Craving Creativity

Twenty One Pilots released a new album a short while back, and with it, a song I’ve been loving called The Craving. I probably listened to that song at least 50 times the day it released alone, but it’s the video that really got to me. The video itself is a metaphor for the creative process, and the imagery dredged up some deep childhood memories.

The first time I saw the video, I got a rush of the more unpleasant of emotions: sadness, embarrassment, shame. Watching it dug up a memory of my first go with a shotgun, seven or eight years old, my nerves going nuts, and getting knocked back hard as soon as I pulled the trigger. I missed the target, and couldn’t even stay on my feet, caught instead by the guy showing me how to shoot. He knew the kick was coming of course. I didn’t. I handed him the gun and walked away feeling like a failure.

I spent a lot of time at that gun club when I was young, a kind of bar and shooting range blended together. It was a fun place overall, really. I learned to play pool there as soon as I could see over the edge of the table, and I spent hours upon hours playing the Popeye arcade game. I also passed many evenings wandering the range as the shotguns lay silent, collecting unbroken clay pigeons, trying to be useful, and enjoying the stillness, the silence, while everyone else was inside playing pool or poker.

But that one memory, that one failure, has the power to creep in and override everything else. That day, as the story of my failed shotgun attempt made the rounds, it was met with laughter. Of course I got knocked back. Didn’t I know the kick was coming? Ha ha! Stupid kid. And as those emotions came boiling back up, I kept watching the video, kept listening to the song, kept pushing through the emotions.

As the days passed, and my view count racked up, I started to see the video and my story, in a different light. I realized that all the value, all the joy, is in the process, the creation.

Thinking back on my gun club experiences, I remembered the hours spent filling shotgun shells, one of my favorite activities. I remembered the mechanics of the machine, and how satisfying it was to combine the varied parts to make something new and useful.

I lingered on the memory of my hours spent walking the range, some of the most peaceful times I could get at that age. It was just me, wandering the field, my shoes crunching through chunks of broken clay as the easy breeze drifted in from the bay. I was simply exploring then, trying to discover useful things, without much care of what happened after.

It’s not much different from what I do now. I sit here, putting words on the page, and try to find the useful bits I can combine to create something whole. The value is in the journey, in the process. And the beauty is nobody can take that process away. Not critics, not reviewers, not even our robot overlords.

None of this is original thinking of course, but sometimes we need a reminder, to hear it in a fresh way, like I did with this song. Now, watching it one more time, I’m craving a bit more creativity, because that’s the part that really matters.