#21

I just finished my first year (would be third if I didn’t have my master’s already) of a PhD program, which has been the most busy and stressful year of my life. During the year I tried to make time to play music for an hour or two one day per week. When I attempted to make time I would plan for Friday afternoon, but by then I was so exhausted from everything during the week. So I ended up just trying to find time whenever I could.
This summer I’ve been able to play a lot more, almost every day, though I really should be working on other things.
I guess at this point in my life, I’m more on the finding rather than making time path.

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#22

Getting started is often the biggest challenge for me, i’ve tried multiple ways to overcome and have found that the biggest drive is not routine, briefs or calendars but actually inspiration itself. To unpack, this is not me feeling directly inspired, but indirectly encountering and responding to somebody’s elses inspiration. This can be (but isn’t always) unrelated to what I’m doing, it could be a book, a conversation, a lines post, a YouTube video or whatever. The key is to notice what it does in you, and take a gamble that somehow it could be a launching off point.

Another approach is personification, to consider that your creations want to be made. That your tools want to help you self express. That the universes basic posture towards you is encouraging and nurturing.

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#23

I used to go months at a time without making any music, and felt bad about it. I’d enter NaSoAlMo or FAWM or something and meet the goal in two weeks… then go back to nothing for a while. Deciding in 2016 I’d release something every week changed all that.

If I can get started, I can finish. I just have to stay in the habit of starting on a regular basis.

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#24

Don’t drink any alcohol if you want to create something. Even glass of wine of pair bottles of beer can move your interests from music creation to music listening/computer games/internet surfing.

After workday I usually turn off mobile phone (no mail, slack, skype, calls), spend some time with my family, meditation and I’m ready for 1-1.5 hour of music composing (I don’t like word “producing”).

For weekend - we have an agreement with my wife. Both of us have half day for our hobbies without any other activities.

I don’t have so much time for music that I had when I was 16-24 years old, but I composed more tracks and have more fun now.

Goal for 2019-2020 move out from studio corner to studio room. I think it will help me to spend my music time more productive.

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#25

The biggest challenge to my creativity is social anxiety, and the complications that flow from it. (Warning, personal stuff ahead).

Getting chances to have an audience is extremely difficult, because social networking for me is extremely difficult. Even if I get a show - I’m ok in crowded places if I have a task to accomplish, i.e. play a show, record, whatever, but if I have to just stand around and try to talk to people I freeze up and can’t talk. It comes off badly (arrogant is a word I’ve heard) because 90% of me is just trying to keep it together and hide my anxiety- so once I finish playing, I leave. Which itself creates a bad impression, but what can I do? (Besides drink to excess, but that’s even worse).

Plus, when I do make a connection, I don’t follow up because I can’t convince myself that it’s worth the effort.

You might think that this would free up time and energy to be alone and create - but if there’s no project and no audience, it’s hard to see the point of it. (The most valuable thing any artist can have is a commission, someone said, and I agree). Plus I like to improvise, which requires other musicians to work with.

Sorry - after I posted this I realized that it’s off topic. So to tie it back in - for those of you who have many people and commitments pulling at you, taking time away from creativity - be grateful. Those things make your creative time all the more valuable.

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#26

I’ve got social anxiety too. I do know what you mean about coming off as arrogant, or cold. I really don’t like talking to people I don’t know well, even sometimes having trouble responding with a “hi” if someone greets me in passing.

So far, I have never played out with synths and don’t really plan to. I also don’t make videos.

I was a performing member of St. Louis Osuwa Taiko for a couple of years – but in the context of being in a mid-sized ensemble there’s not much need to interact with the audience pre- or post-show. I left the group mostly because it left me with too little time and energy for my own creative pursuits

I do like to improvise! I either just jam, or I record it. While the peak improvisational experience is with other players when everything meshes, it can certainly be done solo. I find it more fulfilling than the 8-bar solos I got to do in taiko. (Honestly, I miss drum circles a bit more than that.)

