If you’re anything like me, an ideal work day would spent drawing monsters, robots and sexy babes-and then getting paid. There may a select few that are able to do this day-in and day-out, but the rest of us at one point or another are going to have to draw stuff that just isn’t our cup of tea. When you’ve got food to put on the table, most of us can slog through a boring job, but at best it’s not fun and at worst you’re wasting your time and not progressing artistically.

So what’s a monster-loving artist to do?

As I mentioned in a previous article being willing venture into uncomfortable areas can open up great opportunities for growth, and it all starts with:

Finding the Feeling

I remember watching a documentary on Raymond Kinstler a few years back where he suggested that artists should always paint with feeling.  When you’re drawing something fun, its easy to draw with feeling, but if your subject matter is not-so-awesome you have to put some work into finding the feeling.  Somewhere out there, there is another human being that is fascinated by what you find boring, so stop and ask yourself: If I was that guy, what would I find interesting about this subject? You may have to open yourself up to a wider range of emotions than you’re comfortable exploring. The feeling you find in a serene landscape will differ greatly from the feeling of a gritty urban setting, but both have something at their core that’s appealing. The key is to find what that is.

A couple of approaches can help with the search:

Use Reference

Consider this an addendum to Six Tips to Get Better at Drawing. Using reference will not only make your art better but it will open your eyes to the possibilities of  your subject matter. I like to collect a lot of reference before I start. Think of it as a search for awesomeness. Somewhere you’re going to find a couple of photos that open up an approach that is appealing to you.

What Would _____ Do?

Find an artist you admire that has tackled the same subject. If someone else has already solved the problem, why spend the time figuring it out yourself? Look at how they’ve made the subject interesting and try to take the same approach. A while back I had an assignment to do renderings of urban environments. Looking back at Otomo’s Akira opened up huge possibilities for how I could approach the pieces with feeling.

Take the Challenge

Perhaps the subject matter you are approaching isn’t actually boring, but it’s difficult; fear is masking itself with disinterest. I think this was the case for me with technical drawing, perspective and building design. It wasn’t until I was put in a situation where I had to face my fear that I realized it was fear I was avoiding and not boredom. Look at your subject matter and take it as a challenge. Maybe it’s something you haven’t tackled before, but I guarantee that you are more than suited to take on the challenge and come out victorious.

To finish I wanted  to refer to a line from Elizabeth Bennett Browing’s Aurora Leigh:

Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes – The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

There is something divine in any subject matter you approach, the key is to have the artistic faith to see its true nature. And really, do you want to spend one second of your life being miserable about drawing something? It’s not just your time that’s at stake but the passion for your chosen trade, and the last thing you want to be is an artist that hates being an artist.

Okay, stay with me here. I promise this contains some practical advice on being a better artist.

Have you ever read The Neverending Story? You’ve probably seen the movie, which is a watered down version of the first half of the book, and you might have seen the sequel which is a pathetic pastiche of the second half of the book. But the actual book is a surreal, frightening and epic fable with far more depth than either movie suggests. While a lot happens in the book, it’s basically about Bastian’s struggle with two devils. They manifest themselves in many of the challenges Bastian faces, but their most concrete forms are found in the werewolf, G’mork and the witch, Xayide. Each using unique and drastically different tactics to destroy Bastian.

While researching more info on the author of TNES, Michael Ende, I discovered his connection to a quasi-religious, philosophical school of thought called Anthroposophy .  One of its basic tenets is that there is a reality beyond what we can see with our regular senses that can only be accessed through spiritual insight and imagination. (Fantastica anyone?)

