Makers Make

I recently spent the better part of a week travelling on a road trip with my best friend, driving to Boston and back from Toronto. It fulfilled that itching wanderlust that apparently everyone below the age of 30 has bubbling beneath the surface (though I do hope the love for travel never fades, it merely morphs as time passes).

Like most trips to a new place, the unique sights, sounds and tastes noticed by a set of foreign eyes impressed something upon me. Rather than reflecting on the city itself, though, this impression is trying desparately to be a revelation. I’m not sure it’s quite as lofty as that, but the thought struck me and as I toyed with it in my mind, moving the malleable clay of the initial thought back and forth, it held its shape as it molded itself based on my pushes and prods.

Makers make.

It’s simple, but it’s painfully easy to forget when the daily rigours of work, friends, family and life are all added in.

What chance does a few minutes of sketching, writing or playing music have against the easy temptations of the XBOX? In what world does a few minutes of solitary creation, made purely for the sake of making it, stand a chance against the promise of a couple pints after work?

Simply put, it’s in the artist’s world where this needs to be the case. In my world, it certainly needs to be the case more than it currently is.

This isn’t a grand call to arms, but it’s a simple reminder that, like most creative types, I’m happiest when I’ve made something I’m happy with. But, also like most creative types, it can be tough to keep up the daily workflow of creation — whether in the smallest experiments or the grandest acts — when the execution is not up to the standards of the idea.

The essence of this thought, however, does not depend on a finished product destined for a portfolio or gallery. To come up with an advertising portfolio when just starting out, an aspiring creative needs to slap a logo on everything they create to make it relevant. But take it back a step, take a longer view, and the softer benefits of simply creating, over time, creates a far richer, deeper and more meaningful palette of creative instincts from which to draw from than simply shoehorning oneself into a defined category based on their professional lives.

Drawing. Painting. Sketching. Illustrating. Lettering. Photography. Creative writing. Analytical writing. Cooking. Crafting.

All of these are creative acts, and all of them in their own unique way. One of the crystallizing conversations my friend and I had centered around this notion of different kinds of creative pieces and processes developing different kinds of creative thoughts and instincts.

Throughout my career, I’ve primarily been a design-focused art director. It’s a subset of the field which I initially gravitated towards as it laddered up from my previous life as a student of history, focused on weaving multiple threads or storylines into a cohesive, clear and concise end result.

While by no means a waste, what’s been often missing is the element of surprise; the techniques of metaphor or similie; the enrichening flow of literary devices that course through a piece of creative writing that makes a message without needing to necessarily state it clearly. That particular creative spark is missing from much of my work, and like any unused muscle it takes a Hurculean effort to re-ignite it on an on-demand basis.

So, my goal is simply to write more fiction, actively read more fiction (or story-driven non-fiction), and engulf myself in poetry, art, music and film using a slightly different lens than I engaged before: with the focal point adjusted towards symbolism over clarity, and impression over explanation. When watching or viewing something, to start really taking in the underlying threads and meanings and not always take things at face value. But, most importantly, to create with that same frame of mind, to write poetry and prose, to paint, draw and otherwise bring myself to look at the world one layer beneath the surface rather than one layer above it.

In short, to engage.

The second meaning that exists within that deceptively simple phrase — makers make — alludes to the daily work and process needed to achieve true success, measured as a level of satisfaction with the overall state of a creative mind. It’s the need to bring a semi-idealized future goal into such sharp — but still malleable — focus that the end result is still a key motivator throughout the daily cycle of disappointments and setbacks that will inevitably follow.

By simply making something, anything, every single day, and consciously infusing creativity within everything instead of simply shoehorning it into certain parts of my life, the road will eventually meander and wander into the direction it needs to go in. Depending on the dawdling, unpredictable muse of inspiration for a kickstart is a dangerous crutch, most often used in order to call oneself a maker without actually making anything. In the same way that it’s crucial for writers to write however many hundreds of words in a day, whether brilliant or irredeemable, it’s crucial to make something every day.

The primary focus of this renewed enthusiasm for creativity as a holistic mindset instead of a compartmentalized pursuit will always be on the visual arts — as art direction is still what I will continue to devote myself to professionally. But in the same way that an art director is tasked with pulling anything and everything from the world and infusing it into their work, it therefore follows that I must dive into anything and everything the world has to offer. Fortunately, this dovetails with my natural curiosity (and can overcome my natural hesitation on some matters) in a way that not only can make it easier than someone who follows more of a single-track mentality, but is also probably one of the things that drew me into it in the first place.

This may read as something profound or as absolute hogwash — or, worst of the three, the kind of revelations that happen in the initial schooling stages of a career rather than the intermediate level of my career I’m currently in. But the perspective of a trip abroad, even a long weekend to a nearby city or country, often distills the jumbled thoughts that swirl around the daily schedules of life without ever making it through. However profound or simplistic the resolution may be, it’s the only one that constantly needs to be kept top of mind, consciously or unconsciously, if there is to be any hope of creative satisfaction.