Great Work Takes Years to Bake

2023-04-06 · essays

Not my words: a monologue by Exurb1a, which I posted on 2023-04-06 because it said something I could not.

I love "2001: A Space Odyssey". It's the first serious film I ever saw.
My dad showed it to me when I was very little, and for the next week or so I apparently just kept screaming if we didn't rewatch it in the evenings.

The film took on this kind of religious quality in my childhood.

That was fun, but what was really neat was reading the letters between Arthur C. Clarke, the sci-fi writer, and Stanley Kubrick, the director, and realizing – oh! There was this massive period of time before the film was made when they had no idea what the fuck they were doing.

Because it's such a perfect movie to me that you can just kind of believe it made itself, or that they filmed it in a few weeks, and bada-bing, job done.

But in reality great work takes years to bake sometimes, and great artists generally don't have much interest in bragging afterwards about how much preparation went into the cake itself.

I would strongly urge you to find out how artists you respect made their stuff, because there's always a story there, and it's usually a very difficult one.
But the end result looks effortless.

For the writers out there, my Bible for a long time now has been "Zen in the Art of Writing" by Ray Bradbury.
I hope you enjoy it.

There's some kind of long-enduring myth that great art usually just turns up fully formed, and if you're having trouble – it's because you're not naturally gifted or something.
WOWIE, what a load of bollocks!

There are ENDLESS resources for help with arting, if you will only seek them out. There are artists who started at 50 or 60, there are artists with debilitating diseases, there are artists living in war zones.

Great art is possible in almost all conditions. And don't even think about taking up smoking, please!
There is no shame in making simple shit.
We're living in a rather paradoxical age of media. It's never been easier to get one's work out there, but as a result, people's attention spans have probably never been shorter.

I was at a conference a time back, and I come to listen to a debate between two philosophers about the point of life, and what happened instead was lots and lots of long words, when in fact they were talking about very graspable stuff –

"What are we doing here", "what's the point in being alive", etc., And I sat there for hours thinking:

"You could just talk like normal people.
Why aren't you talking like normal people?
The meat of what you're actually saying isn't that complicated."

And I realized those folks on stage were probably scared – scared of being seen as stupid. And so instead, they'd ended up being all obscure with big silly long words.

But really, isn't it way more impressive to say a complex thing in a simple way than a simple thing in a complex way?