I don’t know enough about Anthroposophy to be more than curious about it, but some of the teachings of the founder, Rudolph Steiner, offer some valuable metaphors for life. I was particularly fascinated by the metaphor of Lucifer and Ahriman. From Wikipedia:

Lucifer and his counterpart Ahriman figure in anthroposophy as two polar, generally evil influences on world and human evolution. Steiner described both positive and negative aspects of both figures, however: Lucifer as the light spirit which “plays on human pride and offers the delusion of divinity”, but also motivates creativity and spirituality; Ahriman as the dark spirit which tempts human beings to “deny [their] link with divinity and to live entirely on the material plane“, but also stimulates intellectuality and technology. Both figures exert a negative effect on humanity when their influence becomes misplaced or one-sided, yet their influences are necessary for human freedom to unfold.^[1][3]

G’mork and Xayide are basically Ende’s embodiment of Ahriman and Lucifer respectively. G’mork seeks to destroy Fantastica and Bastian through despair, discouragement and self-hatred. One of the fascinating revelations in the book, that is never mentioned in the movie, is that the inhabitants of Fantastica aren’t destroyed by the Nothing, but are transported to the physical world where they become lies. G’mork seeks to deceive Bastian into believing that there is nothing but that which is in front of him, and it isn’t until Bastian takes the creative act of naming the Childlike Empress, that G’mork is truly conquered (although technically he dies earlier in the book).

Xayide, on the other hand tempts Bastian to use the limitless power of Auryn to make himself Emperor of Fantastica; to revel so much in his own creativity and greatness that he slowly destroys his own identity, and alienates all of his friends. It isn’t until Bastian gives up everything, including Fantastica, that he regains his true self.

So what does this have to do with art? Every artist is constantly under the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer, or if you prefer, G’mork and Xayide. The Art and Story Crew discussed this recently in The Big Ego episode of their podcast. Either an artist will never create anything because they lack faith in themselves, or spend their hours reveling in the aroma of their own flatulence because they’ve had a smidgeon of success.

True artistic salvation can only be found on the middle road. What religious types like to call “the straight and narrow”.  A true artist has to be like the warrior who knows that he can kill, but knows that he is also made of flesh and blood.

Now for the prescriptive stuff. So, you want to avoid falling off the straight and narrow into the hell of Lucifer and the hell of Ahriman, right? Here’s how you do it: Work.

Steven Pressfield describes how to do it here: Having a Practice

Pay particular attention to his point on the hierarchical orientation vs. the territorial orientation. You’ll find your satisfaction in the life at the drawing table, not at the complaint desk nor at the awards banquet. And if you ever find yourself slipping off the straight and narrow, thinking, “who am I to do this” or “they sure broke the mold when they made me” then shut up, sit down and get to work. Ahriman and Lucifer will still visit you, but they’ll be transformed. When the two forces are balanced they become muses, offering creativity and insight beyond what your lowly flesh was capable of before. In short, you’ll basically become the artist version of this:

It doesn’t take greatness to do this, it just takes the wisdom to clear away every other distraction in your life out the way and to get to work.

I’m going to make an admission: I have no idea what “plot” means. It confuses me. Some movies are supposedly tightly plotted, others are supposedly plot-less. Personally, I find “plot” to be totally useless when trying to figure out how to tell a story. Instead, I prefer to focus on what every story has in common.

Every story, whether action, comedy, slice-of-life, or abstract will build tension and then release that tension at a certain point. That’s it.

You’ve probably seen a graph like this before:

from catchyourhare.com

That’s all you need to know about telling a story. So how do you build tension?

Start with a small event, followed by a bigger event, and finish with a really big event. Kung Fu Hustle is a great example of a very simple version of this structure. It’s nothing more than a series of fights and comic moments that get progressively bigger and more absurd as time progresses, until the final moment culminates with a decisive end of the escalation.

We're just getting started.

Don’t worry about inciting incidents, don’t worry about story beats, just start with a small event and follow it up with bigger events until you come to an event that finishes it all. This even works scene to scene too. Every little part of your story should follow the same pattern, as long as the resolutions to the little stories build toward the overall big story.

