I have no idea what I’m making. (An ode to just doing).

The struggle to hold on to an idea.

My creative process typically works in one of two directions. Either I decide I want to work in a certain medium (photography, essay, painting, etc.) and just see where the mood takes me or I will have a definitive idea and have to sort out what medium, or combination of mediums, makes the most sense.

At the moment I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m a little over one thousand words into a thing and I don’t know what the thing is. I don’t have a medium in mind, though at the very least understand that it is some sort of writing project, and I don’t have any idea what I’m actually writing as far as subject goes. All I know is that there is something there. And if I let it go somebody else will get to make it.

I’m a firm believer that we don’t “own” our ideas. Think of the number of times you had an idea for a piece of art, or an invention, or some other thing that didn’t exist before you thought of it. That thing you forgot to write down, or draw, or shoot, only to have that very thing cross your path, created by someone else days, months, years later. That thought you let languish found a home somewhere else. That seed found soil and bloomed into the thing you should have made.

I hate when that happens. HATE.

So instead of losing access, my right to that idea I have decided to hold it captive. I’m wreslting with it daily because by adding just a few more words every day I reset the clock. An idea can’t leave if I just touched it right? There has to be some decorum to this. THERE ARE RULES GOTDAMMIT!

In the same vein I am creating random voice notes and videos and journal scribbles in an effort to collect whatever little seeds fall my way. I am hording thoughts and ideas because at this stage of my creative journey I can’t afford to let anything slip though my fingers.

By the way. The first line of the thing I’m writing is “I wasn’t born, I was downloaded”.

Oh the places we will go.