A long time ago, before I was telling my stories with illustrations and words, I was a telling them through the use of moving pictures, I was an aspiring filmmaker.
It all started when a friend and I decided we would be the next Tarantino; break out filmmakers, creating cutting edge film. But instead of spending thousands of dollars on film school, we took what little money we had and we were going to do it guerilla style, the indie way.
In the next few months, we drafted a screenplay, auditioned actors, scouted locations, purchased equipment and started filming. We even came up with a hollywood sounding name for our troupe, “The Yuzzi Brothers.” And since we couldn’t take a few months out of our day jobs to make the movie, we wrote a story that took place at night. It would be one of the most intense times of my life. We typically filmed from 8pm to 3am, with just enough sleep to go to work that same morning. Caffeine had become my best friend. A year later, we finally finished our movie and showed it in theaters, in all its flawed glory.
Looking back at the romanticized version of those events, I could honestly say that it was one of the best experiences of my life. We learned a lot about ourselves and about the industry, yet it was not without its challenges. We had actors & crew members who dropped out, our equipment was stolen, myriad of technical issues, schedule conflicts and even injuries. And when you’re on the 8th month of a production, you start to question yourself and your project (or your spouse would). We could have easily given up at any point, but we did not. We kept telling ourselves that we needed to finish.
Starting something new is exciting & fun. And let’s be honest, it’s probably the easiest part. The endless daydreaming of a new project gives us a sense of euphoria. But once the tire hits the pavement and the daily grind of our life gets in the way, that’s when we’re really tested. Self-doubt begins to manifest and we start looking for the off-ramp. We question our ideas, we procrastinate, we revise endlessly. We’re stuck in a never ending loop between unlived expectations and our limited abilities to meet them.
It’s only natural we should strive for perfection. But perfection is that golden goose that if you look at it long enough, it turns into an ugly duckling. That is, in fact, an important part of what makes us creatives. And as we grow and get better, we look back at our work and see the flaws. Yet it’s also important not to get stuck, to keep moving forward, to finish. That is how we grow. I know artists who actually don’t start anything, fearing that the end result will never live up to their expectations. It’s quite unfortunate.
When I feel dismayed, I go back to the reasons why I started. It’s much like reminiscing about my carefree childhood days. Everything seemed possible. I look for that seed of inspiration and use it to re-ignite my inner locomotive.
Sometimes, I realize that I am at that moment in my life incapable of telling the story or drawing that picture. I simply lack the life experience or skills to do so. This doesn’t mean that my idea is lost in the woods, never to be seen. It just means that I can put it in my back pocket and come back to it later. And trust me, I have many of those.
When we were working on our movie, there were so many variables that was ultimately out of our control. We relied on so many people, and to be able to keep it going for a year, and to finish was quite a miraculous thing.
Contrasting that to my current endeavor of writing and illustrating, where everything is really on my shoulders, gives me a unique perspective and set of expectations. I really have no excuse not to finish. It’s all on me. And If I have to spend time away from my family to work on my craft, then I better make it count.
Finishing is important. Once you’ve experienced completing a project that you’ve poured your life into, you stand among the few who have “made it.” You can tip your fedora to the naysayers and show them that you’ve done what you’ve set out to do. You’ve kept your word, your promise; even if it’s just to yourself.
Those who finish are the ones who inspire me the most, because I know how hard it is to get to that point. Not everyone can be a breakout overnight success, but we can sure break out of our walls and create something amazing, and it all starts with mastering the art of finishing.
So put on that thinking cap, adjust your monocle, get a jug of coffee, and dust off that manuscript or picture book. It’s calling your name.
At Penguin we're lucky to come into contact with some of the finest minds around - our job, when it comes down to it, is to get the product of those fine minds into as many hands as possible. So it's been a real pleasure to see how enthusiastically early proofs of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky have been
spreading round the office and how the ideas he espouses have become part of our conversational currency in Penguin.
It's also very appropriate for Clay to write a guest post here on the blog - as a teacher, writer and consultant on the social impact of technology we can certainly use his advice! Here Comes Everybody is concerned with the social changes we are witnessing today as the technology which allows individuals to rapidly disseminate and share news and views becomes more common and more sophisticated by the day.
We want as many people as possible to read this book, and we've got some advance copies to send out - so if you are a UK blogger and if you want to read Clay's book and share your views on it with the world, send us an email with your name, address and blog url and 'Everybody' in the subject line and we'll get a book over to you.
Now, over to Clay...
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
Here, on a random Friday in January, is some of what is on offer from the world's mass of amateurs.
At Livejournal, BlueDuck says "ok a bottle of wine later, i wish i hAd vodka...or something. damnit."
On Twitter, a user going by nsaum75 says "looks
like another sleepless night is coming to an end. 5:30am...need to be
up in an hour... ::sigh::"
At YouTube, bishow1808 has just uploaded a blurry 30 second video of a fish swimming in shallow water.
At MySpace, Jonathan (M, 24) tells us "you cant say happiness without saying penis"
At Xanga, seedsower has posted several photos of a doll with different styles of Play-Doh hair.
And that, of course, is a drop in the bucket.
The catch-all label for this material is "user-generated content." It's
easy to deride this sort of thing as the nadir of publishing -- why would anyone
put such drivel out in public?
It's simple. They're not talking to us.
We misinterpret these seemingly inane posts, because we're so unused to
seeing material in public that isn't for the public. The people
posting messages to one another, on social networking services and weblogs and
media sharing sites, are creating a different kind of material, and doing a
different kind of communicating, than the publishers of newspapers and magazines
are.
Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public
forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this
content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated
content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all,
at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot
of it is just part of a conversation.
Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking
of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a
group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a
community setting, and a community isn't just a small audience; it has a social
density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An
audience isn't just a big community either; it's more anonymous, with many fewer
ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media
made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of
having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through
the phone, it all comes in over the internet.
As a result, some tools support both publication and conversation. Weblogs
aren't only like newspapers and they aren't only like coffeeshops and they
aren't only like diaries -- their meaning changes depending on how they are
used, running the gamut from reaching the world to gossiping with your
friends.
When BlueDuck is blogging drunk at LiveJournal, he's blogging a communal
context, and mostly for the amusement of his friends. As I'm writing this post
for Penguin, I am self-consciously working on something for broad public
consumption. When my students post to a class blog, they are operating
in-between; they are members of a small academic community, and they are writing
drafts of things that they may someday make public. This is new. We have never
before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast
and all points between, but social media gives us that -- it's like your
telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it.
The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label
'media'. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold
multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons
and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can't be fit into the old mode of
"content", where one group creates and another merely consumes. What I've
discovered both as a participant and observer of social uses of media is that no
one pattern of use is as interesting as the incredible flexibility and
re-combinability of all the patterns together; one of the reasons I wrote this
book, and one of the things I most hope readers get out of it, is an excitement
about how much experimentation is still possible, and how many new uses of our
social tools are waiting to be invented.
Clay Shirky
23 January 2008