Speak early and often
Between my 99th and 100th post on my film blog there was over a hundred day gap. I realized I wasn't posting ultimately because I was afraid I couldn't really add to the conversation, and that idea is wrong. I wrote a short post on the subject that I want to reprint here because I think the themes are very important for anyone doing creative work. Enjoy.
This is my hundredth post! The irony is that it comes over 100 days since I did my 99th.I have to apologize for not posting for so long. I can't offer being busy as a reason, or having nothing to post about. Neither is true. It was more a confidence issue.Reading more and more about the history of blogging and watching social media develop as a medium, I found it hard to believe that I could really add much that hadn't been touched on already by better minds. But this view, I later discovered (or re-discovered), is completely wrong. I reaffirmed for myself something I had known intuitively for a long time but faded when I never asserted it: everyone's perspective matters.One might not be a master wordsmith or know the perfect metaphor for the moment, but the Web invites even the dustiest prose, and the most amateur author, to speak. The act alone is important, because you can't evaluate beforehand the impact of your words. You have to form them and put them firmly into the world first to really know their worth. And even if your work is not deemed worthy, it's a step toward getting your 10,000 hours in and learning the craft.I wrote about Ira Glass's comments on storytelling and creativity a while ago, and it came back to me as I thought about this topic. He talks about how people in creative fields start out with great taste but little skill. It takes a while, a long while, for those two things to converge, where you can make something that really matches the image you have in your mind. What he doesn't come out and say is this: perfectionism and fear of failure will make you fail. You have to try and fail over and over again, and rarely will you be rewarded for the act of trying, but it is by far the most important thing you can do to increase your ability to "be the change you wish to see in the world "(Ghandi).My perfectionism and fear of failure kept me silent since March. I hope not to succumb to that again. To make it up, I have some posts coming up after this one to talk a bit about what I've been doing in the last few months, and I hope you enjoy them.Update: Here are some direct links to the three new blog posts.[ Originally posted at Hungry Filmmaker Blog ]--
Matthew J. Agnello
http://hungryfilmmaker.com/
