“Personally, I experience success when I enjoy what I’m doing. I love the creative process, even if the end result isn’t embraced by anyone else.”-RuPaul
There’s something about this quote that resonates with me. It’s that the creative process is about personal fulfillment. I really get that, it’s not to try to make a career out of this blog that I restarted it. It’s that I need a way to express myself. I have all these ideas, feelings, and desires and no real way to get them out in my daily life. Sure my loved ones encourage me with my photography, but merely good photos isn’t what I’m after.
There’s this perverse desire in me to be this reclusive artist who every so often just releases a body of work. I think that subconsciously that’s most artists desire. It’s those that don’t have that desire to change the world that I think do change the world. It’s like the law of inverses, the more you care the less of an impact you leave.
Some people’s creative process is to work through everything first. Storyboard the entire project. Beginning, middle, end. That’s beneficial because you can decide what your message is. How to communicate that message, and how to wrap things up. This style works for things like books, movies, TV shows. Anything that has a plot, characters who grow, some who regress.
Other people’s is to just start, find the end point, and reach it. Only bringing the story together at the very last minute. This is otherwise known as journalism. A question is asked, a journey to find the truth of the answer takes place, and then conclusions are made. It’s a slice of the universe as it is in a specific moment in time. Never before existing and never again existing.
No matter which style someone’s creative process is, the end message is always personal. That’s what is key I think. Being personal, and open is what builds a good narrative and makes a character relatable. It also makes us as real people relatable.
I’ve always struggled to start projects and get them to a conclusion. For much of my life I would start something and just be at worst average at it quickly. Not ideal for creatives, not that I’d call myself a creator. I have the vision of what I want a project to be when it’s finished. Yet something always gets in the way, money, time, skill.
This very post is an example of that. I know what I’m wanting to get across, but the words elude me like the, I don’t even know. I’m currently writing this almost stream of conscious. I’m venturing into deep, dark waters. This is good. It will focus my mind. That doesn’t mean it’s not also agonizing. I guess only time will tell how I cope through this exercise and the overall project as a whole.
I don’t think I fit into either category of creative process yet. I don’t know what the end point of this blog is. I’m just writing about things that come across my mind because in some absurd way it brings me some peace. Not like emotional peace, more a peace that some part of my soul will forever be left somewhere. Be it in the ones and zeros of a server somewhere. Or just in the memory of someone who read my ramblings and took something away from them.
WC Fulks 