Creativity and paper puppets

A few years ago, I listened to my favorite episode of the Atlas Obscura podcast. The subject was Matt Farley, arguably the most prolific songwriter of all time, and a creative genius. He's written tens of thousands of songs and I spent a good chunk of an afternoon sifting through them just to realize that they were mostly shit. No one can write tens of thousands of songs and expect anything but a fraction of them to be good. But, every few hundredth or maybe thousandth song, he did write something really special and clever. I could only dream of having such an exhaustive output but his mantra really stuck with me: creativity begets creativity.

Since I listened to that episode, my life has been teeter-tottered between bursts of creativity and long spells of nothing. During those dry months, I really missed writing and being creative. When I tried to write it felt forced and contrived and when I did nothing I felt like a big loser, which then led to me spiraling and even less writing getting done.

For the last few years I've wanted to create stop motion short films. I've talked with friends about it and watched tutorials but when it came to sitting down and moving bits of clay very slowly, I couldn't be bothered. I started this year by creating two small stop motion projects and they turned out crude and weird, but it was so fun. So fun in fact that it made me want to write. I'd move my little paper puppet and then have new ideas for a novel. I'd painstakingly edit a ninja's movements and then want to write a play. It was exactly as Matt Farley described it. Creativity breeds creativity.