I’ve been trying to stream more. So far I just stream myself playing lots and lots of video games, which is… nice. It’s nice to have a reason to play games, because a lot of the time, without any direct impetus, I will just not do that. I do have concerns about whether this is a good use of my time and energy, whether I’m burning valuable mental and physical resources I could be using on my writing or developing my game. I worry about whether I’m making myself enjoy games less by playing them for an audience or whether it’s pushing me towards a narrower band of games. I think these worries can be adequately combated by the knowledge that if I were not streaming I’d be worried just as much about how I’m not putting myself or my ideas out there enough, not playing enough games to stay abreast of the trends and ideas, and that I was generally shrinking back into silence and isolation.
The grass always looks greenest on whichever side of the fence we have most recently vacated.
Okay then: Say I want to keep doing the streaming thing, but I want to try to channel all this time and energy into something that advances my ambitions of being a Well Known Creative-Type Person. At that point the obvious thing to start doing is to start streaming creative work as well as gameplay. This is eminently logical and also obviously terrifying – or perhaps that’s overstating the case, but it is at least intimidating, for several reasons. One reason is that a huge part of creating something is not having any idea what you’re doing and going down a bunch of dead ends before you begin to catch a hold of what kind of thing you’re actually creating. This can be an uncomfortable process here, at home, by myself, but the thought of exposing that process live on-stream? Oof. On top of that, it’s always deeply frustrating and depressing to me when I put a lot of work into something and share it and it gets absolutely no reaction: Streaming myself working would both amplify the amount of work I’m putting in and give me real-time feedback over how many (or few) people actually are interested and watching. It’s hard to believe that this would be conducive to creating more or better work.
Being okay with sucking at things was a necessary step for me to start actually improving – in particular with art, accepting that most of my drawings would be bad, at least for a while, was the only way I could silence my internal voices long enough to start drawing. Conversely, with music and writing, I think I benefited a bit more from a sort of blissful ignorance in not being able to see as clearly how not-great my early work was… it’s always easy to make yourself feel either good or bad about your work by when comparing yourself to different artists: Just choose whether to view yourself as a big fish or a small fish by calibrating the size of your pond as necessary. It’s easy to be the best writer in your class: It’s hard to be the best writer at your school. Of course, ‘best’ doesn’t mean anything in the first place, but try telling your brain that.
My perception of the inadequacy of my earlier work is a double-edged sword: I can be proud of how far I’ve come, but at the same time it leads to acute worry that I’m actually still incredibly far behind some hypothetical future me. How can I possibly put my work out there when I’m so much worse than I might hypothetically be in the future? How can I share work that isn’t my best work, even if this better work is entirely hypothetical? If I put any of this temporally inferior work out there now I’d only be embarrassing myself.
So, if I want to stream my imperfect creation, I have to not only be okay with sucking, but be okay with sucking publicly. I may suck less frequently now than I used to but every piece of music has a point where it sounds like crap and every portrait has a period of time where it looks like some grotesque misshapen caricature. In the past the main thing that has made me feel okay about these moments is that I was the only one who ever saw them: That’s a tough security blanket to burn.
Along with these doubts other doubts like to surface. I wonder if I’m actually as creative as I think I am, when it feels so much of the time like my work feels so constrained and fuzzy and meandering, when other peoples’ feels so extravagant and full of color and detail and purpose. I doubt whether the things I make are intrinsically interesting to people who are not myself, if there’s a gap between my idea of art and what audiences want to see, whether as I improve my ability to hew closer to my own creative ideals the actual output created by that work will become less interesting and my skill will only alienate me further. I doubt that there will be any place in the world that can accommodate the entirety of what I am or want to be, and I know that other people split themselves up into pieces and find places for parts of themselves bit by bit and I wonder why I find that so difficult.
Being full of doubts and questions is something that I have to resign myself to, the same way I had to resign myself to being bad at art to become better at art. The only way to find my way is to accept that I am lost, because otherwise I will march confidently off in the wrong direction forever, just like almost everyone else seems to end up doing.
This is a train of thought I’ve def thought about before, it’s pretty interesting IMO.
As someone who is about to publish his third book, I can tell you having some sort of balance of “blissful ignorance” and “self-criticism” is key. You have to embrace your work is what it is and just let it fly, but you also need to be critical to improve.
This growth is inevitable. And it’s okay. I spoken to many authors about it, and I often hear “should I go back and fix my early works?” to which everyone has an opinion. I’m not even sure myself. But the most important part to me is that THEY PUBLISHED their early works. They are flawed. It’s all going to be flawed. It’s okay.
Simply put, its okay that what you produce publicly will be not as good as future output. In fact, it’s actually a great thing if that is true.
As someone once said to me, “If your first book is your best book, then you have a problem.”
Maybe your first work might be your most popular work. But as long as it’s not your BEST. Because hopefully you study and improve and create better art and get better technique and produce something better.
If you think you can produce something good or entertaining in ANY artistic field, just do it. Then learn from it. It doesn’t matter if its not your best work, or if you aren’t at your ‘peak.’ If you’re waiting to perfect your craft to ‘go public’, you’re wasting precious time.
If it’s good, some people will still find flaws and criticize them. Many people will love all the things you do well. Learn and keep pumping out more art/entertainment/whatever.
Just my thoughts,
Evan