Question Time

A while ago, I was asked some questions that I said I would answer. It was part of a pay-it-forward blog nomination thing, but I don't read blogs (or read any consistently) so I don't really have any to suggest to you all. I know. Bad magpie, blogging and not reading others. I have a short attention span. 

1.  What is the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten?

At the moment, peanut butter and nutella on a spoon. 

2.  Do you need contact with people in order for you to create?

Tentatively yes. I think it's necessary to have a wide variety of stimuli to create. Talking to other people, particularly other creative people, always seems to have a positive effect on the creative process. That said, I don't think I need direct contact with other people; mostly I just need them somewhere in the vicinity. I get as much from walking around watching people on the street as having a conversation, but I suppose voyeurism is a type of contact in itself. 

There is a part of the creating process where other people just get in the way, though. So maybe it's more, other people are necessary for the pre-creating process, but need to go away during the actual creation. Then they can come back afterwards and look at it. There are those who create in a vacuum, and never show their work, or discuss it, or share it in anyway, and I don't think that's a particularly effective way. Eventually, your output will just end up stagnating if you're only drawing on yourself for material. You also won't get a very good idea of what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. Granted, no single person's opinion should be taken as gospel, but if enough people don't understand a certain aspect, or continuously misinterpret the same aspect, it's a good bet something needs to be changed. 

3.  Does (your) despair have its place in (your) happiness? 

I'm one of those people who believes you can't have one without the other. At least, you can't put one in context without the other. Would happiness (or despair) have any significance without the opposing force? I don't know. I can't answer that question because, obviously, we have both, and all the variations in between. But I imagine without those variations happiness (or despair) would just become a neutral state of existence. 

4.  Give me a link to a recording of your favourite piece of music.

5.  Talk about the relation between mental health (good or bad) and the creative act.

At least a little bit of crazy is expected with any sort of creativity. Most creative acts require the person doing them to become something other than themselves for a moment, which isn't the easiest thing to do. You also have to be able to look at the world in a different way. See the details and potentialities that the every day world passes by. I think, for most creative people, there is a constant struggle between the reality they live in, the reality everyone else is in, and the need, from time to time, to adopt everyone else's reality to survive. For school, for work, sometimes just for basic social interactions. 

There are some people who use their creativity as a therapeutic catharsis. There are the urban myths that you can only create when you're depressed, or that creative output should be some sort of emotional purging. Maybe it is for some people, but I tend to find those views restrictive and a little insulting. It undermines the level of work and effort that goes into creating something, which is not to say that there aren't therapeutic benefits to creativity. That's just not all it is. 

For me, personally, I don't create during a depressive episode. I don't really do much of anything during a depressive episode. I tend to be more "inspired" (I don't like that word) during happy times, but most of my creations centre around trying to capture moments, capture living, and people are most active, most living, when they're happy. I do think, though, that going through the depressive episodes, the manic episodes, the various quirks and nuances of my chemical imbalances, does allow me to express things, or pay attention to things, that I wouldn't necessarily focus on if I didn't have those experiences. 

6.  Recommend something for me to read that you haven’t written.

The Nostalgist's Map of America, Agha Shahid Ali. Or any of his books, really. 

7.  Give me a link to something that you have written.

I don't have many links to written things anymore, but here's a part of something I wrote: "The Magpie".

8.  Is there a moment you can remember when something happened or you had some thought that changed things for you?  If so, tell that story.  If not, what could have changed everything?

That's a tricky question. It's like dominoes. Every thing changes everything.

9.  What is THE most amazing thing about human beings?

The fact that they are totally predictable and completely surprising.

10.  Write a summary of how you see yourself.
One of those little curio boxes. Or maybe a big curio box. With all sorts of things found on the street, and in second-hand shops and old drawers. 

Crawling Out of the Cave

I have been incredibly lax about keeping up with this. It happens. I get into a routine, and all goes well, and then something comes along to side-swipe me (good or bad, usually a mix of both) and writing a new post gets pushed back to tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Before you know it, it's been six months of tomorrows and a mound of good intentions you couldn't dig your way out of with a backhoe.

That's just part of it. There's the self-consciousness of writing in a public forum. The two-pronged attack of who gives a shit what I have to say about x? and what are the people I know going to think?

It took me a long time to be comfortable admitting to other people that I'm a writer. There were mixed feelings about it, usually some sort of guilt and almost shame. Shame isn't the right word, but I don't know that there is one. I was embarrassed to admit it, mostly because I felt like I was pretending to something and would eventually be found out.

That's kind of been a theme with me. This fear that the nameless They will identify me as a fake.

Back to the two questions. They're both questions that anyone who makes anything carries around with them, probably forever. Yeah, sure, we're all good at throwing out this external projection of confidence. We put together our little spiels to justify our projects and passions and convince others they're worthwhile and significant. But beneath all that, those two questions are still there. Who cares, and what are they going to think? 

I would say that a good portion of the creative process is learning to ignore those questions, or at the very least, to push through them. Otherwise, you just stop. There's no output.

The Who cares? question really only trips me up when it comes to this blog. For my fictional adventures, the answer is easy: I care, and yes, I'm self-centred enough to be satisfied with that. The other question doesn't usually trip me up so much (again, outside the blog; knowing your little eyes are scurrying over every word makes me cringe until I have to pretend you aren't out there); my fictional adventures are generally far enough removed from any semblance of real life I don't worry about people trying to place me (or themselves) into any of the characters or events.

Recently, though, I started working on a project that had a lot of similarities to real life. No alternate timelines or made up histories or fantasy elements. Suddenly, what other people would think about it became the most prominent thought every time I sat down to work on it. I worried that they would recast my characters with real people, real thoughts, real events. And that did happen. I lost count of the number of times I had to say Maks is not me.

I guess it can be confusing for those who aren't used to spending a decent amount of time with someone else in their head.

Writing is something I do, and something I do quite haphazardly at that. A majority of the people around me are writers of one thing or another, and they work at. Daily. They plot out time, and create charts, plot arcs, character sheets. Sometimes I get around to doing all that, but mostly every few weeks or so I just sit down and throw out a thousand words or so. Sometimes I edit them, usually if someone else is going to grade them, but I rarely have to make major changes.

And I feel guilty about that. Because in the end, this is something that is quite easy for me that I more or less take for granted.

Shedding your skin is one of the hardest things you'll ever do. It's graceless. Uncomfortable. Potentially embarrassing. I've done it enough times to be intimately familiar with the process, and yet I just can't seem to help myself. The minute I get comfortable with one identity, it's on to the next. A little like places.

It took me a long time to be comfortable calling myself a writer. And I am, for the most part. I'm comfortable in my abilities to do plot and characterisation and meet deadlines (when I don't set them myself). So with that conquest down, over the past few years I've started falling back into photography, and with that shift comes all the old doubts and questions I used to have with writing. The difference being that at this stage in my life, I've learned that walking into what makes me uncomfortable is usually the best way to go.

But the whole process has gotten me thinking back, to what it took to be confident as a writer, to what it means to do either, to the similarities. Both, in a way, are a socially acceptable reason to watch people. Aside from all the other reasons - entertaining myself, affinity for shiny things, really liking to push buttons - that's probably the biggest motivation. People.

Writing, for me, has always just been a way of documenting the pictures I have in my head. (And maybe that's why I can sit down and throw out a thousand words or so, because it's all just pictures.) Visual and written are just parts of the same thing: a way to try to pin down all the little moments that make life what it is.