For the longest time, I never saw myself as someone who had adopted creative living. I saw myself as only a fan of the arts, at best.  Yes, external validation can help with the labels. But I’ve never cared much for it- nor should you. 

As James Cameron once said:

“Pick up a camera, shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you’re a director.”

Just stamp your name on it and that’s that. But this is not what I want to talk about though. More than the fear and self doubt about practice itself, my fear came from a different place. Who’s going to authorise the choice of our interests? If you’re in school, your teachers are paid to pay attention to your work. But once we are out, who’s going to pay attention to what we are interested in? 

Verlyn Klinkenborg in his book, Several Short Sentences about Writing, writes:

“Nothing in your education has taught you that what you notice is important,

But everything you notice is important. Let me say that in a different way: If you notice something, it’s because it’s important. But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice, And that depends on what you feel authorised or permitted to notice in a world where we’re trained to disregard our perceptions.

Who’s going to give you the authority to feel that what you notice is important? It will have to be you. The authority you feel has a great deal to do with how you write, and what you write, With your ability to pay attention to the shape and meaning of your own thoughts and the value of your own perceptions.

Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorisation. No matter who you are. Only you can authorise yourself….No one else can authorise you. No one.”

So the answer is self-authorisation. This is important to hear, especially for artists starting out. We cannot let the market or your peers choose the kind of work we dig, right? That is the worst. 

But Klinkenborg warns ,“But this doesn’t happen overnight” 

So how does one begin? He writes: 

Start by learning to recognize what interests you. Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter, so they never learn how to notice – not even what interests them! Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed, already sifted and sorted and categorised by everyone else, by people with real authority. And so they write about pre-authorized subjects in a pre-authorised language. 

When we begin our education in the arts, we start studying the masters. So what happens is we are also consuming their unique interests. I am not speaking about style- that I have a different opinion about. But rather, specific subject matters we find ourselves investing our time in.

I believe we have to escape our formal education to make our own unique taste. 

So let us embrace our obscurities. Let us make stuff that means something to us. 

What we notice is important. It is important because we noticed. What we notice matters. 

Peace and grace,
Nikhil.