Creative Rituals (an essay in progress)
There’s a great essay by Sean Blanda “10 Creative Rituals You Should Steal” http://99u.com/articles/21137/10-creative-rituals-you-should-steal ... one of them that I employ every day is “Envision What You Will Be Remembered For”.
Do yourself a favor, read that essay and pick out the items you can do.
#7 Envision What You Will Be Remembered For.
Every day, I ask myself what will be my legacy. Every day, I review the list and consider changes (reprioritizations, additions, subtractions). One thing that goes for all of them is that I’m not going out of my way to publish or disseminate my work in any way. I’m making that a to-do for the new year. I need to start submitting or applying or something. I dislike the process of submission because there are so many variables that, in my mind, shouldn’t be. The primary variable is networking. There was that great site a few years back that documented Poetry awards, their judges, and how the winners were connected with the judges. To me, it tainted the whole merit-based system. There’s no merit in knowing someone. It changes the whole act of experiencing and judging a piece of artwork into a commercial or marketing based system; it makes me frown. But I digress.
Here is my list as of 12/3 with annotations.
- Poet. (I feel most secure in this discipline.)
- Visual Artist. (I’m feeling more secure in this discipline.)
- Photographer. (As with visual arts, I’m feeling more confident.)
- Performance Artist. (I’ve mostly stopped working in this discipline after I stopped being active with the NY Neo-Futurists. While I’ve come up with some ideas that I think are strong projects, I haven’t been “moved” to complete them. So while I do include it relatively high on this list, its presence is partially to make me think about ways to work it into my regimen.)
- ?Composer? (While I feel good about the work I am creating, I’m very cognizant that I am creating it as a support to my performance/reading process. If it had to go into a genre, it would be as Soundtrack. So, I feel a little less confident about it since I don’t know if the work stands on its own or not yet.)
- ?Novelist? (I feel so good about the work I did in NaNoWriMo 2014. It’s a book I’ve been wanting to write for a few years now. I’m really hoping that I can finish the story and polish it in the next few months. So while I feel good about this discipline, I’m very aware that my success in it is very much about what I do with the product in the next few months.)
- ?Comic Book Creator? (I’m going to see how this goes during the 24 Hour Comic Book challenge this weekend. I don’t know if what I create will “fit” as a comic book or something else. I have found myself inspired by Eric Drooker’s visual storytelling.)
- ?Culinar? (If I can ever figure out my allergies, I’d like to work on making recipes.)
- ??Sculptor? (I’m going to try my hand at this during the January 2015 Artclash Collective’s Fun-A-Day http://artclash.com ... I’m not quite sure what I’m doing yet, but I will make it a sculpting project.)
- ???Filmmaker? (I’ve got some tiny ideas that I want to work on, but need to set aside time to see if I can make them work.)
- ???Director? (I know I can direct, but it’s a matter of do I want to? I think it’s important to ask myself how I feel about it regularly. It’s also very much tied to whether I create performance art pieces again.)
- ????Dancer/movement artist? (I’ve started taking a dance class to determine my true interest in dance.)