Spin the roulette wheel of creativity
or how I am finding the creative process to be difficult these days
The blank page is absolutely demoralizing sometimes. Sometimes you go in with an idea and it works, sometimes you go in with an idea and it doesn’t work. Sometimes you have that natural urge to create, but when you try to do so, it’s meaningless. It’s devoid of the things you love. Sometimes you have expectations for yourself and those expectations are never reached.
The worst part of being an artist is the massive gulf between your inspirations and your own output. I don’t think there is any artist in the world (other than the most narcissistic ones) who can confidently say with a straight face that the art they create is on par with the art that got them into the craft in the first place. Unless there’s some secret I don’t know about where I need to unlock an eighth chakra (located at my ankles, probably), it’s impossible to reach and sustain that par in your own mind. Others will probably tell you that they love what you made, they’ll draw comparisons you never imagined, they’ll tell you that you’re their favorite artist. But, at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone can square it up in their head that they are that person.
That’s what I want to write about today.
I’ve been struggling to find that meaning as an artist lately. Music is probably the worst art form for someone with anxiety and imposter syndrome because at the end of the day, there are no guardrails. There’s nothing to essentially tell you that you’ve done something well, or that you’ve made terrible garbage. Sure, there’s ways to tell that you’ve broken too many rules to make something enjoyable, like if you have a blaring siren in a song that overpowers the rest of the mix, then people will probably shy away from that.
AND YET, some people won’t! There’s a small sect of listeners that will love that. The caviar enjoyers, the foie gras lovers, the escargot feasters of the music landscape that desire that next step, that evolution into the strange and bizarre. The world literally is ever changing. What was considered good yesterday is terrible today, what was considered left-field yesterday can be definitive of the generation today.
The rise of hyper-pop (and all other hyper- genres) exemplifies this greatly. 100 gecs was previously considered to be the music exclusively listened to by weirdos and basement dwellers, but today that band is one of the most successful in the industry, and everyone knows who they are. I would bet good money the average person on the street knows the lyrics of ‘money machine’ more than they know the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun. I even fit that description.
So the inherent problem lays bare. What is good, what isn’t? How can we possibly make that determination? If I have 300 unfinished projects, which ones should I finish and which one should I leave to die? (a bit grim, huh.) When do we know our art is good enough to be ready to send off to publishing outfits? What’s worth saving? If I save this file, will it blossom into something beautiful later? If my time is finite, is it worth even finding out if that idea will work?
The catharsis I’m getting from writing this is immense, because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.
It’s all a roulette wheel. Everything is a roulette wheel. For someone who has major anxiety like myself, this is literally terrible. The abundance of options and ideas and thoughts and considerations and queries and unknowns can drive me mad sometimes. But, as it turns out, we can use this to our advantage.
Making a good creative project is hard, and sometimes you have to get lucky in order to get by. The thing that’s hard to notice, however, is that we’re not gambling. We don't necessarily lose if we don’t hit the jackpot. We just need to change our mindset, change our starting location, and we can change how we look at the outcome. We might be able to change the outcome altogether!
Every moment in the process is a stepping stone that we can use to learn something new. Some of the best creative projects come out of years of learning and developing, and while it sucks that this takes time, slowly we can raise our odds of making something we love and cherish.
I play an MMORPG called Destiny. It probably keeps me from doing anything creative for far too long, but it helps establish the metaphor (so my thousands of hours are worth it). In the game, there’s a ‘buff’ called Prime Attunement, where you get a chance at a piece of gear that’s a higher level when you finish difficult activities. However, there’s a secret mechanic included - the longer you go without a loot drop, the higher your chances of getting that drop become.
Creativity works the exact same way. The longer we go without hitting that creative high, the more we do without making something we cherish that we can mark as a “level up”, the higher chance the next thing we make will be that creative high.
And, as it turns out, roulette also works when it comes to our audience’s tastes.
I was speaking with someone else in the music industry about this recently, and they gave me this interesting note that I probably won’t forget for a while: would it be better to be everyone’s 100th favorite artist, or 10 people’s favorite artist? Would you rather exist purely in the background where nobody really cares about you or your art because it’s generic, or be a ride-or-die to a few select people because you took a creative stride? Besides, it’s those ride-or-dies that will take us to that massive platform, because just like everyone else on the planet, superfans love telling other people about their favorite art.
So I write this to say to you, and more to myself, that you should make what you love. Make what makes you happy. Never think about what other people might like, because for every ten people who don’t like your art, there’s one person who adores it.
If you liked my writing and want to support me, give my music a spin on Bandcamp - I put out a new album last March that I love, and I hope you love it too.