How To Make Stuff

I wanted to talk a little about making stuff and being creative and, y'know, doing things. I love doing things, in general. I'm a big fan of it. However, we are human people after all, and that means that sometimes doing things is tiring, or our brains are just too busy focusing on remembering really specific moments from children's TV we watched ten years ago (does anyone remember the cartoon about footballers or something on CITV in the 90s that was called 'Hurricanes'?).

It seems like to a lot of people, anything creative is this elusive and strange thing. Something far off in the distance, a glimmer on the horizon. It gets this way for people who are doing creative stuff all the time, too, but how do you make stuff? It's a complicated question, and everyone ultimately has a different approach, but a lot of the answer for me is to just do the thing.

Sometimes I feel like there's a wall between myself and the thing I want to make or do, but I always feel that wall being blasted open when I force myself to sit down and just do the thing. Sometimes I have to do something else as a warm up. For writing I like to sometimes write a stream of consciousness jumble, and it just makes things happen. It's like oiling the squeaky wheels in my brain. Everything just starts tumbling.

Otherwise, I try to enjoy the journey of making something. If I focus on the visceral pleasure of clacking away on a keyboard, then it becomes so much easier to write, because the nice feeling carries me forward. It doesn't matter as much what happens in the end, so it's easier to run along like a little kid skipping along the road, metaphorically dragging a stick across the railings and making a great clanging sound.

Sometimes you just have to focus on making anything, and not worry about what it is or whether it's bad. You just gotta gleefully make things you don't really like, or that you're embarrassed by, and then you'll learn from them over and over again until you're making a bunch of stuff you can look back on and say "yeah, actually, this is okay". And then you make some more stuff that you're not really enthused by, but you know that you have to treasure that stuff just as much, because it allows you to get to the things you feel excited about, for whatever reason.

So please, if you want to, go make some stuff.