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once you eat the flesh of other creative people, the main thing is to make a routine practice and just do stuff.
inspiration is for amateurs.
if someone had told me that when i was 18 i would've thought they were crazy. whaddya mean? i would've said. i might have actually said it, but the hallucinogens i was doing at the time make that period a little foggy still.
i know we've talked about this before, but i really think that there's a point in one's life where things change in terms of how one approaches working. i think that's somewhere in the background behind eliot's kinda snarky line "everyone's a poet at 18; no-one is at 40." initially it's all fire and inspiration. later, you can go further but you should, i think, just take what you learned about what you like to do from that period and forget the modus operandi.
do stuff that engages you, think of it as a way to extend and refine modes of seeing or listening or being in the world.
you can play with the process once it's under way, go on adventures, take risks, have things fail or surprise you the other way.
but you have to be in a position so any of that can happen, and that position just requires doing stuff. patient, consistent doing stuff.
when i landed at tfp, my ex convinced me that i should do with the writing what i do with piano--just work at it every day, even if i don't have anything to write about, nothing to say, write anyway.
i took her advice. i'm not sure how far i've gotten, but i know that what i'm doing now is more fun and intricate than it ever woulda been had i not done that.
i guess somewhere in there i stopped really caring about what people thought of it---i mean i like it when people like things and learn alot from when they engage (this both sound and writing stuff)---but it's also entirely ok if people don't like things or aren't interested. i keep going anyway. it's not for everybody. it's just something i do, really, that i also do another thing with, which is getting it out into the world.
you can't learn to be a kind of self-contained operation right away. you work it out for yourself as you work on what engages you. allow things to change through consistency of interaction with a medium. have fun. give yourself a break, too. it's ok for things not to work. as you go, the reasons they don't work will maybe get more interesting. that's when the puzzles start opening up. i like puzzles.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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