There’s an insecurity in me that this blog heals. Heals, because I have to finish things here. I have to publish them. I have to be done. I have to decide on an ending and go with it.
I tend to use several words when I write, trying, searching, looking for whatever is the right one. There’s no right one. I’m just scared to settle on one. I want to avoid clarity, so I write everything as if I’m not looking at it.
Tag Archives: creativity
The effort, and the not
I wonder how much is the effort and how much is the flow. I can’t paint if I think about selling paintings. The pressure destroys the creativity. But I also can’t create if I never feel any pressure. Right? Or is that untrue? If I organize everything else around me to be good, if I’m healthy, happy, would I create without putting the pressure on the creative process itself?
(Is the trying necessary, or would it flow out of me like water if I stopped?)
From a sunny balcony, writing with friends
(I’ve been in a flow lately with writing on a story, but now I have to really make an effort to keep going with it instead of starting to think.)
(3 Quotes that hit me and got written down in my notebook)
- “Every time you wrestle with your doubts, every time you dismantle your intellect to use a tool instead of analysing it, every time you choose to practice instead of theorize your creativity, you will move forward.”
- “Art is a field that’s defined by your actions, not by your qualifications.”
- “The 21st century is an aesthetic century. In history there are ages of reason and there are ages of spectacle, and it’s important to know which you’re in. Our America, our internet, is not ancient Athens. it’s Rome. And your problem is you think you’re in the forum when you’re really in the circus.”
(+1
- “Trust yourself. Trusting yourself means living out what you already know to be true.”)
The Surprise of Creativity
(Excerpt from a notebook) On the topic of writing, Bukowski says: If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. There’s no other way, and there never was. I think what he means is that your writing has to be a surprise, even to yourself. Too many people see writing as a form of thinking, when in reality it’s the complete opposite, a mirrored version or maybe a distant relative to it. When you write, when you really write, you do not need to fear the blank page, because it’s not you who are going to fill it, but your words. Sometimes I’m all up in my head, and I only write such things I’ve already thought about. But what then is the point of writing at all? Is it only documentation? I believe, and believe strongly, that the power lies in not knowing how your sentence will end. I believe, and believe strongly, that we have labyrinths in us just waiting to be discovered, but if you always know and see everything, you just walk along a winding path. You miss all the ways you could have gone. True writing is about something like that.
Little art
Black ink and watercolour, I make them really fast so I don’t have time to second guess myself.
To the writer who won’t start writing (so, me)
Stop looking for the perfect story and choose a real one. (Your heroine doesn’t need freckles or a specific hair colour and your love interest doesn’t need his eyes described in detail. It would be more interesting hearing your story from the point of a view of a baby. It would be more interesting if everyone wasn’t so morally good. It would be more interesting if you didn’t care so much that you ruined it.)
Necessary procrastination
The word procrastination does not exist in the swedish language. We have a word that means to push something to the future, but procrastinating is not just postponing something, it’s the verb for what you’re actually doing while pushing something to the future. So it describes doing something, but it describes it not by saying what you’re doing, but by saying what you are NOT. (weird word, I like it)
Sometimes though, I think the subconscious processing of thoughts is undervalued.
It always makes me think about a story I heard once. It’s about the emperor of China or something, and how he told an artist to paint the most beautiful painting ever (of some motif, I don’t remember). The artist spent years working on his painting, but when he was supposed to be done, he asked for another year, and another, saying he was not quite finished. When he finally appeared before the emperor and uncovered the canvas, it was empty. He then took his paints out, and painted the most beautiful painting in 15 minutes.
How long did it take for the artist to paint the picture? 15 minutes? Or all those years?
I can usually write a school essay because I’ve been writing it for a long time. Even if I write it the night before it’s due, it’s been in the back of my mind for a long time.
The question is, is it better to consciously decide to do something later, instead of constantly pushing it to the next minute? Do some intentional procrastinating? (I suppose that’s called planning) Or is the stress necessary to constantly have it there in the back of your mind?
I don’t know. I don’t have enough patience to finish writing about this.
All we do is gain or lose control
I wish I could lose control.
Splash colours until people cry by looking at them,
turn myself inside out and wipe my blood on the canvas.
Instead I give up halfway through ugly eyes, drawn as if I were a pretentious 12 year old. Disproportionate figures and shapes that never become anything. The thing is, I don’t know how to draw. I repeat lines, and colours, look and remake, but when it comes down to my own expression, I’m empty. Just recreate by hands and in mind. Like we all do, are we nothing but radios? We understand something we think no one has understood before and we tell it or teach or live it. And even tuning in to that, the repetitiveness with which people think their minds are free, is just another of those realisations. Is that what I’ll blare about until the day I die?
Sometimes (too rarely) I forget to act normal in public and I sit weirdly curled up on the bus with the bumps shaking my handwriting. It’s slowing down though. Minutes of looking out the window between every sentence. My mad sadness settles into sleepiness. To quote a song that I like: I don’t know if this, is a surrender or a rebel.
Trying to fall in love with photography
And every now and then I get in a mood where I do
eirians 