What following the rules looks like.
How putting your art out there feels like being a kid terrified of getting into trouble.
I find it curious how happenstance shapes and influences our most formative memories. What must seem completely trivial at the time somehow triggers us into remembering a thing forever. In this case, it’s the photo album of my third birthday that carbonised some vivid details of my earliest memories.
Now, in case it’s been a long time since you were three years old, let me remind you that the art of blowing out candles is serious business. And blowing out birthday cake candles that also grant magic wishes? Deadly serious. That I happened to be terrible at it was beside the point, what mattered was they were mine and by dammit I was going to huff until the deed was done. It was in this long winded endeavour that a shameless opportunist stole my thunder and blew out MY birthday candles. Arsehole.
I can vividly remember the table of candied men, with their ice cream cone bodies and lollipop heads, dressed in icing and gumdrop buttons. I desperately wanted one, and they were free to take, but some spider sense within feared the absence of explicit permission. As the wonderfully candid photo below shows, I even picked one up, thought better of it and returned him back to his people. It was then the birthday blower thief sidled up alongside me, took one, and proclaimed we were allowed. He could not to be trusted. As tragic as it is cute, I never did eat a candied man on my very own birthday.
Though the passage of time has warped and embellished these memories, I believe the spirit remains intact. I was scared and I let fear censor me, because it seemed safer to give up my desires than to expose myself to the possibility of doing something wrong. It’s remarkable three year olds are capable of such fully realised emotions, or how often this pattern would repeat in later life. Cowering from fear is a boundless topic, but in this case lets ask from whence does this sense of wrongness come?
School of hard knocks
Pick any teenager, and I’m sure they can confirm their parent’s almost superpower like ability to embarrass them. As I remember, most often this was when my parents did something outside of the bounds of the way I thought it was supposed work. Like when my mother bought my school uniform shirts from the second hand store, but the badges were faded so she recoloured them with permanent marker. So very uncool.
And as it goes, despite any number of pleas and desperate exasperation, your parents have a hard time taking any of this seriously. The rigours of adult life have long since beaten the need to fit in down the priority list. Pandering to avoid a bit of awkwardness seems like unnecessary folly in the face of real problems like keeping you fed an paying school fees.
The point here is that experience seems to have an effect on what we see as the proper way of doing things. By doing the wrong thing enough times and getting away with it, and similarly being punished for doing the right thing, we learn edges of the playing field can be very different to where we see them in our mind — often the rules are fungible.
Falling in line
This bug in our mental programming can be especially troublesome when we’re pursuing creative excellence. Attaching our name to something and putting it out there for the world to judge can feel very much like high school. If we try to hide behind our faulty rules to avoid becoming a target we’re probably limiting ourselves without even realising it.
I’m still trying to rewire the rule that says I’m fraudulent if I’m not a “true artist”. For me this means being responsible for everything and doing it all from scratch, be it writing a song, drawing a character or inventing a game play mechanic. Not only does this create a much higher mountain to climb, it can be lethal to your motivation when it feels like enough progress isn’t being made.
By instead remixing what already exists: a sample from another song or a photo reference of a person or a genre convention; progression is built in by default. This is free motivation boost also helps instil the familiarity your audience needs to access and appreciate your work in the first place.
I may be aware of this now but I still find it very difficult to let go. Much like my three year old self it feels wrong, and I don’t know what would happen but somehow I’m sure it would be bad. Someone would shout at me or they would point and laugh. And hey, perhaps they would, but I guess on some level I’m starting to see that it’s also very likely they wouldn’t even notice because they were enjoying it too much to care.
Cadence is a video game in development and the inspiration for this series. To see how this turns out, delivered to your inbox every Tuesday, then hit follow next to Creative Suck below. Or don’t, this is probably easier if no one’s watching.