This even works for stories that are slow, minimalistic or sparse. It just happens much more subtly, and the climaxes are smaller (although not necessarily less powerful). Case in point is Ozu’s Late Spring. While the events are quotidian, they build toward a powerful tension that is released with the final subtle moments of the film. Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style In Film is an in-depth description of how this works with “quieter” stories. While he refers to “codas” and “human density” he’s basically just describing the same process; build tension and then, release it.

The emotional climax of Late Spring.

Even a movie like Baraka, that isn’t even really a story, follows the same pattern. It’s a series of seemingly unrelated, but beautiful images from around that world that tie together thematically as the film progresses. The culmination is a collection of disturbing images of genocide and violence, interspersed with dark Japanese performance art, followed by a visual harmony that suggests a unification of all the images that have come before. While its quality is more musical than narrative, it still builds and releases.

The fun thing about telling stories is that there are a ton of ways that you can accomplish this, but you don’t need to over-think it! Just make sure the big pie fight is at the end of the movie and not at the beginning and you’re on your way.

Now, having said all this, I think there are some details about how to best do this, but they aren’t hard fast rules, and I can think of exceptions to almost every other element that I think makes a story good. Many of my favorite stories have dynamic characters, interesting turns and compelling stakes, but I have other favorites that do fine without.

But every story, somehow, has to build to something.

I can’t say that I’m the best artist out there, but I’m certainly a better artist than I was when I started this blog. I’ve read a lot of advice about getting better at drawing over the years. Some advice has been very helpful and some advice just hasn’t worked for me. I want to share just a couple of things that have helped me improve, particularly over the last four or five years.

1. Draw a lot. How much is a lot? Malcom Gladwell says its takes about 10,000 hours of doing something to become an expert at it. (I recently did a back-of-the-napkin calculation with my father and we figured he had done over 80,000 hours of surgery!) So the more you do every day, the faster you’ll get good. In 2004, I attended my first San Diego Comic Con, where I nervously showed around my sketchbook to artists I admired. One of these artists was Paul Davies, who recommended that I fill up one sketchbook a month, at minimum. I did just that, several months over, and was amazed at how quickly I progressed over that time. I also recommend that if you have the means, to get a job where you draw. It’s much easier to get in a lot of hours of practice when 8 or more of them are guaranteed everyday.

This is your best friend

2. Slow and Steady. Especially when learning to do cleanup, whether it be with pencil, brush or crow quill, go slowly. It’s just like practicing a musical instrument. You start as slowly as you can without making mistakes, then you speed up. Go as slowly as necessary to have control over what you’re doing on the page. This is particularly important when trying to ink ellipses and other curves freehand. While it’s best to sketch an ellipse in a single quick stroke, I’ve never seen an artist I admire ink an ellipse that way. Most will carefully and deliberately chunk out the ellipse with smaller controlled ink strokes.

Watch how Jake Parker does it:

Inking Missile Mouse from jakeparker on Vimeo.

3. Learn from the best. Another musical analogy. I met a guy once who played the violin in high school. His music teacher gave him this piece of advice: If you want to be first chair, don’t set your sights on first chair, set your sights on the best violinists in the world. Particularly with the ubiquity of information on artists available on the internet, there’s no reason you can’t learn from the best. Find the artists you admire through google or twitter. Start a correspondence with them. Ask them questions. You’ll find many are generous and willing to help. Read what they have to say on their blogs, and watch their video tutorials. The recently launched ArtCast Network is a great place to do this. If you can’t get in touch with an artist you like, then copy their work. Download, or buy high resolution images of their art and practice making exact replicas. When I started learning how to ink, I would download hi-res images of Frank Cho’s art, convert it to blue-line, print it out on Bristol and ink over it trying to copy his line quality. The same can apply to any artist you want to replicate. Look at their art, study it closely and figure out how to replicate it. Just one caution: make sure and give the original artist credit if you show your studies to anyone else.

One of the Frank Cho images I would practice my inking on.

