On Trying

My reading list these days suggests that I haven't been all that creative. On my nightstand sits a copy of Introduction to Marketing, Ogilvy on Advertising, Getting to Yes, Interviewing for Journalists, and even Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Builder to try and remedy my piss poor vocabulary. I bought a new thesaurus. I bought a book on grammar. I even started one of those Bill O'Reilly books my cousin suggested. Didn't last long though. All this reading is in an effort to create better stuff. 

Sometimes I sit and watch TV, drink a few beers, and remain in a state of self-sabotage for hours before suddenly, out of nowhere, something of inter-dimensional importance hammers into my thoughts. It could come from a TV ad, the static on the radio, or a speck on the wall. There's a question so profoundly stated back to myself that I feel like I'll erupt if I don't write it down immediately. It's a truth, and I know it, and until tomorrow morning once I've forgotten it, this clear beam of acute relevance will be a new axiom in my life.

For me, this is the process of creation—listening to your inner voice whenever, wherever, however it decides to speak. It's why I keep a notebook on hand at all times. You may feel inspired as you're hurrying to the bathroom, and if that hammer crack is ignored, there goes the spark, out into infinity, back into the radio waves, never to return. 

If you do too much thinking, churning and rationalizing and justifying and judging its merit, you dull its original shimmer. This idea won't ever happen again. Somehow, you know this deep down inside.

You don't have to be a genius to make a genius work of art. You've likely shared thoughts with your favorite artists, and it's probably why their works send shivers down your spine. You bond with them because they've been exactly where you are now, and they created something at that moment. Artists take a shapeless, invisible energy and alchemize a physical object or sensation.

Some masterpieces are not profound. An artist could establish an emotion so common that we've forgotten it completely. Robert Browning's "Love in a Life" makes me feel like someone's in the room with me when I read it. In that freeze of time, I know what Robert Browning looks like. He gazes at me through "yon looking glass" in a timeless moment. His thoughts are so clear that I can't see anything but the truth. 

I catch the glimmer in Jay Gatsby's, and the dried blood and tears on my skin in Alice in Chains' Jar of Flies.

The greats throughout history aren't original or even masterful—they just speak with clarity, whether through their mouths or some instrument. Jimi Hendrix didn't second guess notes. Roberto Clemente didn't doubt his read of the field. Debbie Harry didn't ask which way the wind was blowing before floating her lyrics on its wings.

All the books we read, the music we hear, the TV we watch—these are the influences that shape our responses to the future. However creativity strikes you—whether through words, music, ideas, maths, predictions, forgivings—they're all thoughts any of us could conceive. We all have thoughts, but when you try to manifest your response to those thoughts, it will be in a way the world has never seen.