Noah Henry Morriss

I just read Ed the Happy Clown and the edition that I had contained a running commentary on its creation. Cartoonist Chester Brown mentions that the comic was mostly improvised and that he used the structure of writing/drawing a panel a day without a full script to rely on.

The result is an exciting and out-there story with constant twists and turn. As the story progressed and neared some sort of conclusion, Brown does mention steering the story in a certain direction and have a plan of sorts to lead towards, but for the most part he uses the improv technique.

For a while in college I would spend my weekends scratch building a robot. I had a large bin of recyclables and broken toys that were great material for this. I’d usually start on Thursday night and then would spend all of Friday-Sunday finishing it. They were great weekend projects and a ton of fun to figure out.

But a specific routine would occur whenever I set out to work on one. The first thing that I’d do on Thursday night, the deciding factor on whether or not I’d be putting together a robot or finding something else to do, would be rooting through my materials and seeing if I could find a capable headpiece for the bot.

By capable I mean one that spoke to me. If I couldn’t find a good piece, then I knew I wouldn’t be able to put together a robot. It just wasn’t going to work.

I might spend a few hours on Thursday night looking, and when I found the right one I always knew it and the rest of the robot would fall into place. It was like that one piece set up all the others that followed it. All I had to do was find that leading piece.

There were a few occasions where I’d try to bullhead my way through without finding a good piece and the project would always fall to pieces. It wouldn’t work and I’d always shelve it as an unfinished.

I like to relate other processes that have worked for me creatively in the past to different mediums, and I wanted to see if I could relate this to writing.

In terms of a story, the headpiece is the climax. It’s what everything leads to and what the resolution relates to.

It’s the bank heist. The kiss. Finally enacting vengeance. The confrontation with the super villain. The big moment.

This might seem obvious to some, but to me it’s a bit of a revelation. My writing tends to get hung up, and realizing that I need to spend less time on the opening, or the catalyst, or the mood, or the genre… and that I should be spending time figuring out what things are leading towards is an eye-opener .

“Can’t say it often enough – change your hair, change your life.”

~ Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon

I tend to go for longish periods of time between getting my haircut. Not terribly long, maybe 4 months or so, but long enough for it to become annoying. It’ll be just long enough that it sort of gets in the way or is just unruly enough to be irritating. This might happen at the 3-month mark, maybe a little before, but still I’ll wait.

I’ll wait because I just don’t really like going to the barber. It’s not fun, it’s sort of pricey, I never know what to say, and a stranger will be touching my head for 20-30 minutes. An all around odd situation which is reason enough for me to put it off.

The repercussions for putting it off are small, but they compound. Having to move your hair away from your face every few minutes has a way of getting under your skin without you ever knowing it.

So eventually I’ll get it cut, bite the bullet, and sit through the awkwardness of small talk and hair cutting, and once it’s done I’ll feel like a million bucks. Like a switch has been flicked, everything will get turned right side up and with alarming clarity I’ll realize just how annoyed I’d been for the past month or so.

This happens every time, like clockwork, an endless cycle in which the solution is so simple yet every time I avoid it.

I see a few solutions ahead of me:

1. Learn to cut my own hair and potentially be forced to rock a buzzcut for the rest of my life.
2. Never cut my hair again and embrace the hippy lifestyle.
3. Go regularly to the barber. Schedule the next appointment right after I’ve completed the current and just go when it’s time to.

We’re human. We procrastinate doing the things that we don’t really like doing, even if they’ll benefit us greatly. Are these things that just have to be bullheaded through? Or are their other angles to these roadblocks that we just don’t see or can’t see because we’re so worked up? Is bravery the solution to fear or is there something else?

A new project means something new to learn. A new challenge to overcome. Something to really sink your teeth in to.

A deliberate effort should be made in deciding what that new thing should be; be it a tool, a style, a medium, a topic, or even a person that you want to work with.

This is the personal through line.

The thing that keeps the project fresh and a challenge.

When you don’t have something like this, something to keep you engaged and thinking, you can run into boredom.

You’ll find yourself rehashing the same old things that you always do.

And that’s never fun.

Before you begin, ask yourself:

What do you need to do to finish?

When is the project done?

What are the core elements?

At what point will it be good enough?

It’s amazing how your opinion on your work can change over just a little bit of time.

I spent some time yesterday looking over some of my shorts on my Youtube channel, just a couple of weird animations and experiments really, but I found myself really being proud. I liked them. The question of whether or not they were any good didn’t really come to mind It didn’t matter. I was just happy to see some completed things.

Is that the reward for hard work? The pride that you feel way down the line when you look back on what you’ve done?

But then there’s the engagement that I felt when I worked on them. I can recall the time that I spent on each of them, the level of focus and the feeling of flow that I really had. Those were good feelings too.

But then there’s the in between. When the project is “done” and you’ve separated yourself from it and you look at it with disgust. It just didn’t turn out right.

That’s the worst part. That’s the curse. The unhappiness and uselessness that you feel upon finding yourself at the end. It didn’t reach your expectations, so you feel like a failure.

So you have to wait a couple of years just to feel that sense of pride? To get to the next good part?

How can you fill that gap? Especially at the beginning when the pattern of work and reflection hasn’t quite settled, when you don’t have enough behind you to look at with pride?

What do you do in the meantime?

Industrial Craftsmanship

The story that article relays, the one about the ceramics teacher, that story is put into just about every self-help, productivity, development book on the planet. It is always referenced, though sometimes it’s a photography instructor instead, but it’s all the same.

The thing that might need to be looked into is the mediums that the reference is using in order to explore it’s topic.

In the case of the photography example, it’s incredibly simple to take a bajillion photos. With modern tech anybody can do that. The big thing is getting your butt in gear, working on your eye, and then doing it. Quantity is an achievable thing through photography. I’ve done events that have lasted only a couple of hours and I’ll take hundreds of photos in that span.

On the other hand ceramics might be a bit tougher. Physical materials are needed, which can get expensive, and time is needed to put together each piece. I’ve never done ceramics so I can’t assume how long each project might take, but you probably can’t get dozens done in a day. Maybe one a day. I really have no clue.

So the rate of production for separate mediums is different. You can get more done in shorter amounts of time doing one thing but not another.

What about writing? I’m trying to do a blog post a day for the next month. I’ve stuck with it for the past 5 days, but some of them are brief… very brief. Blips of ideas.

But fiction? I mean a draft of a SHORT story, less than 10 pages, would probably take me a week. And that’d just be a first draft.

And that’s another thing, there’s no first drafts for photos. Not really. Sure you could go back and take it again, but how often does that happen? Unless it was staged, how often does the moment present itself again?

And in ceramics are you really going to remake the same piece? That feels like a waste of materials, because once the clay has set I don’t think you can unset it.

I feel like there is an important lesson here.