Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.
–Thomas Edison
I don’t like this quote. For starters, Thomas Edison was a rotten human being – so his advice is questionable at best.
I also dislike the quote because it’s incorrect. Genius is not solely a function of working hard. Genius is a function of many factors, including working smart. (Edison clearly didn’t get this, as evidenced by how much time he wasted on obviously bad ideas.)
I may not be a genius, but many brilliant people have offered better advice than Edison. For example, I prefer this quote:
This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name
– “Remember the Name” by Fort Minor
(When it comes to “inspiration”, Mike Shinoda is far more qualified to comment than Edison. My $0.02.)
I have found the creative process to be much closer to the 10+20+15+5+50 rule. Working hard is important – to be sure – but it’s just one small part of the puzzle. If you want to maximize creativity, a certain amount of luck, skill, training, planning, research, and education is required. (Case in point: Edison’s utter failure in promoting direct current (DC) for general power distribution. To quote the aforementioned wiki article: “Edison was a brute-force experimenter, but was no mathematician. AC cannot be properly understood or exploited without a substantial understanding of mathematics and mathematical physics, which Tesla possessed.” Said another way – Edison could work his ass off, but all the experimentation in the world couldn’t replace the need for education.)
So to summarize: genius – and by extension, creativity – is not about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It’s a complex interaction between many factors, including some that can be controlled (research, perspiration, education) and some that cannot (luck, innate talent).
As a supplement to the 10+20+15+5+50 rule, I’ve noticed that my creative process operates like a pendulum – a pendulum swinging between inspiration and perspiration. I’ll periodically experiences bursts of inspiration where I can create without effort; whether it’s music or programming or writing, the good ideas flow unabated when the pendulum hits the “inspiration” apex of its arc.
Then the pendulum swings the other way, and I have to apply a great deal of perspiration to sort out and clean up ideas from the creative stage. This stage seems to represent the “50% pain” component… but it’s pain well-spent. For writing, this is the editing stage. With music, it’s orchestrating and remastering. Programming requires optimizing, debugging, and commenting.
Any good idea requires a certain amount of effort before it can be transformed into something concrete. Even Edison understood that.
Why this sudden analysis of the creative process? Because after a year+ worth of “perspiration time”, the pendulum has finally started its swing back to the inspiration side. WOOHOO!
In other words, here is what’s coming to THDC in the coming months.
Writing
Teal, my CC-licensed science fiction novel, is complete. Yes, you read that right – as far as the text is concerned, Teal is 100% finished. A surprise manuscript request from a superb agent motivated me to crank on the manuscript and finish up the final round of edits. (I may want to double-check the last few chapters, since I finished them around 4:00 in the morning… but that shouldn’t take long. :)
With the text and cover design complete, all that’s left is a bit of polish on the manuscript design and Teal will be ready for publication. I don’t know who will publish it (Amazon? a traditional publishing company?)… I guess it hinges on what the aforementioned agent thinks of the manuscript. Either way, I should have a better idea several weeks from now.
Until I hear otherwise, I’ll continue posting a chapter a week online. PDF downloads of the novel have slowly picked up steam (400-ish so far), while several thousand individuals have taken a look at the various online chapters. I don’t have a great way of tracking specific paths through the chapters, but the most popular chapter (Chapter 12) has received ~700 hits… so between pdfs and online views, I think it’s safe to say at least a thousand people have read a good portion of the book. Considering that the average self-published book sells somewhere between 50 and 150 copies, I find this to be an encouraging number of “reads” for being online only three months. I still haven’t begun work on a coordinated advertising campaign for the online copy… but depending on how the next few weeks go, it may be time to start on that. We’ll see what happens.
Many thanks to everyone who has already donated and/or submitted feedback for Teal. Your contributions are invaluable!
Music
As I’ve discussed before, I’ve got big plans for the music available on this site. Those plans have already led to good things – for example, 2010 has already seen the addition of seven new songs (more than the last several years combined).
I’ve also spent this year remastering all the music currently available for download. This has been… well, a TON more work than I anticipated. Producing music that plays properly across a huge range of devices and formats is surprisingly complicated. It has taken a great deal of research (and many false-starts), but I finally have a very nice step-by-step process for producing professional-quality audio. Maybe someday I’ll condense the process into a nice online guide…
However, all this remastering has led to an interesting quandary – what’s the best way to get music into the hands (ears?) of potential listeners? Posting all my mp3/Ogg/MIDIs on this site is a good start, but it’s not very efficient in terms of overall exposure.
So I’m working on something better.
