This month I'm very excited to share this interview with Andrew Collins. Andrew is an author, journalist, scriptwriter and broadcaster from the UK and he is just about to perform his solo comedy show, Secret Dancing, at the 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. His podcasts are an essential part of my week so check them out but for now, please enjoy Andrew's contribution to the Black Sheep Pen .
Andrew's self-portrait (for a Christmas card, 1984!)
© Andrew Collins, 2010
What inspires you in your creativity?
A deadline. This may sound a bit brutal, but if I have to deliver something or prepare something for a certain date, I will do so. This is not to say that I don't wake up in the morning with a creative thought - I often do - but I can't control that. I may be inspired by a seeing comedian to write a joke, or by a piece of journalism to write something, or by a TV show to come up with a new idea for a TV show, but nothing beats being commissioned to do one of those things, and having a deadline to meet.
What is the process you apply to being creative in your field?
There is no process. Just sit down, open the laptop and create a new, blank document. If I have a secret, it's to sometimes open a document that contains something I have recently written which I am proud of. I "save as", insert the new title, and then delete what's there in order to start again. This is pointless, but it helps to translate the vibe of what I've previously written into my fingers and my brain. If you write for a living, you are merely reorganizing existing sentences into a new order. That's all you can hope to do: arrange the English language into a new shape that pleases you and hopefully pleases others. Or at least explains something clearly.
Where does the confidence or motivation come from to keep doing what you do?
I actually don't know. My line of work - especially writing for television - is spelled out in rejection. For every sitcom I actually get into development, or to pilot stage, or to commission stage (the holy grail), there will be at least ten, if not more, that I also pitched and had rejected. I had a sitcom put into development by BBC Comedy at the beginning of 2009. I ended up writing six drafts of the pilot script, and it was then rejected. This was hard. But instead of killing myself, or getting a proper job, I came up with another three pitches, and one of those was later put into development with an independent production company, and I have a meeting with the BBC about that, literally, in two days' time. Who knows? That will probably be rejected too. But if you give up, you can guarantee you won't get a sitcom commissioned. I must have hope in my soul somewhere. I do think of myself as an optimist, but I am not a blind optimist. I am a realistic optimist. I always say, I may not be talented, but I am punctual. You'd be amazed by how far you can get by being on time, and writing to length and to deadline, and being polite and nice. I have confidence that I can do all of that, and hope that luck gets me the rest of the way.
How do you evaluate your success as a creative person?
If I am happy. I was happy with the script that the BBC rejected. I was happy with the script that Channel 4 rejected two years before. I worked as a professional illustrator for a year after leaving college. Pretty much everything I drew was soulless and functional. I was rarely proud of the work, only proud of the fact that I had some work. I gave it up.
Where should people start, when they don't know where to start?
In front of a blank sheet of paper, or a blank screen. There is no other place to start. Your job is the take away the white space. That's it.
© all images and text Andrew Collins, 2010.
Thanks for these insights Andrew, and good luck in Edinburgh! I am really drawn to the idea of a sense of happiness being the prime benchmark for evaluating our creative success. This month, the creativity challenge is quite simple. Attempt three different creative tasks and evaluate how happy you feel while doing them (not how happy you are with the output) and try to define what it is about the activity that's making you happy.... then do more of that - find new ways to include these elements into other tasks and other contexts.
This was a really interesting read, thanks to both of you. It's a different focus to look at the practicalities of having to be creative for a deadline, rather than just some airy-fairy notion of creativity.
ReplyDeleteAs a blogger, I give myself self-imposed deadlines of making sure that I write at least 4 posts a week, just to force myself to keep going and to keep being creative.