AYOBA 3 Month Update: The ARTISTIC TRAINING PROGRAMME
It’s been just over 3 months since I started this A Year Of Bad Art (AYOBA) project, and it’s been going really well.
I've made videos, written blog posts and short stories, but most importantly I've generally felt more liberated and inclined to share what I make.
However, I still hold back. Lots of videos I’ve made I haven't posted publicly, and have many MANY drafts of essays that will never reach the Internet.
My main reason, hilariously, is that I feel they’re still not good enough to share.
I know, I know, it was meant to be a year of bad art - but work with me here:
These past few months, while initially giving me license and incentive to start making stuff, have made it apparent that my artistic or creative ambitions are generally much greater than my current artistic abilities right now.
In a moment of realisation, it occurred to me that most of my hold ups and bad habits when it comes creativity are exactly the sort of excuses and less-than-ideal mindset that I was trying to call out in my 'how to make exercise less enjoyable' video. Things like:
Only making things so often - parallel to only exercising every few weeks. With creativity you get in a groove on a project. Your mind tinkers with it as you sleep. You gather momentum, which is easy to lose.
Not follow a plan - most of the times projects plan themselves. If I'm shooting a video I have a rough idea of what shots I need to make, and I've started to put together a process. But these are all on a project-by-project basis. There's no overarching structure for how I'm going to make all these ideas, and, it turns out, I have a lot of bad ideas that I want to make (and some good ones). This is akin to someone having a lot of athletic goals, some of which are totally non-related, and not having any sort of structured plan in place to reach them.
So why not apply athletic-training principles to artistic goals?
I make videos and write pieces and I just want them to be better. What I produce is usually far off what I envisioned. Sometimes this is inevitable and you have to move on - it is what it is - but with some ideas, you need a certain level of proficiency in the first place to even have a hope of capturing them.
I want to be a better writer. I want to be a better filmmaker, editor and so on.
So why not train for that?
So I’m starting an
ARTISTIC TRAINING PROGRAMME
The programme:
Write 1000 words a day, 6 days a week
That’s about it.
More detail:
These words can be on essays, short stories, scripts and so on. Journalling doesn't count. Letters to people do count - as those have an intended audience other than myself.
Writing can be substituted for editing through 1000 words of text or editing video for roughly an hour a couple of times a week. This seemed reasonable to me - an important part of writing is re-writing, usually a full edit involves replacing or rearranging almost all of a text anyway.
The targets have to be met daily - doing 6000 words on a Saturday does not count, neither does a day of filming or editing. The aim is small chunks of work repeatedly.
I’ve been really enjoying doing this for the last couple of weeks, for a few reasons:
I can relax when I'm not writing or creating. I can trust that I'm doing the adequate amount of work to get me to where I want to be. I can more fully switch off, and more fully switch on.
Training plans are energising. In any film featuring one, my favourite part is normally the training montage - the moment whereby the character DECIDES they're going to get better and improve. They have a goal and now they're going to reach it. Life is affirmed as being worthwhile and full of purpose, they wake up with a reason.
It gives me a framework from which to build on a different schedule - if I need to adjust then the structure of working regularly is in place.
It removes the decision I need to make each day of “what am I going to do creatively?” I have a default, and alternatives if desired.
It’s SIMPLE - and easy to measure and stick to.
I got this idea from two places. The first was from Stephen King’s On Writing, where he mentions he has a minimum of 2000 words to hit a day. That sounded a bit intense to do with a full time job already, so I figured I’d go for 1000. That’s around two pages. Challenging enough to be interesting, yet doable.
The second place was some advice attributed to Ray Bradbury on how to improve your writing - one of his tips is to write a short story a week for a year. It’s impossible to write 52 bad short stories apparently, eventually one will be good. Quantity leads to quality - I like that idea, so I’m giving it a go.
I have a lot of creative things I want to do, but most of them are in some way underpinned by good writing. Whether that’s a script for a video, a book, a blog post, or even lyrics to music, writing is involved. I’m hoping by improving this, the rest will follow accordingly.
So we’ll see how this goes - will I become a better writer? More productive? Will it make me hate all of this? Only time will tell.
And that’s just about 950 words. Going to go write some poetry now to finish today off.