4. Fix it until it’s right. When working on a difficult piece, redraw it until you get it right. Especially if you’re starting out, I recommend using mechanical pencils with a good eraser. They erase easily, and you can re-work and readjust a drawing until you get it right. Set a high standard f0r yourself and work to achieve that with every piece. Look at your drawing in front of a mirror, or flip it around and hold it up to the light. Seeing it in reverse will reveal problems in the drawing. Don’t take this suggestion too far. If you’re really hitting a wall, abandon the drawing, or start over. It’s more important to draw a lot than get stuck on one drawing.

5. Study the Fundamentals. Study the best books and videos on perspective, construction, anatomy, rendering and color theory. I highly recommend the resources found at Gnomon Workshops (Some of the best stuff I found on Gnomon were tutorials by Feng Zhu and Scott Robertson on how to draw a straight line freehand.) Go to live figure drawing classes, weekly, if possible. Go to the zoo every week, or more, if you want to learn to draw animals. Ernest Norling’s Perspective Made Easy will teach you everything you need to know about perspective. Preston Blair’s Cartoon Animation is the best place to get started with construction.  I’m still really searching for is a good book on anatomy. I own several books on anatomy, but none that really satisfies me. If anyone has any recommendations, please contact me.

Buy this book.

6. Repeat until you die. This is probably the most important step. There’s always something new to learn. Thank God! One of the greatest joys of drawing is having those break-through moments that come from constantly challenging yourself. Keep at it. The fun is in the process, not in the prize.

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to use Twitter to get know other artists and other folks interested in animation, comics, and film. I try to post interesting stuff on Twitter that other people will want to read, but every now and again, I will post things that seem totally unrelated to art. I’m particularly fascinated by lightcraft, water bears and earthships, and will post about those things as quickly as I post about anything else.

I do this because I’m a curious guy, and I think curiosity and creativity are linked at the waist. Being fascinated and in awe with the world around you is the quickest way to fill up your creative tank and keep you in the mood to love new ideas as they bubble up from your subconscious.

We all start being curious. It’s thrilling watching my 9 month old daughter as she discovers everything. Every shoe, toy, cupboard and chunk of dirt is new. She’s filling her mind with a fire-hose and her neural network is clicking together like a giant Voltron made of millions of chrome and plastic robot-cats. We were all like that once.

But somewhere along the way, we start putting up barriers to curiosity. The fire-hose slows to a trickle and suddenly Voltron looks like an amputee. We’re left with going-with-the flow-and doing as we’re told.

So what are the barriers that keep us from filling our minds with new ideas, and how can we knock them down?

I think there are two big barriers that really keep us from exploring our world and being more creative.

Barrier 1: Judgment

Back to me posting on Twitter about tardigrades. What if I said to myself, “I shouldn’t be wasting my time looking up info on tardigrades, I need to focus on studying art.” That’s a barrier of judgment. There is an expectation about what is appropriate for us according to our social role.  As a result, doctors should only read about medicine, writers should only read about writing and football players cannot possibly enjoy ballet.

Everyone needs some sort of unstructured play-time where what you do has nothing to do with survival (i.e. paying the bills). While I’ve never been a fan of sports, or even much of an athlete, I started playing soccer with some of the guys at work about a year ago. It’s the highlight of my week, every week. It has absolutely nothing to do with my profession, and it gives me a chance to work my brain (and my body) in ways that I never get to with art.

Stuart Brown says it better than I can in his book Play. Play is about far more than winding-down and diversion. Healthy play can make us more creative and curious about life. And if we can find out how to incorporate play into our work, the results are explosive. The best artists I know, are the ones for whom every day is game. They love drawing, and they’ll do it until they’re blind and have carpel tunnel.

One of the great lessons about judgment I learned from Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot-camp. Our first day of the workshop we had the assignment to go to a library or bookstore and find a book on a topic we had no interest in. I found myself looking at books on salt mining and medical fraud. At first they didn’t do much for me, but it didn’t take longer than a couple of minutes for me to be totally fascinated by what I was reading. The material from those two books eventually inspired the short story Coney Island that I wrote for the workshop, and eventually adapted into a short film. All I needed was that little push to get past my judgment about what I would or would not find interesting.

