Defining Your Essential Story
Your essential story is the baseline for your body of work. You may be attracted to many mediums or themes over the span of your career. This is the wonderful freedom of the creative process, but having so many interests may make you question what ties it all together.
Defining the essential story of your work will not only help you communicate with clearly others about your craft, but it will encourage you to attempt working in a variety of mediums.
Defining the specific story you want to tell can give you the courage to push your own limits and attempt a brand new way to tell it.
First, determine what is lighting you up. Ask yourself what keeps your attention for a long period of time.
You may be inspired by movies, books or images that come from many different outlets, but what are the ideas you can’t stop thinking about? Having your attention fixated on one topic for a long time may mean you aren’t done exploring it quite yet.
This idea should be part of defining your essential story because there is a part of you deeply connected to it. If you are inspired by something, chances are others will be, too. Drive that inspiration into your work.
To define your essential story, it’s also necessary to boil everything down to its lowest common denominator.
Perhaps you love working with clay to make sculptures and you also love working with metals to design jewelry. Those are two different materials to make two different products, but what is it about each of those things that compels you? Maybe what interests you about the clay is it’s easy malleability and what interests you about the metals is their stubbornness to transform. They are completely different mediums, but within both practices, you are interested in how and why things take shape. That is your baseline story.
When you understand what your essential story is within your work, keep looking for those qualities in the world around you.
Try to find the evidence of your thematic work in non-obvious places in the world.
Look for the inspiration that gives you a new perspective on your story everywhere you go and in every piece of art or culture you consume. Knowing the story you are most compelled to tell will help you find inspiration in everything because you are looking for evidence of it in the world. This will help you continue to have a nuanced approach to how you tell your story.
Defining your essential story helps you become a master storyteller in your work.
It makes you look at your work as a form of communication, giving it breath and life in the world. It extends the connection between maker and audience. Knowing what the major themes of your work are helps to push you forward on your path. You can be interested in different themes as your life and work go on, but your body of work will be defined at each step of the way.
Use your essential story to push your ideas forward, to test the limits of your own ability to communicate and to have a conversation with your audience.
