Monday Rules (Part 4)

Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.

It's funny because it's true.

Whenever you begin a new Thing That Is Not, it's all an experiment. Unless you are in that phase of your creative life where you are essentially copying yourself over and over — and bully for you if you are; just keep creating! — every time you set pencil to paper or brush to canvas or fingers to keyboard, it's a crap shoot. You have no idea whether your ABORTIVE ATTEMPT is going to be amazing or just a series of downward SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATIONS to misery and ABANDONMENT.

This is why most of us never start.  We're afraid of the failure. We're afraid of not being sure of what we're doing. We don't want to look like idiots.

But the term my fellow Lichtenbergian Mike Funt uses when he's teaching clown techniques is very helpful: we're all Beautiful Idiots. Just like his clowns, we need to put it all out there for the AUDIENCE and don't worry about looking foolish.

Remember this: many of the artistic movements we study today got their names because someone was making fun of them: Impressionists, Fauves, even Gothic. Don't worry about it.

Just Make the Thing That Is Not.