Are days like today really so bad?
All day today, I've been in another one of my creative funks. All I want to do is create something, anything, and yet when I sit down and try to do just that, nothing comes out. I thought this is what going to New York was supposed to fix!
Realistically, I knew that visiting New York City, or any location for that matter, would not actually have that much of an effect on my creative drive. My two songs last summer were a perfect storm of inspiration and circumstances hitting at just the right time, but New York wasn't the magical secret to creating what I created. It also didn't help that this was a school trip, and even though I had fun, I much prefer to be in control of my own trips to the city so I can control exactly where I go and when. Sometimes inspiration would hit me at the wrong time and I wanted to go sit down and write something but instead I had to be somewhere in 20 minutes and I was 21 minutes away. Okay, that exact scenario never happened but I liked the way it sounded to write so I wrote it. That's sometimes what I do, after all I like to think I'm a writer. Or sometimes I wanted to stay up all night writing but we had to meet somewhere at 9:00 the next morning. That actually did happen.
The good news is that I have sat with my feelings for long enough now, and I think I have an idea about what might be causing this long-term burnout. And I know it's barely been over a month, but it's longer-term than I'm used to.
Rat Race is kind of at a standstill right now. Sure, it needs a lot of revisions and it's certainly not at a point to send anywhere yet, but those are something that I'm actually okay with admitting will take a while longer to come up with, and I've known that since before this burnout hit. The problem is that I used to be at various stages of completing a bunch of different parts of the musical at once, so when I found myself wanting to create something, there was always something I was in the mood for. Maybe some sheet music, maybe some lyrics, maybe some script, maybe some plot—there was always something to be done that I could successfully work on in that moment. As I began to complete each thing one by one, those options dwindled, but by that point it was a race to the finish line to get the workshop done so I was able to brute-force my way through everything pretty well even if I didn't want to 100% of the time. Now that all the "fun" stuff is done, it takes a lot more effort to sit down and actually do the hard work of cutting, rearranging, and rewriting things to make the musical work better. Usually when I'm in a creative mood, I just want to write a song or work on a piano vocal part for something. And I know I have this long-term goal of producing an album, but currently it's much harder for me to write songs for that because I don't have a solid theme or anything in mind really. Part of the reason musicals are so fun to write is because all the songs work together to tell a specific story. Albums can certainly work in the same way, but I haven't quite figured that story out yet.
Every time I have a day like this I take a step back at the end of the day and look at what I actually did. And while today might not have been the most productive in the way I wanted it to be, I still got a lot done. I made an appointment in Marquette that I'd been meaning to make for months, I sent some important emails (because that never ends), and I called the credit union about a refund that I've also been meaning to figure out. I even went on a nice walk with my mom and climbed my favorite tree by my house. It was a good day, which is why I hate that any day where I'm not actively creating something new feels unproductive to me. Maybe my next step is taking one of these days and using my time to figure out how to actually be okay with having them more often.
