Tag: Challenge

the skill of chasing inspiration

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During my second semester of graduate school, I began to mentally sort my projects into three categories.

  1. Projects that feel like my heart’s work.
    This is the gold. When the story you’re telling and the words & music you’re writing feel aligned with your inner sense of purpose. When your idea fuels your inspiration and your heart wants intently to discover this thing you’re making. I pretty much always wish I were writing pieces in this category.
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  2. Projects that feel like skill-building opportunities.
    Especially when deadlines loom, we don’t always have the luxury to discover the work that feels like our heart’s work. Even if we don’t feel inspired about the ideas themselves, we can find inspiration in the opportunity we have to build our skills so that when we find project ideas that do feel like our heart’s work, we have the tools in our toolkit to make the most of those moments of inspiration.
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  3. Projects that feel like doing laundry.
    Occasionally, we run across projects that we have to do in order to be reasonable graduate students, even though we struggle to find the excitement for them. These exercises can feel like going through the motions without aim; these are the most frustrating pieces to write. To minimize the frustration, I often give these exercises as little time as possible; whatever comes out of me goes into the piece without much foresight or afterthought.

This mental sorting has been helpful for me, enabling me to prioritize my favorite projects while behaving reasonably about my least favorite projects.

However, I’m beginning to understand that part of being an effective artist means knowing how to bring a project from a lower category to a higher category.

I call this the skill of chasing inspiration—of noticing when you aren’t feeling inspired and venturing out in search for a kernel or framing that re-sparks your excitement.

Sometimes, this skill will feel like an active “chasing” or “pursuing.” Other times it will feel like a natural “following” or “finding.”

This skill becomes especially necessary as we begin to write longer pieces. Of course, we should avoid embarking on a longer piece unless we already love the idea enough that it drives us out of bed in the morning, but if we start to feel lost and uninspired—and inevitably, we will—we must know how to find the tinder and kindling to reignite our own inspiration.

We don’t always have to do this alone. Our collaborators, teachers, and supporters can help us. But we will get stuck. So we’d better cultivate the skill of getting unstuck.

the bogus condition

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In The Musical Theatre Writer’s Survival Guide, author David Spencer proclaims:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITER’S BLOCK. NOT WHEN A musical with a decently developing foundation is under way.

There is emotional turmoil and personal mishegoss that can interfere with writing, to be sure; and certainly the need to juggle a pay-the-bills “civilian” job with limited creative time can sap one’s energy and concentration—at least until you figure out how to prioritize and pace yourself. But allowing for the absence or the moderation or the mastery of such real-life distractions, and the presence of even mild professional-minded functionality, writer’s block is a mythical malady borne of four quite real symptoms:

1. You don’t have enough information.
2. The song or scene you’re trying to write is resisting you because the underlying premise is false.
3. Something is intrinsically amiss with your story structure or your underlying theme, and in trying to accommodate that flaw, you’re running up against its limitations.
4. What you’re trying to write simply isn’t good enough by your own standards, and your internal barometer is urging you to start again.

What I like about this framework is that if you can categorize which symptom you are experiencing, you can take concrete actions to resolve the “block.” If 1), you need to study your character more closely, or research the parameters of the situation, or find music that inspires the sound palette you want. If 2), you need to rewrite the scene or musicalize with a different moment or a different character. If 3), you need to re-examine your assumptions about the larger story and see if one of those premises is problematic. If 4), you just need to identify the part that’s dissatisfying and rewrite it completely, or even start the whole song over from scratch. And if you’re not sure which symptom it is, you can try any number of these solutions, and see what works.

pride in your choices

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transcript

It’s harder to be kind than clever.
Cleverness is a gift. kindness is a choice.
Gifts are easy. Choices can be hard.

Will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?

We are our choices. Build yourself a great story.

Thank you to Tanay for inspiring this post.

EDIT (2023-03-20): It’s interesting to revisit this post knowing what I know now about how Bezos has chosen to use his power and personal fortune. I still resonate deeply with the questions he has posed, but have to keep in mind that perhaps Bezos himself has not lived up to his own original intentions.

kilimanjaro

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8636e615-fdd2-4278-86f8-62f5fac5545d.png
Mawenzi, Kilimanjaro’s the second-highest volcanic cone, as seen from Kibo, its highest peak. Photograph taken by the author, January 2018.

Preparations

  • Select a route. We chose the 8-day Lemosho route in order to avoid altitude sickness and optimize for summit success rate.
  • Shape up. For true mountaineers, Kilimanjaro isn’t a difficult climb, as it doesn’t require much specialized training, technique, or gear. For a “person of average fitness,” the climb is doable, but certainly not easy.
  • Altitude. The main challenge – aside from the sheer determination needed to keep your body moving through a cold and snowy summit night – is the altitude. Kilimanjaro’s summit is 19,341 feet high, or about two thirds as high as Everest. Up top there’s only about half as much oxygen as there would be at sea level. Take medicine (Diamox) to help with acclimatization, but otherwise all you(r guide) can do is climb slowly and control your elevation carefully so your body can naturally adjust to the lower oxygen content.
  • Contrasting climates. Over the course of a week, you’ll progress past farms and forests, up through heather & moorland, across highland desert, and into arctic conditions. And then you’ll come all the way back down.
  • Meditation. Altitude trekking for the unacclimatized is slow, plodding, and ultimately meditative. Bring mental spaces you’d like to mull over.

Humble pie

  • Tempo. The speed record for a summit and return is 8 hours. (Compare that with 8 days.)
  • Competence. A group of 6 climbers warrants 23 staff – 1 head guide, 2 assistant guides, 2 cooks, and the rest porters, who carry everything that isn’t in your daypack: your bags, the sleeping tents, a mess tent + table + chairs, food + cooking gas + equipment, a toilet. The staff travel at least twice as quickly while carrying at least twice as much. (We asked one of our guides if there was any training or physical exam to be a porter, and he laughed. “They are African,” he told us. It seems that most folks there grow up carrying heavy loads on their heads, developing that kind of physical stamina as part of the natural course of life.)
  • Energy. A couple of the porters are “summit porters” who go with you and the guides to the summit, so that there are enough people to carry down any emergency evacuees. When your energy starts to fade, they sing and clap the energy back into you.

Learning

  • Endurance. You can keep going much further than you think you can.
  • Community. Trustworthy guides and caring compatriots share their strength.
 Thank you to my mom for making this climb with me.