Michael Harney wrote: >The problem >I have is that the best models I have made seemed to flow out so >effortlessly. I feel like I wasn't even trying. This makes me worry... If >I wasn't really trying, if I were to deliberatly try to produce similar >results, could I do it? I know from experience that I can, but somehow it >still seems strange. Analogy: It feels like a cartoon, where I dip a >brush >in a bucket of paint, run a few strokes over the canvas, and then I >suddenly >have a complete, perfect picture, complete with different colors, even >though the paint in the bucket is just 1 color and my strokes were only >haphazard. Then I stare at the picture and say "How the heck did I do >that?", and am afraid to try again for fear that the next time I try it >will >be a collosal failure. [snip] >I spent a measly 2 hours on Lightwave >today. I should have done at least 6 hours (Heck, if I did do 6 hours, I >probably would have finished the rat model today, ahead of schedule). I >just did the 2 hours, then stared in disbelief... I couldn't bring myself >to >do 3D modeling again today, so I just gave up trying and spent the rest of >the day doing random system administrator tasks and finishing a book I had >been reading. Any suggestions?
I was just talking to a friend of mine here at work about this. She is a painter, and I am a composer/musician, and we have both gone through similar problems. Her solution was to bring pencil and paper to work and sketch while she is on the phone doing troubleshooting. This sounds similar to the AD(H)D model mentioned by Nick. When I was in college, I always wrote music best on a deadline. If I had to turn in 20 minutes worth of music and had writers block, I would toy with melodic ideas, play around with different harmonies, think some about the form of the piece or pieces, but not get much done in the way of actual music notes on paper until a day or two before I had to turn it in. Then I would enter "crunch mode." I'd tie myself to my computer and keyboard for 50 minutes out of every hour, and require myself to write a certain number of measures of music per hour, even if the measures were unmitigated garbage. Eventually, the ideas started to coalesce into something coherent, usually about 1 or 2 a.m. the morning the piece was due. I'd would then start giving myself a 15 minute break every hour instead of just 10, and I'd use that 15 minutes to take "power naps." I always got the pieces done, and I often had a "how the heck did I get that effect" reaction to my own pieces, similar to your "how the heck did I do that" reaction. I guess it really just amounted to getting myself so tired that my conscious mind got out of the way and let my subconscious do the work. There are a couple of books I'll talk about a little bit later in this email that discuss this in terms of "squelching the squelcher" or bypassing the judgemental part of the brain/consciousness. The only other way I was able to get through writers block was to get lots and lots of sleep. If I was completely rested, I was better able to clear my head and relax and just start writing. While going to college and working 2 or 3 jobs, that just didn't happen very often... So I guess my answer is to sleep a lot or sleep very little (so much for the middle ground). There are a few pieces of music that I have used to get me into a very calm, very focused state of mind, most recently and most successfully _Electric Counterpoint_ by Steven Reich, performed by Pat Metheny. It's minimalism, which drives some folks nuts, but if you like the genre, _EC_ is a good one for relaxing and focusing. It comes on a cd with _Different Trains_ by Reich, performed by the Kronos Quartet with audio samples of train sounds and people talking about trains in the late 1930's through the 1940's. It's a pretty strange piece, but it won a Grammy for best classical composition of the year back in 1988 or 1989 (I heard it live - more or less* - in KC just before the cd was released). You might also want to read one of the Inner Game books by W. Timothy Gallwey. He had originally written _The Inner Game of Tennis_ and _The Inner Game of Golf_, and a musician named Barry Green read those and saw that they applied very well to music also, and co-wrote _The Inner Game of Music_ with Gallwey. A lot of it is oriented towards performing music as opposed to writing it, but some of the principles do apply to writing and you might be able to apply those to drawing/modelling also. It has been a long time since I read it, but IIRC the Inner Game books talk a lot about "turning off" the judgemental part of the brain and letting the creative part take over. The theory is that if you have the technique basically down, then the creative part of your brain has access to that technique also without you having to consciously control every aspect of what you're doing. In other words, if you know how to use a computer modelling program, or how to correctly place your fingers on the strings of a violin and draw a bow across those strings, it can actually be counterproductive to try to consciously control that; just let your creative part be creative and let that creative part handle worrying about technique. You can probably find _The Inner Game of Music_ in most public libraries, and for sure it would be in the school library at any college or university with a pretty good music program. Another book that talks some about "squelching the squelcher" or turning of the judgemental part of your consciousness is _The Einstein Factor: A Proven New Method for Increasing Your Intelligence_. It probably won't really help you increase your intelligence, but it does have an interesting technique for accessing the subconsious called "image streaming." Image streaming is sort of like free association or guided imagery, only done verbally with a partner or (a tape recorder if no partner is available). This book is a little New Agey for my tastes, but a limited form of image streaming has gotten me through bouts of writers block before. I hope that helps. The most important thing to know is that you are not alone; lots of us experience writer's block. Reggie Bautista * I say more or less because the piece is written for multiple string quartets and the way Kronos performs it live is to have all the string quartet parts except for one quartet recorded along with all the sound samples of trains and people talking about trains, and they play the "main" quartet part live along with that tape. This is how Reich designed the piece to be played, so what I heard was about as live as it gets... _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
