Thoughts: Why I Make
I've been having a very grumpy day today. Perhaps because I stayed up too long last night consuming the last 75 super cheerful chapters of Goodnight Punpun, but I think it's primarily due to a general frustration at my inability, of late, to produce anything.
My goal for the day was to visit a local Gundam store and get some black Friday deals, but the very idea of spending money on a hobby that was just for fun made me even more irritable. Why spend money on a hobby that doesn't further any of my skill towards finishing any of my projects? But then, instead of doing any projects I just sulked around the house being frustrated and indecisive.
I got pondering as to why I want so badly to do these projects. I can't think of a single time in my life when I wasn't working on some kind of personal project, yet almost none of those projects have every come to fruition. I've identified a pattern in which I tend to get hung up on some skill ceiling, then latch on to another (different) project which I feel would help improve some skill I felt I needed for the previous project. This is an infinite chain. I'll make a comic to practice art so I'll be better at character design, scratch that, I'll write a story to practice writing so my comic can be better, scratch that, I'll do a world building project to prepare better for doing story writing, scratch that I'll make a small game to try exploring some smaller scale world building, to get better at world building in general! Round and round we go.
This pattern has left me a habitual dabbler. I can draw well enough to surprise colleagues, but not consistently well enough to draw what I want. I know my way around blender, but haven't ever produced anything worth looking at. I can put together (basic) melodies, do photo editing, write code, assemble storylines. I have a wide breadth of slightly-more-than-zero skills, but none deep enough to produce anything I've felt worthy of publishing. This in turn activates the defeatist in me and a project is abandoned before it ever got anywhere meaningful.
Thing is, "Make something meaningful" is my only driving force. Since childhood I've had this constant drive to produce something, anything, that some stranger somewhere would someday feel was meaningful. To make something that someday could be someone's favourite thing, even if it was only one person. That desire, I think, may also be my blocker, as my dissatisfaction with my own abilities terminates my confidence in my projects' value, preventing me from finishing them as I begin the infinite project-hop dealth-spiral to "less meaningful practice works", which are in turn not "meaningful" enough to keep me driven.
Having read a lot of fantastic works this year, I wonder if perhaps I'm simply approaching it wrong. Many of the stories (the best) I experienced felt as if they were trying to say something, and not just exist.
I think, perhaps, that these stories and experiences that stick with people -- stories worth experiencing -- are produced by people with something to say. Something they feel they need to share or some awful thing inside of them they're determined to exorcise and trap within some artistic output. The things they need to say don't even need to be important, they don't need to be the grand ideas of philosophers or geniuses; they just need to be felt strongly enough to push the project along.
...I don't know that I've got anything I need to say that badly. I've lived a fairly simple and fortunate life, and while I've got my scrapes and scars and opinions, I've never felt so powerfully about them that I've been driven to immortalize them as art. I've just been trying to make stuff because I want to have made something.
Maybe I need to turn inward and take a look at the stuff I feel but don't say, and see if I can find any coals hot enough to power my engine. To dig deep and find something I want to say enough that I won't care if the art is crappy or my code is buggy or if people don't like what I produce.
If after my search I can't find anything worth saying, maybe I'll stop for a bit. If I'm managing to live such a peaceful life, maybe I should just embrace that for a while and stop agonizing over my lack of creative output. I could practice drawing outside of projects, play with software without a particular goal for a bit, and just enjoy life while life's good.
Or maybe -- and by that I mean most likely -- I'll have shaken off this funk by tomorrow and be back at the old death spiral.