am so inclined. My challenge to myself and for the focus of this project was rather honing ideas to a sharp point, not muddling around in a big vat of chocolate-pudding-flavoured ideas.

    What are your guardrails? Do you step over them?  And does it ultimately, honestly, make the result better? Or not.