As I described in the last post ("The Caretaker") I have been thinking about the weights I have taken onto myself as a creative person, and how to deal with them productively (or more precise, how to get rid of them, because they do not seem to serve a purpose anymore).
For my worldbuilding, 2021 has been witness to a pretty substantial change. I had some of the same issues there: Unfinished things, the urge to create a consistent history and maps, and the feeling of "I can't start a new thing unless I have figured out how XYZ works, because if I later change XYZ, everything will have to be changed again". Stuff like that. There other, unrelated issues, but I'm not gonna go into those here.
The important step #1 was: Screw consistency. Screw perfectionism.
But that's kind of the obvious one. And I had already been trying that for years, without success. It's not that easy, apparently.
Today I realized that one thing that I *also* did while throwing out perfectionism, was my attitude towards gaps. When I re-started my worldbuilding, I first made a list with things that would be interesting to explore further. It became apparent that while it would be cool to have a worked-out history timeline, it would also be an incredible amount of work, and not one that I enjoy doing. Yes, I could attempt to write 5000 years of world history, with thousands of cross-references. But then, that would be all I do.
The formula that actually worked: Focus on the things that are actually fun, pick one of them at my own leisure, work on it until it bores me, move on the to the next. My ADHD makes that approach natural to me - I can get hyperfocused on one topic for a week or two, and then it suddenly becomes boring again. Many of my problems came from my attempts to continue and finish stuff when I already had moved on the the next *Shiny Thing* mentally.
But if I do that, then I will leave a huge trail of unfinished stuff. And that thought kind of depressed me. So I need to reframe what it means for something to be unfinished:
~~ Every unfinished thing is an opportunity to later come back and make something new. ~~ Whenever I run out of steam at a current project, I can go back to my pile of unfinished works and pick one, at my own leisure, *not* because I have to finish it, but rather because it sparks my interest.
And sometimes stuff *does* get finished, of course. Because at the time, I want to finish it. I can spend an entire day hyperfocused on a project, until it's done. In fact, my ADHD can make it almost impossible to *not* work on the thing that I am hyperfocusing on.
The main problem that remains is forgetting things. I am mainly unhappy with leaving pieces unfinished because I know that I will forget them and when I come back, find the thing in ruins. Maybe I can solve that by reframing ("It's an opportunity to create a slightly different thing"), maybe not. It's very similar to the consistency issue in my worldbuilding, and there I have the great advantage of just writing things down. That is much harder to do in music, because I have basically zero patience when it comes to making sketches. I write down exactly as much as I need to come back to a piece on the next day, but not enough to come back to it a week later.
(Yes, I am aware that I can also record myself playing, but then I run into the issue that I have basically no motivation to go through a recording later, so it effectively vanishes until I find it, like, 2 years later. Or never.)
Reframing gaps - one more thing that occured to me is that there is a difference in how I approach worldbuilding and music. You see, I don't ever intend to *finish* a world. It's all about having a space to add literally anything I want. Thinking about philosophy? Write about a school of thinking. Thinking about dreams? Write about dreamers and magic, or about prophetic culture, or metaphysics. I can even - and will, probably - create a history of orchestra music for northwestern Duogiana. Worldbuilding, to me, is just about the most flexible creative hobby possible.
Music is obviously different. A friend of mine recently shared the quote "music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects", apparently some ancient Greek´s opinion (but I do not care who said it. People ain't wise because they lived a long time ago.) I really like that phrasing. When I compose something non-derivative, I sometimes feel like I am working with something very abstract but somehow also very real. And then I "wake up" and have no idea what I just thought about.
Anyway, I got distracted again - the point is, there is no reason to view music as something that *needs to get finished*. Even a finished piece can be interesting enough to further spawn creativity. I'm free to go back to old pieces and extend on what I find there, instead of going "this is finished, I have to make something *entirely new*", a way of thinking that effectively stopped me from writing anything larger for years.
I will probably make lists with possible *fun* projects to do; not necessarily composing, I could also transcribe an older piece, program something, roll some dice, or catalogue and rename older stuff - I've held back from the latter because it seems horribly self-indulgent, but hey, I'm a pretty self-centered person and I'm gonna just own that, because I simply function better this way.
And I have been surprised several times over the last months that sometimes the nerdiest, least accessible stuff actually got the most positive feedback. And sometimes I get none - but if I already enjoyed working on it, who cares? :)
~
This blog post came out way less structured than I anticipated. It's more of an explorative thinking-aloud post than a polished essay, and ... well, that's similar to what I was talking about, so on a meta-level that's probably appropriate.^^
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