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Ideas, like dandelions in the breeze
For me, ideas are like dandelions. They enchant and tease the imagination as they float carelessly and chaotically in the breeze, flitting in and out of your vision before you triumphantly snatch it from the air. This one, brief moment of fulfillment is quickly lost as you open your palm and see nothing but the dying remains of a weed.
Perhaps I’m being a little over dramatic (or, dare I say it, poetic), but I think there’s some truth in that utterly defeatist statement. All too often I have tracked a dandelion of a concept as it dances across my mind, only to catch it, pin it down, and lose all that attracted me to it in the first place. I guess the ability to capture the pure essence of an idea is the difference between being a genius and being simply ‘muh’.
While I am a subscriber to the theory that everyone has a number one single inside of them (though the state of some of the songs that have reached that exalted position in the past means that this probably isn’t the best metaphor for what I am trying to say), I am forced to confess that I am not a genius. I peaked too young and can now feel myself stumbling down the negative incline of the latter stages of my creative life. Too bad.
So, the way that I see it, I have a choice: I can either keep chasing dandelions and hope vainly that my “I am the one and only” is still to come, or I can try to make the most out of what I’ve got. Now, I’ve just purchased a shiny, new Macbook and I didn’t splurge all that money simply to squeeze out a succession of shit ideas. Nosiree, I’m opting for the latter.
As my brilliance has begun to lose its shine and my chances of properly executing something which is, in the air at least, one helluva idea has lessened, I’ve noticed that my natural solution to this has been to step back a little and try to nail down a small piece of the picture instead of attempting to perfectly illustrate the entire landscape. Maybe, even just a rock. One of the best examples of this has been with the novel I always wanted to write. Well, I say novel but really the story began as one frame of a graphic novel. Since then, however, the concept has developed way beyond my abilities as a writer to effectively tell the story! Of course, some of you could say that this is just thinking negatively and that I should still give it a try. You may be right, but in the meantime, my little pieces theory works well enough to satiate my need to delve into the world I’ve created.
By that, I mean that my plan has been to write short stories based around small, even incidental, events in the grand scheme of my uber-story. Hopefully, these will all come together and offer me the confidence to move onto the bigger challenge – maybe it never will. Either way, I’m creating stuff that I’ll be proud of without struggling to overcome the difficulty of piecing together a crushed and ruptured dandelion.
Another way of tackling my diminishing capabilities is the ‘work in progress’ approach. This is how the Deadlamb website, which I am still quite proud of, has (in my opinion at least) escaped the perils of my florae-based metaphor. Simply put, the idea is still snapping, popping and crackling through my brain like a bowlful of Rice Krispies – I’ve yet to try and capture and stifle it. This sounds like an obvious thing to say, and I guess it is, but I still think it’s an important notion to keep in mind.
The danger of grasping a concept too strongly is something I came across recently, much to my disappointment. I’ve been writing another blog, the gorgeously titled Crunkfish, for almost a year now but in the past few weeks have completely lost the spirit to write for it. Why? Because it stopped being all floaty and chaotic and became a ‘thing’. At first, it was the anti-blog, I didn’t care who read it, only wrote for myself, and wanted to stress the point (in a nicely humorous way, of course) that no amount of supposed respectability attached to the term ‘blogger’ can hide the fact that they can write whatever shit they like and people will swallow it. Any random idea that burst into my noggin was hastily drafted into Crunky, making for an eclectic, entertaining, and often very sleazy site which ebbed or flowed pretty much organically. I started to notice that this changed, however, and I became more interested in getting content up there than I had in writing it. I began to think, “is this a Crunkfishy article?”. I stopped enjoying it.
Of course, you could pick apart my ramblings and say the problem wasn’t necessarily that Crunkfish became to strictly defined in my mind. I don’t care. That’s the issue the way I see it, and now that I’m aware of it, it’s something I seek to avoid. Until then, I have no real plans to keep Crunky going the way it was.
My need to blog has not passed though, so I need a new outlet. Deadlamb Blog is, obviously, an option but, in a way, this is just the hub of my creativity and I don’t really want to make it the primary medium. Bullshit like this has a clear place here, but I do ache for a place where I can feign genuine knowledge and intelligence while offering my opinion on stuff I care about – without it being intrinsically linked with my attempts at artwork, or me talking about wanking (that’s Crunkfish, of course). I also want to write a ‘normal’ blog – a diary of sorts where I can just ramble on about my life in a carefree kind of way. In my quest for maintaining the dandelion’s freedom, I shouldn’t lose sight of things like the fact that, first and foremost, the Deadlamb property is supposed to be a portfolio – meaning my trip to the Family Adventure Farm with my girlfriend over the weekend may appear a little quaint. It has a place in my web identity, just not place on this site.
Does that make sense?
Regardless, by focusing on the detail, perfecting the little picture without losing sight of the big, and never closing my fist firmly around the concept (sidenote: while writing this, I have sworn to myself that I will never again append a filename with ‘final’ – not only is this never the case, though that’s usually more down to clients than me, it also doesn’t fit with my new philosophy), I’m hoping to save myself from defeat at the hands of an over-reaching imagination and keep my excitement going on and on and on and on…
Go me.
