I believe that inspiration comes in waves. I've believed this for quite a while, largely because I'll have periods of time where I can draw really well, or feel like writing every day, or take a chain of photographs I'm very happy with. When these periods occur, it feels like I've been hit with a wave of inspiration that is just carrying me forward, creating ideas that bounce off each other and inspire yet more to form in their wake. That concept of cyclicity is appealing, not just because it explains these bursts of creation, but also because it somehow negates the less fruitful periods in between.
I think it's fair to say I'm in one of those less fruitful periods right now. That isn't to say I'm not being creative though, far from it, but that creativity isn't as immediately obvious. So perhaps I'm wrong about the whole wave-inspiration model. It's something I've blamed in the past for failing similar challenges to the New 52 concept I've got going on at the moment. Challenges work great until you hit a trough between creative peaks, at which point they falter. But perhaps that idea is just a get-out-of-jail free card. A lie to make the failure seem, somehow, less.
Which is a fairly harsh way of looking at it. I'm not saying that taking a break, putting energy into something different or even just stepping back for a bit are a bad thing. They aren't. That's just how I look at it, the whole failure vs creation dichotomy. It isn't a good way of looking at it, but it's my way.
Still, as I said, maybe I'm wrong about the whole premise. Right now I am writing. I've written something every day this week, but none of those things are finished enough to publish. That isn't a failure unless viewed through a very specific lens, which probably isn't helpful in the first place. It's just a different kind of progress. And that's okay.
Sometimes, it's okay to make incremental but unrealised progress. Right now, I'm learning how to edit in Adobe Premiere Pro. It's absorbed quite a bit of my free time, time I would normally use to write. Once I've gotten to a stage I feel comfortable using the program I will have developed a very useful skill, on top of which the time required to utilise that skill will decrease massively. My creative output will increase. But in the mean time, from a birds-eye view, it will appear to wane and falter. That's okay, but it isn't great for time sensitive challenges.
What I'm really trying to say is this: I think my belief is wrong. I don't think creativity comes in waves. I think certain types of creativity appeal more, or less, at certain times. And once a certain type of creativity has risen to the surface, it takes over for a while, making switching back and forth difficult. Right now, I don't want to be writing; I want to editing photos or videos. That's where my head space is at, that's the creative itch I want to scratch.
Which is, truthfully, just a very long winded way of saying that I don't have anything to write about this week. But, also, that sometimes that's okay.