I guess my goal has always been to create recorded music I can listen to later, and if anyone else happens to enjoy it too that’s great. I enjoy both the process and the result. A few people like my stuff, but it’s not what one would call a fanbase, and there’s no financial motive to my creative efforts.

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#27

It’s very hard for me to make progress without having long periods of time to work at my own pace without interruption. As I enter my 30’s these periods are almost completely absent from my routine. Even when I am able to explicitly set aside time, errands, chores and other responsibilities inevitably come up. Sometimes I really feel like I’m just asking too much of myself in actually trying to finish tracks/albums. It’s hard not to look back at all the free time I used to enjoy without some bitterness. I’m about to start a masters program while continuing to work full time, and I wonder what place making music will have in my life over the next two years…

I wish I were better at making incremental progress with the short, fragmented periods I have in which to do creative work.

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#28

Have a child.
Have an hour and a half at the end of the day when you have time to yourself.
Indulge in a square of chocolate and sit down with the music.
Chip away at in-process ideas until form or feeling emerges.
Sleep on it.
Revisit it.
Nothing to add? Put it out into the wild.

Realize how valuable your time is and your priorities surface very quickly =D

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#29

it could be possible that musical progress for you just doesn’t tend to look incremental! certainly I’m noticing that being stuck on a project is often a key part of my process.

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#30

The best book ever written about musicians and creativity IMHO. Sadly out of print.

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#31

I totally understand, I suffer from social anxiety as well. In person, I’m pretty much closed off from anyone except through work contexts. Which for a sad reason is no challenge at all, basically my heart’s not in it so I find it very easy to get along with people in that world.

Many years ago, when I had the opportunity, I used to keep my sanity thanks to the coyotes, wild snakes, birds, crickets and so on, I felt this world much easier to exist within than the human world. And this is not as anyone knows, a world that a tourist could ever hope to access, the understanding of the cycles and the seasons has to be lived each day, and not just out of enjoyment – out of necessity and fear also. Tourists experience only the world of tourism in its rootlessness, its crushing uniformity and absolute negation of place. Anyway, five years ago I was forced to move to a region where all this has been driven away, in fact many decades ago, and where the more-than-human world is experienced only through tourism.

Anyway, the extreme social anxiety I have does affect creativity because music is fundamentally a social thing or at least something that is always involved in a much broader effort, that of bringing forth a new world.

A few things I learned (as to creativity):

  1. It’s not about me, it’s always about a certain world or a certain conversation that happens as much if not more through the work of others, rather than in something I do specifically. So I view what I do in the context of that broader involvement and only insofar as I feel it fills a need. And as I wanted to say in another thread but didn’t, I consider ALL of this (the art work, the conversation, magic, ritual) basically the same thing, what I privately call “praxis”. Every time I lose sight of this I go back to Angus MacLise’s poem Year, which illustrates so beautifully how the simple practice of art can totally transform what fundamentally shows up for us, each and every day. Indeed, every living moment becomes an occasion for praxis. Orienting oneself thus it is possible to go on, to make art in ways that start to be independent of self and anxiety. All of this leads to:

  2. A neutral and a negative response are basically the same thing – which means if you don’t do anything at all, it has pretty much the same effect on “praxis” or “the work” or “the broader conversation” as if you get a very negative response, and a negative response is often more interesting. And then what often happens is you get a negative response then someone else without your knowledge ends up sharing what you shared, or what you produced, and you see “the conversation” start to happen anyway.

Anyway, this is more or less how I deal with social anxiety in context of creativity. It enables what little I do to happen, at the same time the anxiety and the being closed-off is still something I deeply suffer. Thank you for sharing your own struggles, I hope at least you know you’re not alone.

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#32

I tend to have punctuated periods of high productivity when I have lots of time and energy available. I’d like to be able to produce more efficiently as time and energy are more and more luxuries in my life. I’ve never been good at forcing myself to work, at least on my own personal projects, and for me it really requires making specific goals and working to meet them, which can be tough. I prefer to be able to spend all day working on things without really having a specific endpoint in mind.

