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For awhile now, I've been asking two very simple questions when it comes to just about everything I put my hands to:
Now...
For too long I was asking the HOW before the WHAT which meant that the WHY had probably been left out.
Until I stumbled upon this little mantra.
Whether it's a film, a blog, performance piece, or an article…
I've been a longtime fan of Scott Belsky, Behance, the Action Method, and the 99U conference since it's inception. In fact, I was lucky enough to attend the very first event in NYC in 2008.
I freelanced for most of my life and for nearly as long thought of creativity as something that was solely inspiration-based and didn't require much work of any kind.
Now that the weather has turned, Ruby and are back to our routine of going for a run after I'm home for work. I strap her in the hand-me-down running stroller a friend gave us, riddle the side satchel with fruit snacks, water, maybe a baby Elmo, and off we go.
The first leg of our journey starts behind our place alongside a giant reservoir. We talk about birdies and goggies ("doggies"), and then we climb. For living in the western suburbs…
In 1892, John Franklin Earhart wrote a book called, The Color Printer: A Treatise on the Use of Color in Typographic Printing. The volume, essentially a manual for printers of the day on how to properly mix colors, is rather dry except for a number of exquisite color illustrations.
You all remember the color wheel from kindergarten art class where we discovered that every color ever is some combination of the three primary colors: red,…
A few weeks ago, my friend Shauna sent a last-minute email to myself and a couple others. She was giving a talk that weekend and was hoping we would come over early the next morning to hear a draft and give some notes. I was flattered and also a bit floored. Shauna is the author of three books (her most recent one we'll be discussing here in the coming weeks). She gives talks and interviews all the time.
Why would a competent, confident…
Ruby will be turning 2 next week and in the last month or so her vocabulary has exploded (a far cry from her previous attempts at articulating the future).
Her voice ranges daily from that of a toddler to her big-girl-10-year-old-voice. Her sweet chuckles morph into college-aged belly laughs as soon as I toss her onto the couch.
This post, however, isn't about how fast she's growing up (although it's happening faster than I could have ever…
Enormous flakes fall outside my window. The snow turns the volume down on everything and begins to white-out all it touches.
In front of me sits my computer, an open document, and that damn blinking cursor. It's only now that I realize why Tony Kushner goes through all the effort he does in order to handwrite all his work. At least that way he doesn't have to be threatened by the constant BLINK | BLINK | BLINK.
Last…
Money. People. Resources. Time. Energy. You name it.
These are just a few excuses I've given when having trouble making something.
"I want to be creative!!!!! How am I supposed to make anything with just this???"
The short answer is: you can't.
When you make the agreement, internally or otherwise, that creativity is tied to resources, you are dead in the water.
The longer answer is this:
For years I’d been keeping track of random thoughts in dozens of Field Notes notebooks. Then two summers ago — the summer our first…
Over the years I’d been fascinated with the use of multimedia (film, dance, projection, music) in live settings and wanted to see what we could create using all these mediums. But of course a medium is nothing without a message.
The story needed a hook (they all do by the way) and so I set off to my little library and grabbed every book that I thought might have a nugget of…
“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say "It is yet more difficult than you thought." This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work…