rethinking the creative process

recently, I've been thinking about the most important things while creating art. that applies to photography, writing, and arts in general. art is a wonderful thing, but I've seen people's life getting broken for the purpose of creating art. we need a creative process, and by this, I mean a healthy one.

I've been stuyding a wide range of artists, including artists that I've listened to their entire discography: ngọt, taylor swift, the 1975, lorde, and other artists that I'm somewhat studying their discography: yann tiersen, bill wurtz, etc. throughout this process, I think artists who have values that resonate most with mine are lorde, yann tiersen, sufjan stevens, the 1975,  and bill wurtz. I feel like they really knows what matter most in life and music: consistency and peace of mind.

for me, a true artist is one who spends time to truly create art. their videos may not have the most views and their albums may not take media's headlines, but they show constant continuation and revolution in their songwriting process. I like how songs from their different albums converse back and forth with each other. in this reasoning, music should be your priority, not merchandise and stuff.

other writers that I really respect are also in my though process as I write this post. who are they? haruki murakami, higashino keigo, austin kleon, henry david thoreau, and goethe.

but most important of all, I'm going to speak from my own experience, which really helps linking all these fragments together.

so stay tuned to see what I have to say about what I've seen.

1. rest

let's talk about bread.

there are many types of bread, but you can generally categorize them based on the time spent making them. yeastless bread takes the shortest to make and they feel dense to eat. bread with yeast takes longer to make and they're just tender to touch. why? because the latter have yeast, and yeast takes time to respire. the reason why yeastless bread exists has a religious beginning. in the old testament, when the israelites just fleed out of egypt from slavery, they had to eat and do everything in haste. plus, they lead a nomadic lifestyle and spend most of their time in the desert before reaching the promised land. with these conditions, one doesn't really have the luxury to sit back and wait for one's dough to rise to make some baguette or croissant. the image of yeastless bread sticks with me closely, because it reminds me of everytime when burnout hits me. even in the summer, I'd still come up with things to do and get overwhelmed by the goals I set for myself.

my yeastless time reminds me of the importance of resting. a while ago, I came across a comic strip with these words of wisdom: just like this dough, you can rise, if you rest.

2. flow

thích nhất hạnh is a vietnamese monk who's well known for his work in mindfulness and the modernization of buddhism. he did a great job in his life making buddhist texts and values more understandable, which makes it therefore more accessible and applicalbe for a wider range of audience. at first, I thought his name mean only happiness (nhất (一) one, hạnh (幸) happiness). however, after fact-checking my beliefs, I realize his name actually means doing only one thing at a time (nhất (一) one, hạnh / hành (行) do).

and that actually works. true happiness comes from making peace with one's suffering. to touch reality instead of running away from it. when you do one thing at a time, your mind is focused and it comes into touch with reality. in a constantly distracting world where multitasking is glorified and overworking is romanticized, the most powerful thing we can do is to do one thing at a time. at that point, time ceases to exist, we flow through time, and we unveil happiness.

as I navigate through college, what matters less to me is productivity. what I truly care about now is focus. it's not about how much you get done, but how much quality you execute with each thing you do, not only in schoolwork but in the creative process.

while looking at the sculptures in carpenter library, I came up with a theory: the more time you spend creating your art, the more time the audience will spend enjoying it. the garden of earthly delights by hieronymus bosch takes him 20 years to finish it, and nowadays, it is a conversation piece where people come back to it times and times again and never fail to unveil another layer of meaning. however, when saying this, I also don't want to mean that art must be complicated. time spend creating art is not solely time you spend physically creating it, but also the time you spend thinking about what and how you're going to execute it on paper.

3. go get a life

when was the last time you heard of an earthquake? unless you live in some regions where they make frequent occurences, you probably don't even remember. what you know is that they happen ocassionally. despite the frequency of the earthquakes, tectonic plates are always moving in the process (at a rate of about 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inches) a year, the same rate at which human's toenails grow). peak experiences, like earthquakes, don't happen that often. most of our time is spent making unnoticed progress (unless we make an effort to truly notice them), and that's completely okay.

the earlier you make peace with the truth that the majority of your life is going to be mundane and normal, the more breathable you will feel in the long run. it's mundane, but it's the ordinary kind of mundane, it's normality. it may not be stimulating, but it is livable and sustainable. overstimulation is not fun in the long run (remember yeast?).

