This semester made me aware of just how stubborn I am. And just how much I need to be willing to flex myself. Working on both the sound and video projects, I noticed some specific things about how I function creatively that put me at odds with any sort of exploration, or at least put me in a position where I had to be willing to rethink some of my preconceived notions of how to work.
For instance, both projects showed me just how attached I am to the idea of narrative. Kelly mentioned in her blog that she saw the exact opposite about herself, that her own fiction oddly enough resists arc in some way and fights the stereotypical structure of narrative, something I would say is to her credit in her work, something that distinguishes it and opens it to a lot of linguistic play that perhaps my work is not as open to, given its adherence to that old concept of plot. I, on the other hand, both in my fiction and in this class, have been attempting to subvert the whole narrative paradigm I’d previously operated in creatively. Sort of. REALLY stubbornly. You’ll notice that both my sound project and the video project I participated in had some arc to them, largely because that’s where I feel I work from creatively. This is what makes sense to me. What I’ve wanted to do, then, is to work around that arc, to see what ways I can play with other elements to redefine what I’m doing with the whole concept of narrative. In this respect, Kelly and Todd have both really pushed me. I suck at working in groups, so this was really a struggle for me, and I have to admit that if I’d been entirely in control of this project, the end result would have been very different. I think each of us believes this about ourselves. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is something interesting about the idea of attempting to remove as much of that Aristotelian arc of conflict as possible, and Kelly and Todd have both helped it in this direction (I was probably dragging my feet every step of the way). I thought it was very interesting that Kelly thought it was going the other direction, when I felt it could have been much more plot-oriented than it was. Shows my biases, I suppose.
Secondly, I think the video project in particular pushed me to be more willing to edit my original conception of a creative piece. I resist revision. Vehemently. If I revise, I either add to the original piece to provide clarity or I throw it aside entirely and start over. I do not cut unless I have no other choice. Todd and Kelly are clearly believers in cutting, and I think this was the greatest problem we ran into putting the final piece together. Again, this is certainly not a bad thing. It’s entirely possible the project is objectively better because of their willingness to remove things they didn’t feel fit in. I just had a different idea of what fits in. Almost every time we discussed whether a particular shot was working for the whole project, it played out largely the same.
Me: “Oh come on, that’s hilarious.”
Todd: “It doesn’t fit.”
Kelly: “Yeah, it really doesn’t.”
Me: “But… come on! He’s feeding the toaster baked beans! It’s funny!”
Kelly: “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Me: “Okay. Fine…. But it would have been awesome.”
That old adage that a writer is supposed to kill his babies when he revises is not one I concede to often, and so letting go of some of my favorite parts of our footage really hurt. This is the essence of collaboration, I suppose. Maybe it didn’t fit into our final concept of the project. But it fit into MY concept of it. Which is why I fought so hard to keep things in. But ultimately, I suppose, because we had to debate about things like this, the project reflects more accurately our combined views on what we finally wanted to do with it. Kelly’s and Todd’s were just more likely closer to each other’s than they were to mine, hence my initial resistance.
I’m with Kelly that I felt like overall this class opened me up to a lot of non-writing ways of being creative, and I would be interested also in continuing to pursue them. We all talked about taking the full footage we got for the apocalypse piece and making our own individually realized projects out of that. Perhaps it would be a good exercise to do this and place them next to each other in some way; perhaps this combination and repetition of images could as an artifact say something different than the version we cut apart together. Even the idea of comparing collaborative work to work derived from the same sources but different artists intrigues me, and I wouldn’t mind playing with this further. I suppose that might be the best way for me to ultimately get away from simple narrative without rejecting it entirely, by stacking it instead. Something to take with me, I guess.
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