Coming up with creative ideas can often be difficult. Especially, when you need to apply three disciplines together. I need to frame a blog on my website, which has up until this point been all about my creative endeavours. So how to come up with an idea of how to tie everything all together? Meaning music, writing and subjects from my master’s in content strategy.
To come up with the idea, I revisited some of my favourite sources. YouTube interviews of creative people. It has been a quandary to me, whether watching interviews is a way of procrastinating. Or if it is a way of replenishing creative output. Reading to a writer is not a waste of time. So, information from a creative to another creative, must be on the same level? No?
In the mid-2010s, I was studying creative writing at Whitireia in Wellington, New Zealand. Which is the country I am from. This was a great time for me in which I explored how to write poems, novels and short stories and how to edit myself. I had great mentors.
The IIML (Victoria University of Wellington) course curated writers on Mondays at Te Papa. Every week a favourite local writer of mine would be interviewing another favourite local author. I had time and space in which to get inspired.
This was also when I became a fan of content creators on YouTube. Who created all kinds of videos about interviewing authors about writing, and about classic fiction and the publishing industry in general.
One of my favourite videos to watch was of Polly Stenham. A London-born playwright who, in this great short video filmed by the UK National theatre, says that “someone once described inspiration or writing a play to me, as like a backwards explosion. That you have all these disparate ideas, and they all get sucked into something sleeker or smaller than what you started with.”
Hopefully, my blog ideas can become sucked into something compact.
Stenham also talked about how you should be ruthless with your own writing and if you have a good idea that you need to cut, it should be cut, and maybe it can be used later. You can watch the video here if you like:
Musicians often baulk against marketing and blogs, and blogs about marketing. And I have played in several New Zealand bands over the last quite a few years. And I find it interesting, because I was one of those musicians, that thought an audience should happen naturally. Because all the big bands ever have managed to create this myth around them, that they were just playing a gig and writing songs, then everything took off.
And now I live in Austria and study content strategy.
Each week, I will be exploring content strategy in creative fields. Prodding and picking at it. I will be living it and getting mad about it, and maybe even excited by it all. I hope to interview some content creators, the new DIY of online creative, I guess. Are they? It certainly doesn’t seem enough to just make music or just write any more, people seem to have some kind of TV personality or natural comedic timing.
Like Taika Waititi!