Creativity or Half-Assery?
I care too much about what other people think. Or rather, I care too much about knowing what other people think. Sure, sometimes being disliked or a hindrance influences my actions. I’m not capable of making an impatient person wait for me, even if I have every right to take my time, for instance. But overall, I can handle interaction with a person who staunchly despises me over a kind person who might just be fake.
Not worrying about other’s judgments is considered
an ultimate goal for most, many proudly proclaiming, “I don’t worry what others
think.”
And you know what? By caring what other people think, I improved. Once I really began
to acknowledge the importance of other people’s opinions, I developed my skills
much faster and began to gain credibility from a first glance. I focused on
cramming the forgotten corners of my talents, tending to aspects that I didn’t
necessarily enjoy or respect.
But it came with a price. As expected, my
creativity was lost, my personality, the uniqueness and style to my work. The
things I was making seemed more stilted and homogenized, less exciting, more typical.
Overall, I even felt less inspired.
It’s also difficult not to enter into a room and
constantly be fixated on what everyone is thinking and doing. It’s not all bad.
I’m extremely perceptive, good at taking care of the needs of others, being a
team player, and handling the situation. I’m an attentive listener and people
do tend to have a shallow fondness for me.
The problem is when it directs all my energy and
incapacitates me from doing what I want to. Even when I know an opinion is
wrong or it’s none of their business, being aware of what they’re thinking can
sometimes cause me to cease up.
When I was younger, being watched didn’t bother me in the least. Nowadays, doing something well in front of someone is substantially more difficult when someone is standing there than when I’m by myself.
The “I don’t care what people think” ideology has
come up several times in the past few weeks, making me reassess what exactly is
going on. It’s pretty frequent in the writing world overall, and it can be a
point of contention. If you look through the biographies of many successful
writers, Jack Kerouac as a more obvious example, you can see how they were
criticized for writing the way that eventually made them a household name.
An author posted a comment, “Many of you may wonder (in regards to my
books/designs) why I don't go by the "standard" formats/rules. Here
is why: when it comes to creative expression...TRUE creative expression; there
is no rule, there is no standard.”
I, of course,
went and looked at his cover designs to find them fairly lacking. It wasn’t
that they were uncreative, they were different
than most, but they seemed amateurish, simplistic in an easy way. I couldn’t
put my finger on the problem. I actually did somewhat like the concept, or
perhaps the colors, yet I thought it could be done better. There were some
issues in them, like typos on the back cover, random capitalization in some
places and not in others.
The other
problem is that he uses the series’ title first, putting the book’s title
beneath it. At first it seems like they are all called the same until you
realize what he’s actually done. Is this really a big problem? Not necessarily,
but with self-publisher’s habit of changing cover art frequently, I could see
how you would miss that this is a sequel and not just a new version of the
first.
Bias confirmed, his fight for creativity proved
exactly what I would expect; it seemed half-assed more than inspired.
I suppose that calling it “true creativity”
irritated me. I don’t necessarily think that stream of conscious ideas are
preferable to brainstormed ones, as in, slapping an idea on a paper and calling
it a day isn’t necessarily more creative than analyzing the pros and cons,
positive and negative influences, receiving feedback, and questioning overall
effect of a decision.
Being creative isn’t exactly about being
different. It’s more about finding a new way to have an impact, or even just
finding a new tact to do… anything. There’s a lot of occasions in which someone
has done something that deviates from the “norm” and I wouldn’t call it
especially creative. I’m more inclined to call it lazy.
Intelligently experimenting, trying new things with
focus (over just spewing random thoughts) is often oriented by understanding
how people think. It’s recognizing how people react to things, it’s recognizing
how people don’t react to things. In fact, people who tell me they don’t care
what others think seem to be more overwhelmed with their inability to get the
desired response.
You don’t have to adhere to other people’s
expectations or assumptions, but understanding how the average person will
hear/see something enables you to decide if and what to change about it.
I genuinely don’t know how to improve as a
writer if you never think about what other people are seeing. I also don’t find
that people who only do what they’re naturally inclined to are being all that
creative. They often come across as the opposite; doing what everyone else is
and mostly unaware of it.
That’s not entirely the case though. Patrick
Rothfuss described a character who had learned to play music on her own
compared to a musician who had studied all his life. Music was like a city, and
the musician knew every inch of it, each street and corner, each shop, and he
could move around quickly and easily, while the girl moved naturally as well,
but that wasn’t because she knew where she was going, just could walk through
walls, unaware that she couldn’t.
There’s something to be said for being honest
and not over thinking it, and how people can restrict you. I find my concepts
were far more inspired than as of late, with half-assed execution that kept
them down. Once you know the rules, it becomes difficult to organically ignore
them, like if someone were to tell you not to think of an elephant and you
tried to think of an elephant a normal amount.
Doing what feels right can create something far
more relatable and new compared to the clinical following of certain standards
of protocol. I am by no means a rule follower, but I’ve come to have a harder
time ignoring people’s two cents.
Recently, I started to come to terms with
exactly what was the problem. I’d been talking to a guy that I really liked,
but was slightly embarrassed by the age difference between us, and it was
putting a wall between us. There came a point where I realized that he was
actually a little younger than he had originally claimed and it was like I had
been socked in the chest. He had rounded up when we first met, thinking that he
wouldn’t stand a chance otherwise… and he had been right.
Nothing changed about him. Nothing was
different, but to hear that specific number mortified me. I had to process it,
and I finally sat back and accepted what was really bothering me; I didn’t want
people to think I was dating a younger man.
Putting that into words, it all sounded so
stupid. I began to realize that most of my guilt and unhappiness had to do with
appearances, not my actual actions, not the actual situation. The understanding
lifted a weight off of me.
Being true to yourself is hard because you’re
flaws don’t have to limit you. My
lazy ass self would be a shut in most of her life, but she wouldn’t have
learned the lessons she did, or find the things she enjoyed otherwise. I can’t
say how much we should stay true to ourselves and how much we should push
ourselves to be better, but we all go through the same sort of shit, and it’s
important to recognize when image (or laziness) is getting in the way of what
is actually best.
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