Which brings us to the next barrier, which is really four barriers tied into one, and probably the most important barrier for you to face and overcome:

Barrier 2: The Gut Feeling

So even if you can get past judgment and crack open a book that doesn’t interest you, you may find that the book is boring, weird, disturbing or scary and that becomes the end of it. You put it down and move on to something that is more your cup of tea. It makes sense. You’ve got a gut feeling that you don’t like it, and you probably want to make art that is like the stuff you like, so why waste your time?

Here’s why.

If you want to be creative person, and think up actual, original thoughts you have to move outside of your comfort zone. The boring/weird/disturbing/scary signposts are like the skulls and roasted armor that  litter the mouth of the dragon’s cave. They don’t lie. The experience ahead will be uncomfortable, but there’s also a pile of riches available for the knight that’s willing to pass through the fiery vale.

A brief example: In 1913 Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered to crowd that quickly erupted into a riot. It was too dissonant, too dark and too savage. Yet, only years later it was hailed as a masterpiece and even made part of Disney’s Fantasia. What, at one time, was an unbearable piece of art had transformed into a musical classic. Why? Well, obviously it wasn’t the music that changed. So, it had to have been the brains of the listeners. After hearing something unsettling, their brains went to work and formed new connections that made sense of the disorder. Their brains grew to understand the music.  (The whole story is told brilliantly by WNYC’s RadioLab)

This may be going on in your head when you first experience something different.

If you haven’t watched a film by Miyazaki before, chances are you are going to think it’s pretty weird. Bizarre animals, weird magic and a total lack of narrative structure in some of his films. But if you keep watching his movies, they start being less weird, and you start to see the patterns and the logic in what he is doing, and suddenly you have a new way of looking at the world, and an expanded tool chest for solving your own artistic problems.

B/W/D/S experiences do the same to our brains. They are uncomfortable, but they physically change the structure of our brains. Neural connections form where there were previously none before, and suddenly we’re thinking thoughts that we’ve never had before.

Some of my most formative artistic experiences started with an unwanted feeling, and ended with me being a more enlightened artist. The first time I watched Akira I was disturbed, scared and weirded out, but I eventually learned to love Otomo’s grounding of fantastic elements in brutal naturalism. It’s a pillar of what I look for in any sci-fi or fantasy.

On the other extreme, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story was so boring the first time I watched it, I fell asleep. But in its real-time pacing it captured something so true about family and life, that I’ve never seen it repeated in any other film.

Slowness and boringness in art can be one of the biggest barriers, but it can be extremely rewarding if you’re willing to take it on.

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has a great interview where he talks about slowness in art. This is one of my favorite lines: “Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.”

You can watch the full interview here:

Did you get the part about how he was thinking for weeks? As artists, we should search for experiences that make us think – that force us to re-evaluate the world and make new connections. Cozying up with the familiar all the time will never open up those opportunities.

In the end, an artist needs to be creative. To be creative you have to fill your head with novel ideas and then stand back as they form original thoughts. If you’re hindering the process with judgment and impatience you stop the flow and seriously hinder your brain from making steps it needs to come up with that next brilliant idea.

Pablo Picasso: “I paint objects as I think them not as I see them.”

The greatest challenge of anyone trying to tell a story visually is to try and figure how to tell the story. For a comic artist, it’s a question of what do I put in the frame, what is its relationship to other things around it, and how close am I going to be to my subject? For the writer, it’s a question of what do I describe, and which and how many words should I use to do so. For film makers and animators, the questions include motion, sound, and the manipulation of time.

So how do you make your choices? There are an infinite amount of possibilities at any moment of your story, and the human brain is physically incapable of analyzing all of those possibilities and selecting a candidate for the best idea. But the human brain is also very good at generalizing and finding simplified heuristic models to understand how any system works. For artists, this is called a theory.