I think the comments on social anxiety and how it relates to music are interesting. While I don’t personally experience generalized social anxiety, my experience in the local music scene in my region has never been very positive. A few years ago, when I was more involved with noise/electronic/diy music in the area I watched the scene evolve from punk/libertarian style “we’re problematic and proud of it” to an ostensibly strict one organized around social justice. In both cases, as an outsider from the social groups which formed these scenes, it quickly became clear that the ideologies professed by those involved were usually a smokescreen for whatever interpersonal drama was going on in these people’s social lives at the time - lots of bitter callouts, callouts of callouts, “if you aren’t with us you’re against us” tribalism. Interaction with the people involved with booking, hosting and playing events always felt like walking on eggshells, and it turned me off from getting more involved. Hope this didn’t sidetrack the thread too much.

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#33

I just wanted to share how much your words resonated with me. What you’ve outlined here is very much reflective of the way I often feel, day-to-day, as someone who also struggles with social anxiety, creativity and the complicated intermingling of the two.

I’m also someone who idolizes the idea of communal improvisation, but for whom the act of immersing oneself in a sympathetic community, let alone building one from the ground up, is cripplingly intimidating. Anywho - your words have offered me a new way to think about this challenge, and for that I thank you.

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#34

I guess I’m pretty blessed with a fairly gregarious personality, but even I get weirded out by scenes and cliques and turf defense scenarios.

I’ve also been blessed with a very long and deep set of musical friendships mostly centered around various bands I’ve been in over the years. Outside of the home studio where my practice has been focused on Ableton constructions, my live music making has been almost completely in a free improvised context, with an ambient leaning but not exclusively so…

This has resulted in very few gig opportunities, which used to bother me a lot, but now as I get closer to 60, I’m actually happier staying at home and working with friends on recordings. Lugging gear to play for a few folks gets rather depressing after a while…

For folks who want to gig, I’d encourage searching out venues that aren’t specifically music oriented. Art galleries, churches, parks, etc…

Such place are often more open to “different” music and may have less scenester conformity issues…

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#35

Excellent advice - the last gig I played was on a public access television show.

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#36

That’s one of the great thing about lines. It’s scratches a similar itch as wasting time on Twitter but I find that time spent here is significantly more productive (and infinity percent more positive). I’ve had plenty of lazy moments interrupted by an idea that was sparked by a post on lines that got me off the couch and in front of my instruments.

On the flip side, though I acknowledge the value that inspiration (from within and without) can have, I’ve been working on getting myself into the habit of not thinking about it. Art is hard work and sometime you gotta just sit down and get to it, regardless of where your muse has pissed off to at the moment. This is, of course, often (much…) easier said than done, but it’s worth the effort.

I like what the artist Chuck Close has to say about this:

“Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will - through work - bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art [idea].’ And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you’ll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you [did] today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.”

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#37

“The only rule is work. If you work it will eventually lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.”

But, I guess, lazy time is useful too. Striking that balance… is hard work in and of itself, it turns out.

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#38

As Winnie the Pooh says in Christopher Robin, “doing nothing often leads to the very best something” :wink:

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#39

in my usual day to day i am so lucky to have
a. a career that pays well enough to not work the american dream of: work yourself to death
b. a job within said career that lets me schedule my own days where i do not ever take work home
c. (but should b AAAA) a wife/partner that works a completely reliable schedule (far more than i work) and is fine if i bring home less income than i would if i worked the same schedule and often times less money overall than her.

so i (usually) dedicate that open time to creative work. that has been the continuous life-thread goal. ive both been lucky but also deliberately made life decisions to move in this direction. i’m almost 40 yrs old so these haven’t been very quick lessons learned.

as ive made time (or time has been allowed to be made) ive constantly been working on the creative muscle exercise aspect so that i can functionally/creatively make use of that time. because time alone will not afford functional creativity. gotta have the learning/practice/space and probably all sorts of other things to allow for functional use of said time.

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#40

gotta say it louder for all of us in the back! I scheduled myself a free Thursday last year and ninety percent of the time I did not do anything creative with it.

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