Step one is getting all the music to professional quality. This is happening… it’s happening slowly, but it’s happening. This includes a huge amount of pre- and post-production work, but the process culminates in a delightfully robust FLAC file that can be converted to any format imaginable (mp3s and Oggs as far as this site is concerned). So far, seven songs have been completed. Seven out of ~fifty. <sigh> Fortunately, I’m getting more and more proficient with every track, so hopefully the process will accelerate.
The remastering process has also led to a number of non-sound issues – for example, how to best tag finished files. What album title(s) should be used? What about track numbers? Do songs need album art? (I think they do.)
These questions led to the realization that I need to be more organized with how I present my music. To that end, I’m going to be releasing my music as part of three very official albums.
Awesome, right? I’m very happy with how the album art turned out. Each album cover is 100% designed by me, and that means each one has been produced using nothing but FOSS (go GIMP!). I even had to write my own software for the “Songs from an American Video Game” cover, because I couldn’t find a way to automate a mosaic effect of progressively shrinking tiles…
As part of the album art, I wanted to utilize at least one piece of recurring symbology. After many attempts, I settled on this logo:
For those without musical experience, that’s three bass clefs (or F-clefs) superimposed over each other. I plan on working this logo into all future musical endeavors. Exciting stuff!
As for the albums themselves, the plan is to distribute my songs according to the following criteria:
- My most popular downloads and personal favorites will end up in “Songs from an American Video Game.” If all goes as planned, I’m going to formally release this as a legit album – e.g. you’ll be able to purchase a CD of it and/or download it from online music stores. The songs will continue to be available for free on this site, but purchase of a CD will provide a great way to support the site as well as share the music with others.
- Any original compositions not appearing in “Songs from an American Video Game” will be placed in the “THDC Originals” album. These songs may eventually be moved into another album… but all new releases and “miscellaneous” tracks will live here.
- Remixes will obviously be placed in the “THDC Remixes” album. I’m quite happy with the artwork for this – it’s clearly a remixed image of the original. Get it? ;) I’d love to include some remixes in the “Songs from an American Video Game” album, but until I can work out copyright issues in a CC-license-pleasing manner, I have no choice but to leave them off anything involving physical media.
The idea of releasing formal albums – including at least one in CD form – gets me very excited. It also motivates me to continue working through the horribly mind-numbing process of remastering my entire music collection!
In other, less exciting news, I have finally built an intelligent backend into my blog for automatically posting new music. Rather than manually creating links to uploaded music files, music articles are now smart enough to scan for music files themselves. Download links are automatically populated for MIDI, mp3, Ogg, and FLAC files when available. This allows me to upload remastered music and make it immediately available for download with minimal work on my part – a MUCH better solution than manually re-editing every music article when changes are made.
As for when these albums and/or remastered tracks will be available… good question. Hehe. I’m still torn between uploading new tracks individually or in large chunks.
Regardless, I’ll post some sort of article or notification once new music goes live.
Programming
While I don’t have as much exciting information for the programming section of THDC, at least one major change has already happened – all code is now available in two forms: a source-code only zip file, and a source code + executable zip file. This is a better solution for many reasons (including security). All zip files have been edited with README files, improved commenting, and removal of any licensing terms that conflict with the all-encompassing BSD license now covering my programming work.
I also have two new programming projects ready for upload, and hopefully a few more will wrap up before the end of the year.
Tanner Helland (dot) Com
Depending on how often you frequent the site, you may have already noticed a host of small changes. This week consisted of rebuilding the header, including moving the search bar to the sidebar. I realize that the header looks painfully bare now, but fear not – that’s on purpose.
I’m currently working on a redesign of the entire header area, and it’ll include some awesome original artwork. (And not abstract artwork, like the album covers above – this will be concrete forms and characters!) I have no idea when it will be finished, but you’ll know when it is because the site will look very different. :)
Over the last six months, I’ve also spent a ton of time cleaning up the site backend. Besides the automated scanning feature for music (and an identical one for programming project download links), I’ve slowly cleaned out unnecessary code and restyled things to better match the orange/blue theme I’m working toward. I’ve also switched to a better caching engine, which should decrease load times for most visitors.
There are many improvements left to make (converting standalone images to sprites is next on the checklist), but overall things are heading in the right direction.
In Summary…
In case you haven’t noticed, I like staying busy. :) I hope this new, more orderly approach helps me be better about working “smart” instead of just working “hard.”
Also, I should mention that there is one area where I disagree with Shinoda’s take on the creative process – in my opinion, the adventure is 50% pleasure and 5% pain. That 5% really sucks, but the 50% more than makes up for it.
Hopefully some of the new projects will contribute to your 50%!
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