The thing is, every artist operates on their own theory, whether they know it or not, and depending on their theory, their art will be shallow and unoriginal or deeply profound and unique.  Michael Bay’s theory of film making can be summed up in one question: “Is It Awesome?” It’s a theory based entirely on spectacle and resonance with pop-culture and is a common guide of the novice. The other two novice theories are the “make it different” and “do it like them” theories. Either, you are trying to come up with something that hasn’t been done before, or you are copying something cool you saw someone else do. None of these theories are bad theories, in fact I think the best storytellers follow them to a certain extent, but I also think the very best storytellers have a much more important underlying theory guiding what they do.

And here’s what it is: Empathy.

The best artists know, that at its root, storytelling is about understanding the experiences of someone else.

And the tool that the greats use to create empathy is point-of-view.

In 2002, I had the opportunity of participating in Orson Scott Card’s Writer’s Bootcamp. Previous to the Bootcamp, I was assigned to read Characters & Viewpoint by Mr. Card which discusses the importance of point-of-view and particularly the superiority of the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator in writing. Like most people I understood point-of-view at a surface level-1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person ect. It just means who is telling the story, right?  But it wasn’t until I was in the workshop that I really understood the importance of point-of-view to telling a story.

He gave us some writing samples to read. They were very descriptive passages of landscapes and sunsets and details of clothing, but they were boring as hell. Why? Because the descriptions were too objective. It was like a robot describing a photograph-there was no humanity to the words. Then we read some other passages that were vibrant, gritty and funny. The difference was point-of-view. The writing communicated an attitude, not just a description. That’s why the 3rd-person-limited-omniscient-narrator is such a powerful tool, because it communicates attitude so well. (For a masterful example of 3PLON, look no further than George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.)

So, point-of-view is not so much about who is telling the story, but how he sees the world. You don’t even have to limit the narrative to just the things a character thinks and sees, as long as the world you are showing is colored by his attitudes.

The textbook example of using point-of-view is Kurosawa’s Rashomon. You see the same event three different times, from three different perspectives. The details and the feeling of the story are widely different with each telling, depending on the attitudes of who is telling the story at the time.

When the Thief tells his version of the story, it’s all bravado and adventure. When the victim tells the story, it’s nightmarish thuggery, and when the guy hiding in the bush tells the story, we see a pathetic struggle for survival. (By the way, the third act of Rashomon includes the truest fight scene in the history of cinema.)

So, point-of-view is not only an important tool, it’s the most important thing to consider when telling a story, and can better help you decide what artistic decisions to make than any other rubric. If you want to do something awesome, unique or traditional go right ahead, but it’ll be a thousand times more powerful if you can also make it support a specific point-of-view.

Lastly, I want to point you to this clip by Improv Everywhere. If you have the means or the desire, contrast it with the subway scene in Borat. We are seeing the same thing through two very different attitudes. Neither one is “true”, they are simply choices. Ultimately you have the power to choose a point-of-view that will show others how you see the world.

Perhaps that’s the most important choice of all.

My Dad gets up at 6 AM every morning, and I know for a fact that my Dad hates getting up early in the morning. But he does it almost every day, like clockwork. So why does he do it? More importantly: how does he do it?

Well, I’m gonna have to ask him that sometime. In the meantime, I’ll tell you what works for me. I am terrible getting up early in the morning, but I’m very good at doing other things, like working on my comic every day. So how do I do it?

Much of it can be summed up in an interview with John Norcross on Science Friday on keeping resolutions. I’ll sum up the important points and add some of my own thoughts.

1. Take the One Seat. I stole this idea from Buddhism. The idea is that salvation is as simple as doing one thing — sitting down and meditating. Creating is similar. Find your one thing to do every day. Stop trying to write a screenplay, plan a performance piece and start an NGO at the same time. Choose ONE thing.

