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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2gymrNh:danceswchopstck replied to your post “So I followed this recipe and made papier-mache clay. I have it in an…”
I’ve had good results from mentally calling a lot of my creative projects “experiments.” Like, creating is a good thing in itself, you know? And so is learning. If I focus on that, rather than a specific desired end “product,” I have a much easier time making things, and I make things often enough that some of them do come out ways I like. Not all, but some. I hope that idea might be useful to you, too, if it appeals!
I’ve been doing very well at this in writing, actually! I’ve justified basically my entire fanfiction career with this concept. The early years stuff started when my I’ve Graduated College And Got Fired From My First Job, Time To Write A Novel efforts coalesced into 500,000 words of big fat nothing, so I figured what the hell, I’d write some shit on the Internet and see what happened. (That immediately followed my I’ve Graduated College And Haven’t Found A Job Yet novella, which was kind of awesome but I never even tried to finish because I got so excited about getting my first real full-time paying job, which was such a shitshow…) And then I joined AO3, eight years later, when I realized I was too depressed to function and hadn’t even opened a document to write anything in over a year, and SGA pulled me back out of that slump. And I started experimenting with form, and POV, and almost everything I’ve done has been an experiment in some fashion, trying a different thing in various ways.
I’m just a lot less good at that when it’s physical objects, and I’m sort of tired of all the failed craft experiments that I never know what to do with. I feel like I have to keep them to learn from them because my memory is so awful I’ll never recall what I tried that didn’t work– but unlike writing, which takes up no actual space and only a few kilobytes of virtual space, failed craft experiments wind up taking up a lot of room in my tiny house.
So, I have kind of a bit more pressure to eliminate the obvious things that are going to fail before I try them, because I don’t want to be dragging those albatrosses around every time I try to redo the thing.
I’ve had good results from mentally calling a lot of my creative projects “experiments.” Like, creating is a good thing in itself, you know? And so is learning. If I focus on that, rather than a specific desired end “product,” I have a much easier time making things, and I make things often enough that some of them do come out ways I like. Not all, but some. I hope that idea might be useful to you, too, if it appeals!
I’ve been doing very well at this in writing, actually! I’ve justified basically my entire fanfiction career with this concept. The early years stuff started when my I’ve Graduated College And Got Fired From My First Job, Time To Write A Novel efforts coalesced into 500,000 words of big fat nothing, so I figured what the hell, I’d write some shit on the Internet and see what happened. (That immediately followed my I’ve Graduated College And Haven’t Found A Job Yet novella, which was kind of awesome but I never even tried to finish because I got so excited about getting my first real full-time paying job, which was such a shitshow…) And then I joined AO3, eight years later, when I realized I was too depressed to function and hadn’t even opened a document to write anything in over a year, and SGA pulled me back out of that slump. And I started experimenting with form, and POV, and almost everything I’ve done has been an experiment in some fashion, trying a different thing in various ways.
I’m just a lot less good at that when it’s physical objects, and I’m sort of tired of all the failed craft experiments that I never know what to do with. I feel like I have to keep them to learn from them because my memory is so awful I’ll never recall what I tried that didn’t work– but unlike writing, which takes up no actual space and only a few kilobytes of virtual space, failed craft experiments wind up taking up a lot of room in my tiny house.
So, I have kind of a bit more pressure to eliminate the obvious things that are going to fail before I try them, because I don’t want to be dragging those albatrosses around every time I try to redo the thing.
