too many dreams, only one lifetime

the myth of self-motivated art and the perils of inspiration

i was going to write two separate posts, one about inspiration and another about life goals, but i realized that for me, the two are inexorably linked. i was spending hours trying to untangle the topics when they were really one and the same.

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i am a creature of inspiration. every time i consume a piece of media i find impactful, i immediately have an intense urge to go create something like it.

this can be good and bad.

recently i’ve been trying to fill up my well of inspiration, because at least for me, the most important prerequisite to creation is consumption. the most motivating feeling in the world is “i want to make something like this,” and i’ve found that an empty well of inspiration is one of the most common reasons for creative block.

so i’ve been reading, watching, and listening, and i’ve also been analyzing the things i consume.

almost every day for the past two weeks, i’ve analyzed a song i like, each time by a different artist i vibe with. i write out each line of the lyrics, each chord, the song structure and instrumentation, and record myself humming the melody. i do this all (except of course the last part) on my yellow notepad, and it’s very therapeutic. it gets me really inspired, because i don’t think i realize often enough how brilliant the lyrics of some songs are. the hope is also that over time i internalize how these songs work, and can later create songs of my own more intuitively. this is a really nice kind of inspiration - a motivating force.

but inspiration is also a drug on which you can overdose

(time to get to the life goals.)

at the start of break, i binged a documentary on the making of Arcane. i had also been rewatching the third season of Legend of Korra with my brother for the fifth time, and the two experiences together slapped me on my right cheek, and then my left, sat me down, and said, firmly: “drop everything. find a team. create a show that will impact others as much as these shows impacted you.”¹

i’ve experienced this feeling before with most of my favorite books, films, tv shows, albums, film scores, and so on², but it was different this time, probably because i have eight months ahead of me that i plan to spend primarily on personal projects which will presumably get me closer to life goals, and so if i really, really did want to go into tv and make a show, now is the time when i should start doing things to get there.

if i wanted to become a tv/film composer, now is the time when i should be finding people to write music for.

if i wanted to become a published author, now is the time when i should be writing more short stories, or another book.

if i wanted to become a linguist, now is the time when i should be writing more papers, and doing more research.

the problem is that i know the road to impacting lots of people with your creative projects is typically filled with years of ups and downs, and that there’s no way i can do everything i want to do in the time i have. i can’t be a film composer like bear mccreary and a tv writer like aaron ehasz and a bestselling author like fonda lee and a linguistics professor with a nice life at some college somewhere³. at the very best i can do two of these things in one lifetime, maybe.

(…and make enough money, have job stability, continue to live near friends and family, not spend decades of my life as an underling at some studio…)

i feel like to really do well at one of these things, i have to drop the others. a (paraphrased) quote from the hans zimmer composing masterclass:

composers are people who really have no other option. no plan B. there can’t be any other job that would work for you. it has to be that composing is literally the only thing you can do. that if you don’t compose, you’ll die.

carlos ruiz zafón, one of my favorite authors ever, writes similarly:

sometimes people ask me what piece of advice i would give to an aspiring author. i’d tell them that you should only become a writer if the possibility of not becoming one would kill you. otherwise, you’d be better off doing something else. i became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise i would have died, or worse.

these quotes really sober me up, because they’re just so blatantly false for me - there are too many things i could do. there are too many possibilities, too many plans, and i don’t even know which ones are the backups anymore.

HJ, my cracked cs lecturer this fall, said that he prefers the “depth-first approach to life” over the breadth-first one⁴, and by this he meant: get really good at one thing, rather than trying to spread yourself thin over multiple. turns out “embrace the and” is a lie in the real world.

there is some hope though.

christian linke, the creator of arcane, worked for years at riot games as a video game musician. bryan konietzko and michael dante dimartino were trained as animators before they became writers for avatar the last airbender and legend of korra. actors go on to write films all the time. there are pathways between related fields - or, maybe more accurately, there at least seems to be a pathway from artist to writer in every field.

but is there a pathway from linguist to (artist to) writer? from artist to linguist? more importantly, can you do both at the same time? i don’t think so.

i think generally the two urges i have, the two overarching dreams, are:

• become a linguist (and figure out how animals communicate?)

• become part of a creative team that makes something beautiful that impacts a bunch of people

and i just don’t really know if these are compatible.

furthermore, if i chose the former, i know i’ll always regret not trying the latter, and if i chose the latter, i might not have as nice/stable of a life as if i’d chosen the former.

‘hobbies’

maybe i should just do linguistics and have creative hobbies. that’s what you’re thinking, right?

the problem is that while some people might like doing creative things just for the sake of it, i know that deep within myself i’m not really satisfied by that. since my motivation for doing creative things comes so much from the desire to impact others through media as i have been impacted through media, it just… doesn’t really work if my creative pursuits are only a hobby. my creative dreams don’t feature me showing my stories to my kids - they feature me showing my stories to the world. maybe this is horribly egotistical and over-ambitious, but it’s the truth. that’s just where my motivation comes from.

maybe i’ll write another post about this at some point, but it’s a little bit perplexing to me how in other fields we look upon the desire to impact others as a really noble goal, and then when it comes to artists, we think this is a bad motivation - we think an artist should be just as happy regardless of how many people appreciate their work. to me this screams of self-deception.

in the afterword to one of my favorite books ever (el laberinto de los espíritus), carlos ruiz zafón says:

i do not write for myself, but for other people. real people. for you. i believe it was umberto eco who said that writers who say they write for themselves and do not care about having an audience are full of shit…. i couldn’t agree more.

(umberto eco’s actual quote was, “there is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.”)

maybe there are a few artists out there who really, truly, are only motivated by themselves, who don’t care where their art goes after its creation. for the most part though, i think this is a narrative created to shelter artists from the probability of failure. in my experience, artists, especially storytellers, want their stories heard.

(so… no. i don’t just want creative ‘hobbies’. i want to impact people.)

conclusionish

i don’t really know how to resolve this.

for now, i think i just have to wait. delay the decision until it’s made for me by whatever opportunities come (or don’t come) my way.

and so my plan is simple: be ready, be on the lookout for opportunities, and get better at stuff in the meantime. practice composing, continue linguistics research, take a screenwriting class in the fall, write a webnovel over the summer, and wait.

Boyles don't make decisions. We delay our decisions until the universe makes them for us.⁵

sidenote on having big dreams

i think it’s way too normalized to have small dreams in our society. for some reason it’s looked down upon to have big dreams, especially as artists - you seem crazy, ambitious, unrealistic, or even vain.

i feel really fragile putting this post out in the world for this reason, but at the same time, i believe strongly in being honest with yourself and others about what’s really in your head, and this is what’s really in mine. if that makes me all of those adjectives above, so be it - but i really don’t think i’m alone.

if you’re also an artist or storyteller with big goals, please don’t be afraid to share them. tell people about them. tell me about them - i genuinely, whoever you are, want to hear. it’s ok to have big goals.

i think one of my deepest internalized beliefs is that goals are just dreams you try to make reality.

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actually a slightly different peril of inspiration

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thanks to EM for conversations that inspired this post. you are the topmost song’s referent :)

1. and somehow i feel like i was once of the least impacted by arcane out of the people ik

2. shoutout especially to books about artists, which hit me two different ways at once: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow; The Kite Runner; Speaker for the Dead…

3. not to mention making my own music, which is probably more of a side quest anyway, but somehow i still feel very invested in doing it.

4. yes this is a cs joke

5. – Charles Boyle, Brooklyn 99