Before I begin this month’s letter, a couple of cool things to share:
I was recently interviewed by filmmaker and Third Something reader Eric Maierson about my creative process, making space for new ideas and finding the balance between my journalism and fiction. Our conversation appears in the National News Photographer Association magazine, you can read it here!
And Patreon founder Jack Conte gave my video essay about Van Gogh painting in the dark generous praise on the Colin & Samir Show. If you create online and YouTube particularly, the whole conversation is worth a listen. (Thanks Phil for flagging!)
Onto this month’s question. As always, click here to ask me something about creating, living or me — your questions continue to be interesting and provocative!
When working on a project, does it happen to you that after you’ve worked on a big chunk, you realise that it can be made better in a fundamental way (in the story, in a particular shot that was significant etc.) but it’s too late? Or do you go back and change them? How do you work around all that with looming deadlines?
Ramya, Paris
Dear Ramya,
Over many years of creating, I have developed a powerful internal litmus test to tell me if the story I am working on is ready to go out into the world. This test has not failed me yet and so I offer it to you as a gift.
The question I ask myself is this: “Am I so absolutely goddam sick to the back teeth with this stupid film/story/script?” If the answer is a resounding yes — so resounding that, were I to discover a typo in the title, I still could not motivate myself to fix it — then the piece is finished.
Every video, every story I’ve ever made has ended this way for me: with an exhausted “whatever, I just don’t care any more”.
There is a certain curse which comes with any kind of creative expression: the work you make will never — never — equal the vision you had for it in your mind. It cannot be any other way. The vision is a message from God, and the art you make can only be a feeble human simulacrum, a pathetic attempt to give form to the formless, to speak the unspeakable.
If you make something and think “this is better than I imagined it would be!”, then a higher power was probably not involved in its conception (and that’s OK!)
Ask any artist what is the best thing they’ve ever made and they’ll probably give you the same answer as Orson Welles: “the thing I’m working on next.”
You will always be a little disappointed in everything you make; rewatching it later you will spot glaring flaws, see things that could be better. Again, this is how it should be: it is a sign that you have grown as an artist.
So my advice to you Ramya, if you discover too late that your project has fundamental parts that could be improved, especially with a deadline looming, is to put the damn thing out into the world anyway, unique, brilliant and beautifully flawed, just like you.
Or set fire to it. If you can see all the things that are wrong with it — well, your project has already taught you what it came here to teach. Its work is done.
Until another Sunday soon,
