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Fairytales are an excellent example of transferable principles. Here’s three, very brief reimaginings of The Little Mermaid:

1. There was once a naughty young mermaid who ignored the conventional advice regarding witches. She made a deal with the local witch and got what she deserved.

2. There was a prince who lived by the sea. Sometimes, on the calm nights while voyaging at sea, he spied the glinting of scales in the ebb of the placid ocean. The sailors were superstitious, and believed the glinting to be merfolk spying on the from within the waves. One night, having had a little too much to drink, he dove into the ocean in search of the mermaids, and was never heard from again.

3. There was once a witch who lived deep under the sea. She had once been married to the king of the merfolk, and they had a daughter. The merfolk were afraid of the witch, and so she was banished into exile. One day, her daughter came in disguise, seeking the help of the witch in escaping the ocean to live on land. The witch did not recognise her daughter, and in a desire to spite the mermaid, placed a curse upon her.

What if the little mermaid was a tattoo? A constellation? The name of a seedy bar?

Do you know what a ‘reacts’ video is? It even has a Wikipedia page.

I realised the other day that this is basically the way I do most of my creative work: writing journal articles, songs, poems, course materials, and even grant applications.

The recipe for a reacts-moment is this:

1. Find something to react to—e.g., a book, a song, a podcast, a report, a painting, a nearby inanimate object, a scene, an opposing team. Amongst other things, I got good mileage out of this video today.

2. Have some tools to hand that let you produce an artefact in response—e.g., a pen and paper, a laptop, a camera, a canvas, a guitar and iPhone.

3. Set a timer for some length of time.

4. Wait and see what happens—engagement with anything other than the designated tools is banned for the duration of the timer.

5. When the timer goes off, the reaction exercise is over.

It is worth noting that not making the choices above often means that they will be made for you.

It rarely makes sense to generalise from an individual person to the scale of the whole population.

Whether we can generalise from an individual to at least one other person (if not a small quantity, say, 100, or 1000) is not the same question. Things can’t be made devoid of all context, and context is very often shared.

Making something for yourself—or for one or two people in specific—means that there is a likelihood it will make sense to at least a few others, but effecting that also means be willing to share the thing.

This type of generalisability seems like a reasonable aspiration for artistic projects.

I’ve been experimenting with different metrics for getting things done. Two of these have stuck around long enough now to become solid habits.

When the aim of the game is to produce a first draft of something, I aim for at least 1000 words in a day (or an approximate equivalent, if working with something other than words). When the main aim is revision, I make myself a cup of tea (or coffee)—I’ve noticed that if I’m properly in the work, it usually ends up going cold before I get to the bottom.

The useful thing about both of these habits isn’t so much the specific goal, so much as the fact that they provide very direct feedback about how things are going. If I’m getting hung up over-editing myself, the word count tells me. If I’m not finding focus, I’ll see the bottom of the cup.

I don’t think these specific strategies are necessarily right for others, but the principles seem transferable. Both of them are fairly cut-and-dried. The words are there, or they aren’t; the tea is cold or it isn’t.

This is something of an addendum to the last post. I’ve been reading (and so far, thoroughly enjoying) James Pawelski’s analysis of William James’ philosophical standpoint. This phrase from the first chapter stood out:

[H]uman beings cannot be infinitely concrete. We can think universally only by thinking abstractly. If we want to think concretely, we must limit ourselves to a specific part of the whole.

In my last post I went a little hard on the virtues of specificity, but James makes a good point—really it is about the dance between the abstract and the concrete. Part of the game, to my mind, is figuring out which ‘parts of the whole’ are worth time and effort.