Revising

Listening to Twenty One Pilots' Tyler Joseph discuss as he revisits his old music and his creative process during his Storyteller Performance, it inspired me to revisit my own work and strip down his message into a more general discussion on the developmental process.

When you’re creating and writing a song, you really don’t have a home base or an anchor. You’re kind of lost at sea trying to figure out what the song wants to be when you have endless possibilities, endless directions the song can go.

A difference method in which to create is to inject the work with its own set of morals, personality or an entire persona. It decides what it wants to do and therefore it makes the decisions. If the work sucks, it was the works fault and releases the pressure off of you as the creator, so that you can reconfigure the persona to structure a different outcome.

Rules tell you a bunch of things you can and can’t do. They are the bumpers on a bowling alley that prevent you from going into the gutters so that you more likely to hit the pins and ideally a strike. With more freedom does not mean less limitations. The limitations increase the possible productions rather than decrease. Without constraints, you wouldn’t have music, you would just have noise.

Once you’ve created something, built it, played with it, released it and introduced it publicly, it takes a life of its own. To revisit the work, you can strip down the work and it does a couple things for you. One, it reminds you where the work came from, the initial idea. Then that core (because the idea is there) becomes the anchor you didn’t have before to become your foundation of what worked to which you can then add new ideas and new elements on top of. You can become a little more fearless, more vulnerable, less concerned with execution or perfection because the message itself has already proven that it’s good and that because of the audience showing up that lets you know it’s good.

-Busy Brain