Creative Meta-Considerations
After I was nominated for the Etisalat Prize for Flash Fiction in 2017, I was given some money and an iPad. I knew what to do with the money. The iPad, not so much.
I did what anyone in my predicament would have done — I decided to draw silly things on the screen and share them on Twitter.
Today you are more likely to know me as the guy who ‘draws stuff on Twitter’ than for what I originally was: a writer.
Intuitively Understood: Compounding Creative Wins
Whether as a writer or as an illustrator, there is something which has remained true: when starting out, your goal is to get one thing right. If you’re a writer, it’s probably scene-setting. I remember someone I used to know who wrote — for the first time — a scene description so good that he repeated it so many times in different other stories, nearly word for word.
As an artist, it’s something like drawing a better nose than you usually do. Over time, it grows to drawing a human form, not too exaggerated. Your rejoicing is palpable; even though your audience cannot tell why you are so psyched for this new milestone, they’re happy you’re happy.
And it’s these little milestones that push you towards becoming better. If you did not get better at drawing noses, you wouldn’t have enough positive energy to carry on to tackle eyes, and then lips, and so on. If you did not write an opening scene that pleased you, you wouldn’t have been confident enough to tackle the mountain of character development and plots, then subplots.
But you do, because these little wins compound.
After a while, you have the prototype of your future creative organism. For the prose writer, it’s a complete story. For the illustrator, it’s a complete human being.
The untrained/inexperienced eye sees this and comments that you are now ready to do something which is the equivalent of the apex of your field.
For the prose writer, it’d be something like getting published.
For the illustrator, it’d probably be something like having their own animated series.
To believe this on the part of the creative person would be to — what’s the American expression? — drink your own Kool-Aid.
Don’t get me wrong — your fanbase is amazing to think you can do all things through Christ that strengtheneth you, but attempting to leap a number of stages before you’re ready to play there is the reason writers lament on Twitter about being ‘rejected’ by publishers, up and coming musical acts complain about being shunned when they submit their songs for music competitions, why and why Nigerian YouTube animators complain that Nigerians as a people don’t like the art form.
Not Intuitively Understood: Creative Meta-considerations
I titled this article ‘creative meta-considerations’, because it started as an abstract musing on how it is not simply enough for me, knowing how to draw, or how to animate — these things aren’t enough for me to create a good animated show. I need to be able to storyboard, and do sound design, understand composition, understand background design, human psychology, color theory, people management, managing expectations, distribution and negotiating with distributors, revenue share, value production, and a number of things that balloon as soon you take their lids off.
Being randomly creative is easy. Being meaningfully creative — creating within structure — there’s the rub.
So, in a landscape where many of the groundwork has yet to be done — where we’re as much pioneers as the pioneers before us [pioneering never ends], it’s simply not enough to be good at one thing. You have to have metaconsiderations because they help you see the big picture, to understand your limitations, understand your frustrations, explore collaborative opportunities/synergetic openings and learn patience — the art of active waiting [doing work while waiting], waiting for the window of opportunity to swing by for your idea because you’ve done your homework and can now fairly guess when the weather will turn.
For the artist, it’s no longer about drawing the perfect nose: it’s about drawing the perfect nose on the perfect head on the perfect body in the perfect setting for the perfect audience, and replicating that action over and over again and iterating until your cost [in terms of time, cognitive load and the very obvious cost of production] becomes justified by your market.
What happens if you disregard your metaconsiderations and skip several steps in your understanding of your journey?
When you skip a step, absence blindness doesn’t let you see how glaring the efffect is on your finished creative product, but your audience/gatekeepers exist in a world of abundance [people/creatives similar to you in outlook/inspiration but further up the development ladder], and they see your inadequacies more starkly than you can imagine.
This is why every creative needs to have metaconsiderations. Your creative metaconsiderations are simple checklists that go beyond the scope of merely being creative but also directly impact the baseline of your creative output.
It’s thinking about how the sausage gets made.
It’s putting yourself in the shoes, not only of the creative, but of the shadow-hugging administrators who make the creative’s work worth anything in gold — the agent, the publisher, the producer.
It’s forcing yourself into those uncomfortable corners that, by virtue of being creative, you’ve signalled to the world — and to yourself — you have no interest in tackling.
It’s short-term discomfort and long-term agony-avoidance.
What happens if you do not make meta-considerations?
The continued existence of your work will permanently be forced to resemble [and signal that resemblance to] creative output that has already been brought to market via an administrator’s repeatable formula.
If you’re a writer, it means you have to write in the tone/style of the last best-selling author in your publisher’s portfolio, even if that’s not your cup of tea.
If you’re a musician, it means you have to bend your voice to mirror the sounds of the most recent ‘hits.’
If you are something of an iconoclast, this is unacceptable.
And that is why we make creative metaconsiderations [a background process] while compounding our creative milestones.
