I still don't understand why people would put images on microstock sites, where they sell for less than a dollar for usage rights. As an example, I have 11 images on Alamy. Total income is over $1200 for 6 sales. I could have had the same images on a microstock site and made about $5. Don't sell yourself short. If your images are worth something, they are worth more than pennies.
Starting projects seems to be easy. Ideas are dime a dozen, always popping up, ready to pursued. But I find the starting bit easy. It is the follow-through that often saps my will. Even if the pictures are good it can become a struggle to keep turning up, time and again. I know from experience that each time I do, I'll see something new or exciting and get carried away. I'll find that productive, flowing place where the good pictures come from. But showing up can be such a battle. All the fears and doubts come rushing out. The idea is stupid. Nobody wants to see it. Who will care about the pictures? I'll be bothering people who have better things to do. It has been done better before. Over and again these voices in the head turn on the doubt and ridicule. Best solution is to just ignore them and get on with it. Just keep turning up and see what happens. Judge the results and the process when you've got the images in hand, not before. The job is to take the pictures not second guess the results before even turning up.
Muses, genius and other sources of inspiration or blame. Don't be afraid. Just show up. Do your job. Keep showing up.
Another week over, in Raleigh - now I'm back in Austin. Another week not working on "the book". It has gotten to the point of being in double quotes. It is weighing on my mind, like my PhD thesis did, for the 10 years it languished unfinished. A low level, constant gnawing block of guilt at the back of my consciousness. I watch TV to tune it out. I go to the gym to avoid it. Drink to keep it at arms length. Blogging seems like another surrogate of avoidance. "Hey look - I'm writing - that counts - doesn't it?"
So to make progress and get out of this minefield of creativity and productivity porn I've found myself in, I guess I have to take Pressfield's advice and turn pro. Same advice as I found in the Creative Habit. Same advice in Time to Write and in Creative Authenticity.
It all boils down to this - do some work. Day after day. Everything else takes care of itself after that one piece falls into place.
Just finished reading the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Like many creativity books it does well describing the barriers and frustrations that all artists seem to share, but peters out when it tries to provide solutions. I think that's because the solutions are all fundamentally very simple and at the same time intensely personal. Pressfield describes all of the frustrations and barriers to creative work as being Resistance. Others call this fear, or procrastination. All the doubting voices and things that stop you starting or help you find something else to do. All the same thing really. His solution is to treat the thing you want to do as a job. You have to turn up, if you want to or not. Day in. Day out. Just get on with it, like you do with your real job. Do the work and the muse will come, the creativity will happen.
So productivity isn't a surrogate for creativity. It is not that we try be productive to be creative. Rather, productivity is a requirement for creativity. You have to be doing the work, putting the time in, for your creative sparks to have a chance to happen. The fickle flashes of brilliance don't come if you aren't vested in the process of making the bad stuff or everyday good stuff along the way to greatness. Turn up. Do the work. Each day. Every day.
The more I write, the more I think. Getting each thought out on a page makes room for the next and on and on in progression. I've been doing morning pages, an idea from the Artist's Way, for about three months now, with occasional lapses. Each time I spend the half hour it takes me to write 3 or 4 pages long hand, I have new ideas. The initial ideas are always there, but capturing them on paper seems to give me the confidence to let that current idea go and move forward, rather than clinging onto the one idea and spinning in mental circles.
Print is very rarely the medium I work in. I've occasionally had comments about images as being hard to print or challenging to print and that takes me by surprise - because I almost never consider it. I compose for a small screen. I edit and finish for a small, self-illuminated display. This is how I work much of he time. I used to think of this a flaw or something to address - something I needed to improve upon. Maybe it still is. But that small, self-illuminated display is a valid medium in its own right. Many, and perhaps most, photographs these days are not destined for a physical print. I'm becoming at peace with this idea.
And then there is SoFoBoMo and the final book.
Check out TriCoast Photography's new blog. I just won a set of radiopoppers!
You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study. He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the School of Architecture. Ever see one of his paintings? Neither have I. Resistance beat him. Call it overstatement but I'll say it anyway: it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.
- The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
I posted 'resistance is futile' this morning, wondering about the twisting and turning people go through when faced with even fairly simple constraints. Today at lunchtime, I was going to eat alone and decided to pick up a copy of 'The War of Art' by Steven Pressfield, on the recommendation of Kirk Tuck, from his blog. Reading the book over lunch, I was amused to find out that Steven defines all the causes of procrastination, fear & doubt in art making as capital-R Resistance. A small coincidence, maybe, but maybe I'm on the right track. The book seems good so far. You can read the first few chapters, here.
Something funny I've noticed when people are faced with the SoFoBoMo concept. They love it. Want to take part. It's something they've always wanted to do. 'Sign me up!' they cry. They've read the rules. They get the concept.
Then the bargaining begins. Oh, I've already got the pictures, can't I just use them? hmm, 35 pictures are a lot, I'm sure I can only do 25, that'll be okay? May to June you say? Well, I'm going to start in April. Will it still count if I don't finish it until July?
Even with such a simple set of constraints, it is interesting to see how much we mentally fight and rail against them. 35 pictures or more. Taken between May and June. That's it - there is almost no constraint at all, and yet. and yet.
What's going on here?
