8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: Part 6 – Clicking Deeper

Building a self and a life around creative expression, putting in the hours, and learning from the effort. The heart of creating stuff.

Chapter List

  • 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.

  • Plotting Resolved

    Almost two years ago now I was deep into writing a novel.

    It was not my first.

    It would not be my last.

    But yet here I sit not having finished writing it. 

    Sure, I made a plan. I sketched out the plot. And I got it about ninety percent of the way to completion, but then…?

    Then I hit a wall.

    Every morning, literally every morning, I wake up and feel guilty that I didn’t write another chapter in that novel the day before. Every morning, literally every morning, I wake up and part of me ponders if today will be the day that fact changes.

    So far, no.

    At the start of 2026 I resolved that just pining about standing in front of a metaphorical brick wall, a wall that I didn’t know how to climb over, or around or through was not the right approach either.

    Instead, I started a new novel.

    No. I haven’t quit the other one, rather I just need some more time to stare at that original brick wall and figure it out. But just staring at it wasn’t helping anything either. 

    Each day I get another day further from my last effort on that story, but it is not forgotten.

    And one day I’ll wake up, ponder if today, that day, will be the day… and I will be right.

  • Smouldering Plots

    It’s difficult to start a story, and it’s difficult to end a story… but somehow worse than both of those parts there is a hump I have found that occurs somewhere in the middle.

    I have been writing a new novel and I am at the point where I need to move from the start, the inciting action where all the characters are introduced and dive into the middle, the guts of the story where all the action and the bulk of the story is going to happen.

    I did all this work on planning out a plot.

    I did all this work creating characters.

    I did all this work lighting the fire to make it all start.

    And whilst I did think a lot about how the flames were meant to keep smouldering for the next couple hundred pages of real story, getting over that hump between the start and the middle, and putting it down into actual words on an actual page is turning out to be a bigger chore than I anticipated.

    If you have been reading my meandering thoughts you know that I generally keep smouldering. I just push through and write my five hundred words each day, and (practically speaking) that’s how it goes down.

    But the effort, the mental churn, the fight to keep going is different now that I’ve moved into middle where the real plot and real works takes more than just a big idea.

  • Baby Steps

    I have a piece of advice that I’m writing mostly for myself here: stop thinking so big. 

    Start small.

    Start with the achievable and work your way up.

    I have been planning this novel-length audio production, writing words, making scripts, composing music, mixing sounds, and—nothing firm has been done yet.

    The big project is simply too overwhelming.

    Oh sure, I see the forest, but I can’t seem to plant the trees. It all feels like I’m jumping into a new plan, a new skill, a new concept without knowing if any of it will even work—and more importantly if something critical will fail. And the result is paralysis incarnate.  

    Something smaller has to come first.

    In my case, maybe instead of trying to make a novel, I record some audio blogs first. Then maybe after I do that, I work on making a few one-pager short stories into encapsulated one-off samples of what I’m hoping to create on a larger scale. And then, maybe something else, and something else after that, and maybe… eventually, the real thing will fall into place.

    I’m sure many great people have achieved great things in one fell swoop… but the rest of us may need to build up our stamina first.