020. The answer to a question nobody asked.
“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
A few days ago my daughter and I made a jigsaw of Disney princesses, when I was younger I used to love making jigsaws too, and I realised that in some ways metaphorically speaking I still do. What i mean is, this is the way I approach my creative process in general, the satisfaction of revealing a big picture from smaller disparate fragments.
Since I have started writing these blogs and learning more about putting myself out there as an artist. I have spoken to so many people who want to start something themselves but have met the dreaded resistance. That little voice in your head that goes “what you want to do is the answer to a question that nobody asked” or “What gives you the right to make something?”. Ultimately for me it was about giving myself permission to be a writer.
I always thought that you had to be this unique kind of human who heard all the music in their heads first and who had an overwhelming compulsion to write and bear their souls and couldn’t stop unless their complete artistic visions were manifest. But this always seemed to be at odds with my process of fitting the parts together like a jigsaw. For me it as always more about tinkering and tweaking things like working on a giant machine of sounds. I never hear it all in my head first or feel like I have a total vision of what Im working on. I simply fumble with the pieces until they start to fit together and eventually, a bigger picture appears.
I felt that because I didn’t approach making music like these real artists did, whatever I was doing was not as valid, this of course was all in my own head. The simple truth is it doesn’t matter which way you approach things and it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what they mean or you don’t have a grand vision for it all. It only matters that you did something.
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