You can't crack the code.
Beep, Boop, Bleh. Write your own story.
A good while back, 5-7 years ago by my approximation, I became fixated on streamlining the creative process. To me that meant dreaming up the visual you see below as a “way of seeing” the ideation process, across mediums. As engrossed as I, the humbly overzealous speculist, was by the thought of sketching up and philosophizing a one and done approach to making things click, I hadn’t yet touched the grass I needed to understand how fragile the premise of creative premeditation truly was.
A chase like this one is squarely pinned to a lack of confidence. Not the kind of confidence that appointed me the fix-it-force capable of engineering the ultimate creative sauce machine, but the kind of confidence rooted in fear. These jitters presented themselves as what I consider today to be the most creatively bankrupt approach to any craft: formula. It’s the dreadfully corroborated list of mainstream mush lining the pockets of number-driven studio executives, in between fat wads of cash shmoney. These formulas don’t simply prioritize the limited framework of success defined by monetary quotas, they flatten the most viable of concepts into sweetly resolved, audience-tested Wonder Bread bullshit stripped of the personally unveiling, adventuring work that only comes from doing things Dora-style. A movie example of this that stokes my frustrations, albeit less flagrantly than say a Regretting You, is last year’s The Long Walk, a movie with strong socio-political underpinnings that felt like it left its meatiest character through lines on the bone in favor of a neatly dressed plot and thematic message. Not to mention its complete overindulgence in the flaming violence inside the concept itself. It was a gripping ride though, I will give it that and it accomplished exactly what it promised.
The concept of a formula is not so bad in its retrospective, post-mortem context and I say that not only to validate the Scribbled Loose media initiative, which is awesome and you should hop on board. There is real value to be pulled from looking back on a project through a lens of methodology.
But whatever you once applied to a project as a functional strategy, whether it be shorthands, tools or structures, you must throw away immediately. Inherent to the creative process is a relinquishment of fixed notions. However you achieved some creative vision in the past becomes entirely void as soon as you’re met with the unpredictable, boundless fragments of a new idea. It’s how the best directors look at it too.
“You have a certain moment to write something and let it come out of you and it’s fleeting. It just it always is. No matter where you are in your life, you you can’t go back. That film was something that came out of me that I…I couldn’t do that again.”
—PTA on making The Master
There’s a seed of selfishness to the creative spirit that I believe requires nourishing in one of two ways. You can strive for the optimal ratio of profit/execution and make the thing “proven” to perform or you can strive for something that’s yours. A full bodied rejection of the standards that box you in at every corner and a commitment to a vision that you nurture to its very last breath. These seeds might not outgrow the option one’s but they always live longer. The profit-motive will always exist and it will always offer the same reward, but the more option two’s entering the fold, refusing to give way to the gatekeepers, the more possible it will be for their seeds to demand the attention they deserve.