It’s Aliiiiiive!!!
You are a creative Dr. Frankenstein.
You take bits and pieces and ideas and bring them to life. And I don’t just mean bringing something new into existence.
Every creative project has a moment, usually sometime past the halfway point, when it properly comes alive. A moment it goes from an inanimate thing you made to something that has taken on a life of its own.
I recently watched a video of an artist painting people into a scene. Each time he made a brush stroke I thought, “That’s just a block of color. There’s nothing notable or special about it.”
Then at some point the artist would paint a line, and suddenly these were no longer crude facsimiles of people. They were living, breathing, three-dimensional human beings. And it happened almost instantly in that moment. Even the props and objects in the background started popping to life.
Every time you work on something — and it doesn’t matter what medium you’re working with — there comes a moment when you make a decision that gives it life. A moment that takes it over the threshold from here’s a cool thing I’ve been working on to here’s a work of self-expression that means something, that translate into a whole bigger than the sum of its parts.
Every song I record has one of these moments and its visceral. I can physically feel it. I may have had the vision for where I wanted it to go from the start, but with that last decision it crossed over the threshold and became a living, breathing thing. And it’s exciting, just like that “IT’S ALIIIIVE” moment with Dr. Frankenstein.
It’s also around this time in the project that I start to fear death. But that’s a story for my next post.
What does that creative “it’s alive” moment look like for you? How do you know you’ve gotten there?
How do you feel knowing you have so much power to be a creative Dr. Frankenstein?
