A Layperson’s Guide to Fighting Tree Beasts
What's stopping you from making the thing?
Note: The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡
Right now, it is the perfect, sublime, magnificent thing. You can’t believe it’s even in there—in YOUR head—just waiting to emerge. Look at it. The OM-ness of its countenance is to be revered and sung about. The silhouette of its form stuck on a damn t-shirt or something. And to think, it chose you! It simply appeared one day *poof* out of the murky sludge of your brain box and started hovering right there, in your idea vestibule. Oh, vision of visions—a single thought of supreme possibility. Shhh! Listen. It’s actually humming softly, like a contented-sigh tuning fork, struck firmly and vibrating its whispered chorus in your thought halls: “Set me free, let me live. Set me free, let me live.”
You go and clean the kitchen. After that, you watch YouTube videos about van life for an hour. Days pass. This perfect thing is still there but you won’t look at it directly. You do nothing. You don’t sit at the desk. You don’t put fingers to keys. Nothing. Procrastination and fear get hitched and honeymoon in your head. On a Tuesday, you clean medicines from the bathroom cabinet with expiry dates in the early 2000s.
Because what if…?
What if this beautiful idea—an idea which currently exists in its most perfect manifestation—emerges from the darkness of your brain as pure dread on legs? Executed by the ham-handedness of your ability, it is grotesque, smudged, and sticky, a hideous representation of a once sexy dream. Now, a horrendous tree beast, it looks nothing like that magnificent thing in your head at all. Not at all at all.
There’s the fear. The idea-stopping fear. The terrifying tree beast of your creative nightmare. Procrastination is one thing, but to be frightened into inaction is crippling. Fear seals up your idea vestibule, leaving the potential of that idea to die in the dark. RIP, beautiful one.
Execution. I’ve heard this word throughout my creative life. How was the idea executed? How many executions of the concept would you like to see? There was something lost between idea and execution. For things to live it seems, some things must die. If you’re lucky, it’s just the budget. But the word execution is usually in reference to the finished product. Perhaps another way to look at it should be:
“How much of YOU died in the creation of this piece?”
Sounds harsh, but it’s not always a bad thing. Because in the act of being brave enough to put it out there, some parts of you will possibly—sometimes quite necessarily—die. It can be humbling, but it can also be exhilarating. Egos can be reshaped in positive ways, alternative viewpoints can alter the direction of an idea and make it better, gaps in your artistic capabilities1 can be identified and worked on. Bad ideas will die natural deaths, and your criticism troll defenses will begin to grow a hardy exoskeleton to serve you well in your creative life.
Things will fail. You will survive. And from time to time that beautiful vision will turn out exactly the way you saw it in your head and let me tell you, you will feel like a God when that happens.2
But there is nothing without the start.
Sit at the desk, or easel, or piano, or wherever your creative coalface may be. Fight the fear, and remember that sometimes the horrific tree beast is just a croissant. And anyone can fight a croissant.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This Week’s Amends…
Well, this is delightful and artful digital storytelling, which is sometimes necessary for a #longread like this. Jarvis Cocker, yes, that Jarvis Cocker3, wrote a quite lovely meditation on caves and music. I’ve had this saved in my “To Read” folder for quite some time and finally got around to it. Progress!
It begins like this:
NU-TROGLODYTE MANIFESTO
Where can you find peace? Where can you find peace?
Where can you find total silence?
Complete darkness?
Here.
No phone reception.
No Wi-Fi.
No TV.
No radio.
- Jarvis Cocker, from The Sound of the Underground, an essay about music and caves. Sound intriguing? Read on >
You can’t have the surname King and not absolutely rule. In this video, B.B. King casually restrings his guitar in the middle [3:10] of his kick-ass performance at Farm Aid, 1985. I bow down to his majesty. I’m on such a blues kick lately and stuff like this gets me buzzing.
About 14 minutes in, I realized I’d been watching with my jaw hanging open. There’s just something about the precision and the sound of what he’s doing that’s…mesmerizing. And it’s a wow, just wow kinda deal.
Who can resist a three-legged dog? Simone Giertz switches gears from shitty robots and hacking up teslas to focus on building a perch for her pooch, Scraps. This is what trial and error look like.
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Watch this video, inspired by an Ira Glass interview, about the gap between taste and skill. It’ll get you fired up.
But you aren’t, you get over yourself.
Never forget the William Shatner cover of Common People. Never.