Protecting My Creativity

How to prevent yourself from crashing before taking off.

Hey Substack! Long time no… read?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted a proper article on here. And I’m so sorry for that! I’ve been putting stupid amounts of pressure on myself to write something intellectual and worth while. And yes, I do recognize the irony in this after having made an article about the importance of “just doing something” without holding yourself back. I think it’s a great example how we are all always works in progress. Just because someone knows what they should do doesn’t necessarily mean that they always do it. At the very least I know that’s the case with me. I wanted to write this article, however, on protecting my creativity.

Being a creative is great. Having creative friends is great. Being able to participate in a community where you get to share what you’re working on with other people and hear what they’re working on in return can be awesome. But personally, I think it’s very important to take a step back and think about whether something is worth “unveiling” yet.

Nothing is worse to me than sharing an idea/song/concept/drawing with someone when it is in its very early stages and them not seeing the same vision and not reciprocating my excitement. It’s like popping a balloon before it’s been fully inflated. Over the years, I have learned to let me ideas cook and marinate a bit longer before sharing them with my friends. And this is much easier said than done because that initial excitement is a feeling so electrifying that you just want to tell everyone about it.

I think in some ways you can treat your precious creative ideas like a newborn baby. They say to be careful about taking your baby out in the first few months because of its weak immune system and the amount of germs and bacteria that are abundant in the open world. I think this could very much apply to your creativity. When a story/thought/concept/song is just a newborn, you need to look after it for a little while before beginning to expose it to the world. This is for the good of the idea. Because if there’s one thing we all love to do, it’s share our opinions on things. And you don’t want a certain opinion to affect the trajectory of the initial vision for your idea.

I want to make it very clear that I am not trying to be a hypocrite about one of my previous articles that encourage you to just create and release and dive into your art. I think both of these ideas can exist at the same time. You can and should dive into creating what you want to create without restricting yourself with any weird rules or expectations. But once you have created something, once you have brought a concept into the world and it’s raw and unrefined, that’s when I say to keep it under your care for a little while before sharing it with your circle. This will allow you to refine the edges of your work. Put more thought and effort into your creative idea and then once it’s “matured” a little while longer under your care, then you can begin to “focus group” it with your trusted collaborators.

One last thing I will add on to this is to also protect your creativity by allowing other people’s opinions to hold less weight in your mind. You shouldn’t place absolute importance on the thoughts of others, even if they are people you respect and admire. Everyone has a bias. Everyone can only look at something through their own personal lens. With that comes an opinion that’s informed by their specific life experiences. Sometimes someone just won’t “get it” like you want them to. And that’s fine. You can still use their feedback to gauge if this will be the common reception of your work or not. But even if most people don’t get it, if you truly believe in what you are doing then put it out regardless! The most important thing is that you’ve put your best intentions into your creative endeavor, you’ve refined it and worked on it to the best of your abilities, and you’ve gotten feedback from the people you care about.

At the end of the day, not all art is meant to be easily digestible. And if it is easily digestible, that doesn’t make it any less artistic than something that is more niche. Do you get where I’m going with this?

Create create CREATE! Don’t hold yourself back. BUT make sure you are protecting your art and your mind when you are ready to share. Make sure you have enough confidence in yourself and your ability to not let the opinions of others wreck you. You need to be your first fan before anyone else, and I mean that with all of my heart. You genuinely need to love and enjoy what you are creating regardless of whether anyone else does as well. And (spoiler alert) more often than not, people will gain an interest in the work you’re putting out if they see how much you love it. Even if they don’t get it at first.

I hope this article made enough sense to you. It was very stream of conscience but hey… that’s how I role ;)

Keep up the drama

-Andrew Rudy of The August Drama