Hyperdrive Motivator

Friday evening I breezed home on the train and cleaned house to prep for a meeting with my editor to discuss some projects I am working on.

It went well. I've got work to do.

So now I have to get motivated and fast. This is a great thing for me but I have to admit that I'm not easily shaken loose from the inertia of my day to day life.

Sometimes I think it's the same fear of mediocrity I wrote of earlier but I notice that I don't feel as compelled to work hard when I'm not being paid for what I'm working on. This doesn't just involve my writing but commitments I've made designing as well. If I'm being paid and I have a deadline I am FAR more likely to take action.

I don't like the nebulous, "get it done whenever" nature of unpaid projects. I am absolutely more in gear when I know the limits of what I'm working on. 4,000 words by next Tuesday, 2 full layouts by the eighth, etc.

The money isn't even really the motivator, but the transaction is. It's the commitment, not the cash. I often don't feel that kind of an obligation when there's nothing else going on. It's weird that I need this kind of structure but I guess I do.

Re-examiner

Ever re-read something you wrote a year ago and believe that someone else wrote it?

One of the things I can say about my writing, even related to today's earlier post, is that when you read and edit something you wrote at different intervals you judge it differently. At some point there is enough separation between you and the work that you can see it as something independent of yourself. It exists outside of your own ego.

When I criticize much of my old work (poetry I wrote as a teenager, papers I wrote for philosophy courses in college, fiction I wrote three years ago, an unedited feature I did six months ago, etc.) I am not reading work I wrote. I’m reading work that a person I was wrote.

I can criticize the voice of that person I was. I can be embarrassed by ideas that person that I used to be saw as important. And I can praise the skill he might have had in crafting an article. I can be impressed by the way this guy tied his comments together at the end of his rant.

But this separation takes time. My ability to remove myself from my own perspective is limited when the piece is two hours old.

This doesn’t happen when I’m being edited by someone else. I always anticipate reading work I did that is actually printed and edited with baited breath. How much will they cut? Will the cuts and changes they make be judicious and will they represent me and the subject (bands mostly) the way I initially intended the writing to. I’ve been lucky at City Paper so far. Bret McCabe, as bitchy as he can be, and he’ll play this up more than I would, is fair and doesn’t alter the meaning of stories by fiddling with my texts. I appreciate his criticism and I admire his ability to be honest with someone when he doesn’t like what I’ve provided. But I don’t really consider much of what ends up on the page entirely MY work.

When I re-read that old blog entry from a year ago that I haven’t seen since I posted it, the work isn’t mine anymore. It’s independent of my ego and somehow it seems better for that.

Criticism vs. Creativity

I am a critic. I write critical reviews of music and other things for an alternative weekly. I would very much like to be more of a creative person as well. My critical mind prevents me from creating much as I worry about how my creative output will be criticised.

I don't think I'm alone.

This is a strange conundrum. I know what's good. I'm paid to think, know and write about what makes something good or bad, valuable or worthless. Being that I spend an inordinate amount of time contemplating the aesthetic value of other people's creative output I recognize a number of things with regard to my own creativity.

Thinking and writing critically isn't easy. It requires certain basic skills that I don't believe many people possess. These are skills that I think you can't develop without exercising some faculties that aren't easy to quantify. How do you determine if someone is a good empath? If someone is good at juding things while being aware of his/her own personal interests? How can anyone be sure that a judgment made is a pure one?) But at the same time, it's hard to just call criticism an art. I think it is creative in some respects but it's not in a lot of other ways too.

Creating things that are supposed to have inherent aesthetic values is a difficult thing. Anyone can produce "artistic" output but it's very difficult to actually make something that is beautiful or sublime.

So maybe it's a form of stagefright. How does the critic produce and why? How does someone whose job it is to qualitatively analyze a product by assigning it a value handle producing something that will inevitably be criticized (and probably with greater scrutiny) itself? How does a (relatively in my case) analytic mind go about subduing that analytic nature enough to believe that he or she is capable of making something that is valuable?

It's a hard thing to do, and as a good friend of mine said recently, "It's the creative writer's job to not care what other people think."

I find this funny largely because it seems to me that as a critical thinker/writer, it's also my job not to care what other people think about something I'm criticizing. I suppose the issue in the end is not so much that I worry about what others may think of what I create but that I worry about what I will think of my own output.

The simple fact of the matter is that I often feel that I'm not a good writer, which I think is a good reason, if not excuse, for my less than prolific output. Strange, considering that, as a critic you have to be confident that you know what's good and you have to be enough of an elitist to believe that your opinion is valuable, often with no actual proof or basis. So you're basically an elitist with low self-esteem. I'm an eltist with no self-esteem? How does that make any sense?