You have way to many things to think about. So take the thinking and planning out of the equation, and just find something you can just do. If you’re not interested in doing something artsy, just find something to do every day religiously. For Twyla Tharp, her ritual is going to the gym every day. Notice that her ritual isn’t directly related to her profession – choreography – but it’s the thing that commits her to her labors every day.

A daily ritual becomes an anchor in your life. You can depend on it. It clarifies and focuses your attention, and it gives your day-to-day life meaning.

2. Start Small. Start with a length of time that you know you can commit to. I would recommend 20 to 30 minutes max. I would even set limits. You don’t need to make monumental efforts. You’ll be amazed how much you can accomplish after a year of doing something every day for a couple of minutes.

If you feel very confident about doing more, do more, but don’t do it out of guilt or ego. Do only as much as you are positive you can do every day.

3. Be Persistent. It’s more important to be persistent than consistent. Most people that keep resolutions, have resets along the way. Don’t worry about yesterday. Just do your thing today.

4. Be Willing to Suck. No end goals here. Your job is to just do your thing whether its good or not. Recently, my buddy Kohl shared this nugget of wisdom with me :

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

(original link)

Ira Glass and Jerzy Drozd seem to think the same thing. Just focus on doing the one thing. You’ll get better over time.

5. Be Willing to Be a Little Miserable. Sometimes doing your one thing will be miserable. But here’s the thing: Misery comes and goes, but your work will still be there after the misery is gone. This is why you keep it short and simple. Even if its miserable, at least its only 20 to 30 minutes.

6. Have Fun. This is kind of a two-parter. First, whatever thing you choose to do, make sure it’s something that has an inherent reward in it. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do, but that it is fun, peaceful, enlightening, engaging or somehow rewarding for you. There should be some nugget in it that keeps you coming back.

It’s very important that the reward is inherent. While there may be external incentives to doing your thing, you must find something that is rewarding just from doing it.

I think this has a lot to do with why my Dad gets up early in the morning every day, even though he hates it. He loves his job. He’s a doctor and he loves his work far more than I will ever love doing art. And so getting up early in the morning is a small sacrifice.

The second part of this is to have fun when you’re not doing your thing. Once you’ve done it, check it off your one-item check list and enjoy life a bit – without feeling guilty about it. Go to the beach, play with your kid, or read a book. Stuart Brown has some really good things to say about this: Play

So what’s the secret of motivation? It’s not a whoosh of  feeling, or an inherent get r’ done attitude. Motivation is habit. It’s creating those practices that make it as easy and rewarding as possible for you to do your thing every day.

If  you still find large psychological barriers to doing your thing, I highly recommend Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit. It’s one of the few books on procrastination that gets past the drill sergeant answers to the deeper issues that can sometimes paralyze the otherwise well intentioned soul.

I was reading some interesting thoughts on motivation the other day on Regarding Design. These two snippets were particularly interesting:

For any who call themselves “creatives,” a need for inspiration would signal a very bad thing…

What the real issue is “motivation.” The very word by definition means “to move.”

I think this is a really important distinction. Particularly for folks out there who want desperately to get off their butts and do something meaningful, but who lack the “motivation”.

There’s this concept of the “tortured artist” that we love to romanticize in popular culture– the self destructive, other-worldly artist that’s so full of genius they can’t lick a postage stamp, but in fits of god-inspired passion, create beauty beyond the comprehension of mortals.

While Vincent VanGogh and Daniel Johnston make great stories, they are not great role models. They are, for the most part, tragic figures that were able to create something beautiful despite immense challenges.

Was cutting off your ear really necessary?

But still, we glamorize this vision of the artist and spend our days watching Dr. Phil and playing Team Fortress while we wait upon the finger of God to touch us with “inspiration”.

The truth is, we have it backwards. Work always precedes inspiration (we can go into a  definition of “work” later).

