Curious people will often ask how I approach the art in art-o-tainment. What’s my practice? How do I hone my craft? Am I a plotter or a pantser? WHAT’S THE ONE THING THEY SHOULD DO?
I have, of course, a trillion answers. But the first is: THERE IS NO ONE THING. It varies wildly, from project to project. Every project is different. And I become a different person, with every one I undertake.
I’m the kind of guy who absorbs every project from every angle. Lives under its skin. Lets it live inside mine. That's how we know we are connected.
I am a stream-of-consciousness creator, absolutely. There's barely a second of any day I live where I'm not making up one crazy thing after another. That's how my mind works. And I like it that way.
But I'm also a structuralist. So I'm always constructing rigorous arenas for said consciousness to stream through, designing that shit within an inch of its life. So that the flow that pours has somewhere to land, with specificity. A target to hit. A goal to meet. A point to achieve, and make clear.
Not everybody thinks that way. And not every writer or filmmaker or songwriter or creator of any form thinks like that, for sure. NOR SHOULD THEY! As a teacher, I always suggest it, yes. But also love the loosey-goosey. Am more than happy to dance at the idiosyncratic frequencies of artists who are bringing it for real, unstructured and pure. At which point, I both go "WOOOO!" and become the de-facto straight man of the team.
Which is hilarious, for anyone who knew me as a young man, where I was often the wild card on everything. Still structure-intensive, but definitely the kind of artist others wished they could somehow reign in, and make behave in some sort of more regular fashion.
Sixty-seven years later, I feel like I've hit the balance of wild man and straight man. Am, in fact, A BETTER WILD MAN, with a trillion times more to offer than I ever did before, because I've been on every side of all of it.
So when I live inside a project, I live inside it in more ways that I could have ever guessed before. But was hoping for, the whole time.
Here's hoping I never stop learning, and becoming more.
A wish I extend, with all my heart, to you. As you make the wild things that nobody could possibly make happen but you.