fill notebooks with your “stupid ideas”

05Dec08

I’d like to start by addressing the irony in this post.  It’s finals time over here, so with all the papers and exams to worry about I’ve taken a blogging hiatus.  I should be regularly maintaining this particular side-project by the middle of next week.

The way I see it, the ultimate goal in life is creation.  By the time my face is carved with wrinkles I hope to have a body of work that I’m proud of.  I hope others share this same philosophy, whether their medium be drawing, painting, acting, writing, speaking, playing music, or raising children.  So my goal is that everything I do, in some way, leads to creation of some sort.  This can be direct (I sit at my desk to draw a picture — ta-da! I’ve created a picture) or indirect (I talk to a friend about a pet peeve — this discussion provides inspiration in an improv scene — that improv scene gives me an idea for a comic — ta-da! A comic is born), but I want as much reincorporation and interconnectedness as possible.  I basically want a life like Wikipedia, where examining one facet of my life will inevitably send you on so many tangents you’ll eventually end up in every corner of my life at once — and somehow it’ll all seem related.  But anyone who has spent their fair share of time on Wikipedia knows how annoying stubs are when you’re looking for a story.  For that reason, it is ever so important to flesh out ideas.

Take your ideas and explore them.  Write them down.  Draw them up.  Act them out.  Talk them through.  Make a project out of them.  True, any given idea may not amount to much, but at the end of the day or week or year, all those little projects will stack up into a respectable pile, and it’s nearly a guarantee that the top of the pile will be more impressive than the bottom.  It’s all about progress.  Thinking is like any other skill, you have to train yourself to do it well.  Sitting around waiting for a million dollar idea, one good enough to warrant action, makes about as much sense as an artist staring at a blank canvas day after day, just waiting for the time when he’ll be able to put his brush down and paint a masterpiece.  Explore your worst ideas along with your best, you’ll probably get more out of them anyways.  If you do it enough that you get to the point where you can make something respectable out of a shitty idea, then imagine what you’ll be able to do when a good idea “comes along.”  Basically, to paraphrase something Mark said, while talking about this little “stupid idea” turned hilarious, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing or if you’re doing it well as long as you’re doing something.  Eventually you’ll be doing something good.

I also clumsily touched on some of the ideas here in my post on conversational poets.  For more insight into this philosophy, turn off the TV and pick up a pen.

Filed under: how to quickly earn my respect and/or admiration   |  1 Comment