And I’m not the only one saying this. Veteran creators like Steven Pressfield , Stephen King , and Twyla Tharp, all write about the “muses” in mythical, almost religious tones, but they all affirm that the inspiration comes only after you’ve laid your sacrifice on the altar. And what is your sacrifice? It’s doing your work, whatever it is, every day. Cory Doctorow does it, So does Michael Chabon:

In 2000, Chabon told The New York Times that he kept a strict schedule, writing from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, Sunday through Thursday.^[13] He tries to write 1,000 words a day. Commenting on the rigidity of his routine, Chabon said, “There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they’re big, and they have a lot of words in them….[T]he best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life.”^[9]

So, now the question is how do they do it. That’s where motivation comes in, but that’s the topic for another post…

Action directors take note:
Jackie Chan knows how to make an awesome fight scene better than anyone else in the world.

Better than Michael Bay, better than the Wachowski Brothers, and even better than Christopher Nolan. Yes, even with everything brilliant that Mr. Nolan did with Batman, his ability to direct a fight scene pales in comparison to Jackie Chan.

I recently had an excuse to revisit Police Force and Drunken Master II. And let me tell you, if the only Jackie Chan movies you’ve ever seen had Chris Tucker or Jennifer Love Hewitt in them, you have no idea how amazing Jackie Chan can be.

It may have something to with Hollywood insurance and that he’s no young buck anymore, but all of Jackie Chan’s masterpieces were made long before he became the Asian Nick Nolte.

Take a look at the fight scenes in films like Police Force, The Legend of Drunken Master, and Super Cop. They’re amazing. And there’s still nothing out there that compares.

There are a couple of tricks that JC has figured out that make his fight scenes so awesome:

1. The Nice Guy. Jackie Chan’s characters are never stoic bad-ass kung-fu masters. They are basically Asian Jimmy Stewarts — nice guys that end up in a mess and try their darnedest to get out of it. This is immensely important, but action directors always miss this. A bad-ass kung-fu master eats ninjas for breakfast. He might as well just be playing croquet. A nice guy hates to fight, isn’t that great at it, and gets beat up a lot. He has to struggle to win. And watching a struggle is much more interesting than watching a croquet game.

This is exactly why Jackie Chan likes to make fun of himself. Bad-asses never look stupid, because then they stop being bad-ass. Jackie Chan makes fun of himself so we know he’s vulnerable, and fallible just like us. That way, when he does win a fight, it’s way more amazing.

3. No Cables Needed. The Forbidden Kingdom may be the exception, but for the most part JC eschews the Hong Kong action practice of choreographing scenes with cables. It’s another one those things that helps to raise the stakes. Cables soften gravity. They make a fight scene feel like it’s happening on a trampoline. Take away the cables, and it feels like a world where gravity can introduce your face to a concrete floor. For the same reason JC likes to the play the nice guy he likes to leave out the cables. When your hero is vulnerable you care a lot more about him when he’s in danger.4. Clever tricks. This is one of the biggest innovations that JC has brought to action directing. A fight scene doesn’t just involve fists and kicks, but every movable and immovable object within the vicinity of the fight. Not only has revitalized the fight scene with this, but also covertly resurrected the brilliance of Gene Kelly. Check out Signing in the Rain and imagine all of the dance scenes were fight scenes. It’s basically just a Jackie Chan film (albeit at half speed).

5. The Cornered Animal aka Beet Face. This is the book-end to The Nice Guy. While JC always likes to play the nice guy, he’s always a nice guy that by the climax of the film is pushed to the boiling point. JC knows that if you start with an awesome fight scene you have to finish with an awesomer fight scene. The first fight scene will be the nice guy scrambling for survival, and final fight scene will be the nice guy transformed into cornered animal who destroys everything in his path. You can always tell when a JC movie reaches this point because his face turns bright red ( or purple in the case of Drunken Master 2) and he gets really, really pissed.

The final fight scene in Drunken Master 2 is a great example of all of thee above, and probably the greatest fight scene of all time. Please partake:

Drunken Master 2