the reason why I've been failing to establish a routine is because of my inability to distinguish between an internal routine (the stuff you do daily) and external routine (the stuff you show people). you don't start to write the moment you write, you start to write the moment you read something and have your own thoughts about it. the amount of work that goes into writing or releasing an album is substantial. most of the time, we only show the tip of our icebergs. like ducks swimming and gliding from one side of the pond to another, the hardest work is seen underwater.

the frequency of your external routine doesn't really matter. lorde probably released 1 extended play, 3 albums, and 1 extended playlist throughout her decade long career. however, all of them sounds good. it doesn't matter how often you produce something, but the quality of what you've produced. for me, I set a very low bar for this blog: at least one post per month. however, what I've been working on is the discipline to not drop my daily routine just because I have too much work on a particular day.

4. a great perhaps

it takes me a long time to make my peace of mind a priority in my life. what past travels have taught me is that happiness is not really about the place you live, the timing of your life, but who you live with. you find peace with the right one. in retrospect, that right one is not only the people around you, but also yourself.

in the spirit of short stuff, a class that I've been taking this semester, I've been looking at dying words for my presentation. my favorite so far comes from john green's looking for alaska: I go to seek a great perhaps by françois rabelais. there are many ways to interpret a great perhaps, but my favorite remains "peace with oneself."

I used to treat art as a thing that is separated away from daily waking life. and the media just do a marvelously dangerous job of glorifying the "quit your job and follow your dreams of being an artist" way of life. you may need to quit your job to focus on your pursuing bigger artistic projects, however, you don't need to quit your job and sacrifice your peace of mind to get started. to make this even more persuasive, I'd like to add a few examples of great novelists that have a side job other than writing. these writers, as mark twain had it, never let school interfere with their education.

mundane things as a way to keep going

before haruki murakami was even a writer, he runs a jazz club. later on, besides being a fulltime writer, he's also a fulltime runner. his experience at the jazz club and running are not just for helping him have a sustainable life, but also serves as main substances for his novel. the most important conversations in his book take place in a shop with a jazzy setting, and his protagonists often have some intense workout life (at least for kafka in kafka on the shore). you don't write in spite of mundane things, you integrate those pieces of your life into what you write and pass them onto the readers.

mundane things as a way to add substance to your work

higashino keigo is also a similar case. his picteresque details of crime scenes and tactics used for murder and crime don't spawn on its own, but are owed to his years spent working as an electrical engineer. he also started writing fiction back in high school, and only quit his job after 5 years to pursue his career path of being a fulltime writer.

mundane things as a way to actualize dreams

although goethe is mostly known as a writer, he actually started out as an assistant as a national tributant after graduating from law school. during his time, he fell in love with the fiance of his collegue, and ends up channeling all that energy in "the sorrows of young werther." the book itself (1) became the bestseller in europe for the next 25 years, with napoleon boasting that he read it 7 times, (2) started a series of copycat suicide after its publication, also known as "the werther effect." in this, he rejects romanticism and moves to classicism, which accepts that "yes actual life is kinda boring bro." it's pretty much like the social contract with oneself: trading off illusions of happiness for a more livable life.

he later serves as the chief adviser and senior administrator for karl august, the duke of weimar, and he helps karl runs his country. he remains in this job for most of the rest of his life. unlike most writers who can only write about their dreams, goethe actualized his by establishing a national theater and an urban park. so yeah, you don't really need to quit your job to start and even keep going. maybe what you need is to search for where you lost time's been going.

5. short and sweet

I find writing long forms useful for helping me expanding my thoughts and reasoning. however, recently, I've been having an affinity for shorter forms as it helps me tell better stories (thanks to my emily balch seminar on short stuff). nietzsche put it best: it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book—what everyone else does not say in a whole book. words is a labyrinth that sometimes you get stuck on with superflous flowery language, which acts as a layer of oxidzed copper that prevents the real message to come through. even though weak rays of it come through, it'd be hard to realize if it's real gold, or just glitter.

you don't need ten-dollar-words to write compelling stories. murakami masters many things, but the most formidable of all is how he wrote picteresque stories with simple words. similarly, you don't need strings of note to sound important or complex. my favorite pieces are from yann tiersen's album eusa, especially pern and penn ar lann. they are clear, transparent and honest, yet they speak volumes. this is all thanks to their quality of being simple.

the best gift you can give to your reader is allowing them to come up with their own interpretation. do as little as you can in steering them into one direction or another. too many signs make no signs. be simple, be the still water that the readers mirror themselves in.