This week I made a sheet to record my writing word counts. I wrote 160,000 words in the first half of this year. Starting in July, I began a weekly newsletter, writing 48,000 words this month, and it will increase in August.
I found since I started posting articles, I just naturally have more content to write, therefore I don't have creative blocks now.
This made me realize some truths about creative productivity:
Life itself is the best creation
Posting brings new ideas
Turn your mood swings into action
Photo by Felix Mittermeier
Life itself is the best creation.
Life itself is the best creation, and just recording it is enough.
Set up a story plot for yourself, follow your thoughts, experience, explore, and meet different people. This allows me to continuously understand myself better and uncover new possibilities.
I see my life as a dynamic process of information processing. The existence and changes of the entire world are my inputs. My feelings, thoughts, records, and art are my filtering and processing of information. When I publish, I send out my signal.
In this world filled with AI content, it’s worthless to copy anyone else.
Our strength lies in using our bodies to truly feel and experience which can lead to personalized perceptions and conclusions.
Feel, explore, express, give a personal perspective record, and show others originality and more possibilities with your experience, philosophy, and art. This is the value of a creator in the context of social media.
Posting brings new ideas.
The content you create must be regularly posted; you need to have the habit of posting to the public.
The act of posting itself has a psychological effect.
Whenever I click post (or schedule), completing this action, I quickly come up with some new ideas in my mind. It might be a supplement to the content just written or its extension. I’d immediately write down these contents, so there is more content to finish later.
The feedback after posting is also a kind of motivation.
The psychological mechanism of humans is to paint a rosy picture for themselves and leverage all feedback.
When only 10 people follow you, you imagine thousands. If you have thousands of followers, you start imagining tens of thousands of fans. This fantasy gives you the motivation to continue creating.
Expression is something that, the more you do, the better you get at it.
Turn your mood swings into action.
Current experiences cannot be replicated.
Growth is not the accumulation of experiences but the introduction of new things and the disappearance of some old things.
Each emotional touch happens in a specific context. Things that once resonated with me may not evoke the same excitement as time goes by.
I remember the first time I saw Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white flower photography during my teenage years, I was struck by the immense sorrow and tranquility it conveyed. Now, having had other life experiences, I am more drawn to bright and vivid works at this stage of my life. Mapplethorpe’s works still move me, but in the near future, I probably will not express the emotions they evoke in me.
We have completely different moods and energies at different stages of life. If past experiences are not recorded or expressed, they cannot be freely reproduced.
My creations can only be based on my current mood and preferences.
In the past, I wasted a lot of "inspiration": when confusion was crossed, when something had closure, I lost interest in discussing it; when I had a concept of an image but didn't create it, I would forget it in a few days. When I finally wanted to start creating, I hit a creative bottleneck.
Strong emotions fade away after a while.
Now I have established a new creative habit: turning mood swings into the tension of action, so I can internalize what I like (a person or a thing).
If I like a song or a movie scene, I will write it down and sketch it out.
If a conversation or a person makes my mood swing, I will put some memorable parts into my new creations.
Let this moment become the source of creation, let new creations open new dialogues.
This is how I can create continuously and endlessly.
Let the creations happen naturally.
This is Edition No.8 of the LazyCreator weekly newsletter.
I’m an illustrator and content creator. I share my creative journey in art and content creation through this newsletter.
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