Listening to Dan Harmon's Harmontown podcast today really got me thinking about the nature of creative minds, and how to care for them. He was reading from the old journals he kept as a teenager on the show, and they had a certain pretention in them that he openly acknowledged, and which I immediately recognized from my own past writings, which I've often winced at (and still do with some of my recent stuff). There was also a segment near the end where he was talking to a guy in the audience who'd deferred his creative dreams in order to pursue a more practical line of work, and again I saw echoes of my own life choices.
The most important advice Harmon had to give was to keep writing, and that you're probably going to write a whole ton of shitty words to get to the good ones. That's advice I keep reminding myself about, and it's advice that I've tried to put into practice with my daily entries on
750 Words. I've written nearly 150,000 words there so far, which is the equivalent of nearly three years of
National Novel Writing Month. Granted, the vast majority of what I've written there hasn't been fiction, but there's a certain level at which it's all just expository writing, and I feel that we could all stand to develop a solid narrative voice even when describing our own lives. I think that voice is still a work in progress for me, and maybe it'll always be that, but I know that I'm not wincing now as much as I once did.
I've also noticed that creativity, my case included, often runs hand in hand with obsessive behavior. Sometimes I can use this obsessive behavior for good, like when I apply it to running, or writing, or cleaning. Other times it drags me down, like when I become obsessed with a video game, or checking social media for updates. I can't always control where my obsessions head (especially when I'm feeling tired and/or depressed), but I think I'm finally starting to understand this behavior better. I think it's what makes creative people so prone to addiction. Thank god I haven't had to deal with
that in my own life, but it's something I keep at the back of my mind.
I think having other people in my life to support me---especially my wife, whom I can never thank enough for that---has really helped me keep my obsessions on the positive side. That's not to say I don't still slip up every now and then, but the cycles are shorter and less frequent now. I even feel that I'm being more productive at work, although it helps to have a job where I finally feel like I'm part of a highly capable team on that front.
It's funny---I was always somewhat of a loner growing up. I always thought I was better off on my own, and that other people didn't understand me well enough to be my friends. I was focusing, though, on the things that I couldn't change (i.e. other people's reactions to me) instead of the things that I could (my behavior). Granted, when I finally did learn how to be a fully functioning social creature, there was a lot of trial and error. That's what often scared me off from it when I was younger---I was an incredibly easily embarrassed boy, and kids my own age could be especially cruel when dealing with my weirdness. Through it all though, I always regretted the times I didn't try reaching out to people more than the times I did. I even managed to get over my all-time most awkward moments eventually (though perhaps that may have something to do with the passage of time making them less vivid).
There was one particular event that haunted me for ages. Tim Robbins went to the same high school as me, and while I was there he came in to give a speech at the auditorium. There was a Q & A session afterwards, and I got it into my head that this was my big chance to ask a celebrity a question. The only question I managed to come up with, however, when I raised my hand and the kid with the microphone came over, was whether the veteran actor/director had heard any good dirty jokes from Walter Matthau on the set of I.Q. The response he gave was a polite demurral, which is probably what I would have done in the same situation, but good lord did it ever take me a long time to live that down---and nobody had even made fun of me for it! Even that, though, is finally something I can look back on and... well maybe not laugh about yet, but I'm getting there.
