IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME

The mind of a so-called “creative” can be a very strange thing.

Now, just for the sake of discussion, I’m going to include myself amongst the creatives here, even though I’m fully aware that there are creative people in this world who have more creativity in their discarded toenail clippings than I ever have had or probably will ever have. Still, if writing an overly self-indulgent blog most mornings, or actually earning a crust at the very blunt end of the design business counts as being even slightly creative, then I just about make the cut - despite my chronic sense of self-disappointment whenever I see a piece of artwork or writing which has been originated by somebody else and which I think is “good” and then finding myself really wishing that I could have created it myself.

It’s all the ideas that pop into the head that cause all the problems, you see. If you have that kind of mind they will just keep on coming, and once they do, you really have to act upon then otherwise they’ll gnaw away at you and annoy you until they either occasionally get forgotten about totally and lost forever, or else you simply have to get them down on paper (or its electronic equivalent) to stop them rattling around in your brain and eating away at every other thought you might have.

It’s not even that they are necessarily good or even vaguely original and innovative ideas anyway. Regular visitors here will be more than a little aware of how much of my time is taken up in consideration of the banal and ordinary whilst others are writing poetry that portrays the world in a brand new light. But nevertheless, once the notion is caught in the dank, fetid web of this brain, it has to be addressed in some form or other because it simply will not go away, no matter how much I might wish it to.

To be fair, sometimes the ideas can seem pretty good, too, even though it goes against my own lack of confidence and crippling self-doubt to admit it. However, sometimes I’ll go to bed having had what I think is a storming idea and yet, when I’ve slept on it, I wake up and it’s not so great, or the enthusiasm of it has fizzled away during the night or maybe I will just convince myself that it really, really was the stupidest and worst and most pathetic idea in the history of humanity. Those are the bad mornings which I have been known to write about on (rather too many) numerous previous occasions.

Equally, sometimes (actually very occasionally) I get so excited by an idea that it becomes all consuming and I can’t wait to be getting on with it and will find myself writing or creating a piece of artwork at ridiculous times of the night when it is neither healthy nor expedient to do so. I find myself having this sudden burst of ridiculously focussed energy which is almost immediately followed by months where nothing much of any interest to me in that line happens at all. The following is a classic example of that. A few months ago I happened to notice, purely by chance because of a website visit, that an acquaintance of mine was setting up a business and I happened to mention that one of the images of an old type of camera which he was using in his current corporate identity seemed to me to have massive graphic possibilities for a bit of logo design.

Now I must stress that he neither requested nor needed this to be done, but nevertheless I found myself obsessing about the possibilities it offered as a piece of design and realised that I really wanted to give it a go, despite the fact that it would take some considerable time for no real purpose (apart from “keeping my hand in” I suppose…). So, that weekend, I found that I just had to get up at a ridiculously early time on a Saturday morning and redraw the complex piece of equipment into a graphic form just for my own amusement. In the end I really did not know whether it turned out to be any good at all, but I was quite happy with it and just enjoyed the process of seeing how it turned out, and yet have never returned to it since. I hope Ian won’t mind me including the results here, after all, it’s a tiny, tiny bit of free publicity.

Oh well, it keeps me off the streets, I guess…

The blog is another case in point. Some of the things I write get me so keyed up that I can hardly wait to get the words written because I’m so excited by the idea. Sometimes I’m just so utterly desperate to get the ideas down because I feel that I simply have to publish them and I wait in eager anticipation of the reaction of my loyal few readers, and then everyone else just doesn’t get half as excited by it as I was. I suppose a lot of this comes down to confidence or perhaps, more realistically, a lack of it. Sometimes I’m so confident that an idea is rather good that I’m always astounded when it turns out not to be, but equally, on some rare occasions, the reverse is also true.

I may have mentioned once or twice that I am a (spectacularly unsuccessful) playwright. About eight years ago, after a conversation I had in Edinburgh during a fleeting visit to that year’s “Fringe” festival, I got talking about the fact that I “used to” do some writing. Ultimately this has led to me writing a number of full-length plays in the years since, each of which has become a bit of an obsession at the time of writing, devouring early mornings and weekends for months on end before being printed out and, er, sitting in a cardboard box.

But then this is what I do. I seem to put a lot of time, energy and effort into something that I end up thinking is ultimately merely average, and I hide it away. Someone did once suggest that I should set up a company and call it “Light Under a Bushel Enterprises” so I guess that I must have always been like this.

Nevertheless, though, the ideas do still keep coming. Last week, for example I got ridiculously over-excited about the idea of a new blog which I called the Tabloid. “Finally”, I thought, “a way to harvest all those little bits of ideas and thoughts which keep popping into my mind but then fail to blossom into something more substantial”. So excited was I by this idea that I spent that entire evening tinkering with styles and layouts and re-editing the photographs into a more “newspapery” look, and I finally crawled to bed much, much later than I should have done with the prospect of another working day just a few short hours away. However, it turned out that the world wasn’t quite so keen on the idea as I was and now it lurks there as a much unloved alternative to these rambling outpourings here in Lesser Blogfordshire and even I am beginning to look at it askance with a certain amount of contempt. It may still limp along and get tinkered with occasionally, but I am no longer going to publicise it from here, and hopefully, after today, we shall never speak of it in Lesser Blogfordshire again. By the way the link is under “MAWH – Other Blogs” in the margin if you’re interested, but, deep down I know you’re probably not.

This week it happened again. An idea just popped into my mind for an image that (hopefully successfully, but I think the world’s going to think otherwise…) combines two of my obsessions, but unfortunately, to make it work, a great deal of basic preparation work had to be done just to get the little artwork elements together to put the final image together. I was initially so pleased by the idea that it became a rather all-pervading thing in my thoughts and I found myself feeling very distracted when I was watching the TV or having a bath with simply thinking about quite how I was going to handle a couple of the trickier little bits and pieces, and much of my personal time this week has been spent in working on this ultimately purposeless enterprise.

Not only that but, as is usually the case with me, I suddenly was hit by a massive wave of self-doubt about three quarters of the way into it all and persuaded myself that not only was it a very bad idea, but it was a bad idea that someone else could probably do better than I ever could and with more skill than I ever will have, and maybe the whole thing really was turning out to be a ridiculous waste of time, effort and energy. It might also have been done before, which was an even worse possibility.

In the end the artwork problems were solved and, if I’m feeling brave enough, I might even show it to you, because (and this is truly the ridiculousness of the whole sorry exercise) I spend all of this energy and worry on something that I usually don’t even show to anyone when it’s finished. Anyway, with a deep breath being taken, there’s a bit of a sneak preview over on the right...

I have little enough free time as it is, and that which I do have I tend to waste rattling out my ridiculous notions for you here in these pages, so, suddenly there was a choice to be made. Do I chew up the slight buffer zone that I had built up with regards to my postings…? Or devour my precious night-time sleeping hours in the pursuit of something pointless…? In the end I did both. Solving the tricky little design problem that I’d set myself would have meant that I probably wouldn’t have slept much anyway, and sometimes I can persuade myself that the blog needs to be “up-to-the-minute”, “contemporary” and “now”. That it usually fails to be any of these things is, of course, utterly irrelevant.

Incidentally, the blog postings tend to be a couple of days behind for a couple of reasons; It gives me the chance to rethink the appropriateness of them and do any swift edits that might be required on the grounds of good taste or bad English, and it also keeps the wolf from the door if the world suddenly needs me to do other things for a while and I have no time to blog.

Astonishingly, that has been known to happen.

Sometimes I decide that perhaps it is the blog itself that is pointless, and that I should just give it up and do something else instead.

Now there’s an idea…