Back to basics: ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS

Since I’m still trying to learn Ableton Live — it’s still abstruse as hell — and am in the middle of final edits on A Young Person’s Guide to Lichtenbergianism (formerly known as Lichtenbergianism for Kids), I don’t have any real creative progress to report, so let’s go back and look at our Lichtenbergian Precepts.

This meme was shared by a friend on Facebook this morning. (There was no credit given — if anyone knows who made this, please let me know.)

This is the problem, isn’t it?

We think that if we were real artists/writers/composers/mixologists, the shinyperfect idea in our head would flow automatically out of our hands onto the canvas we laughingly call reality. [SEE ALSO: The King of Hearts Fallacy]

It doesn’t work that way. It never works that way. It never has worked that way.

For one thing, to get all neurological on you, that shinyperfect idea in our head is not really shinyperfect. Our brains don’t work like that. Your brain comes up with a few shinyperfect bits and then does what our brains do: It fills in the gaps with mysterium, triggers a release of some dopamine, and then its work is done.

It’s no wonder then that when we try to drag those bits out into the real world, they are nowhere close to shinyperfect.

That’s why I hammer home, over and over, the idea that the first step in getting that idea out of your head and into reality is to DO IT BADLY. Go ahead and create crap. Write ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS at the top of the page. Make it bad on purpose, even.

Because only after it’s lying there, all gross and scaly and not at all shinyperfect, can you take a good look at it and say, “Oh yeah, I see what the ol’ brain missed. I can fix that.”

Make the Thing That Is Not.

Badly.

Then make it betterer.