Honest Art

"Write what you know" is something that my highschool film teacher would always say. It's a phrase that gets passed around to encourage screenwriters to write scripts that are true to themselves, because often, those are the pieces that end up really carrying meaning and touching other people's hearts. Because everybody knows: Honest art is good art.

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I've been thinking about this a lot actually. Being "good at something" demands collaboration and teamwork between your talents and your practice. Whether it be a sport, or programming, or art. You take what you've got, and then you build from there. I've always had my doubts on whether or not one could make truly good art without a good struggle story or pain in their lives, but because I've been trapped in my room for the past week and a half, I've had a lot of time to practice my arts, but a loooooot less inspiration/personal experience to draw from. I've been thinking a lot about a lot of things, and I've been writing whatever comes to mind (cliche or otherwise) almost every night, but I still feel like the songs I wrote in SF when my world would crumble at a mere sneeze, somehow are better than the ones I try to write to "practice" my art.

Can you even practice art? Is that a thing? If art is personal expression, then can I practice personally expressing things?

Well, I guess you could express more frequently, but then you're bound to end up with less poignant art because you're not existing on crisis mode 24/7. Then you end up expressing lamer notions like "I feel tired" or "a ballad to that really good pizza I had for lunch".

However logical that is, I think the songs I keep trying to write are dishonest in a different way. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm writing because I want to make a good song, not because I want to express myself. Somehow in all of this "inspiration" that I've been watching on youtube, I slipped into a desire to be as good as them. No, I want to be them. And because of that, I write what I think they would write. I sing what I think would be "good" based off of the definition of what I think is "good" in other people's music. And that's why I end up with cliche, poppy, nonsense during my practice sessions.

I'm expressing myself. But I'm expressing a lie in an indirect, convoluted, and subconscious way. I'm covering up the conflict and the confusion with words that pander to the Popularity Gods, begging for validation from those I look up to.

Ok. So my art, recently, hasn't been honest. But that shouldn't stop me from practicing, should it? Practice is needed if I want to improve in any way because at the end of the day, art is as much a craft as it is creativity. Even if it's low quality output, I should still try to build consistency and pRaCtIcE. Right???

I don't know. On the one hand, my brain says "Yes. Any practice is better than no practice. Afterall, would you have had this realization about honest art if you hadn't written utter garbage for the past week?". But on the other hand, my perfectionist second brain is whispering in my other ear "Practicing wrong is worse than not practicing at all. At least you won't build bad habits then. At least you won't progress backwards."

I don't really know what's right or wrong, but I think it's important to try. I was watching a review of "Whiplash," one of my favorite movies of all time, and the guy mentioned something about how the movie is really good at telling the autobiographical experience of jazz school from the perspective of Damian Chazelle, but it's not a 100% accurate portrayal of jazz school itself. Which makes sense because the director was honest about his experience, not the average experience of students who go through jazz school. And that's why the movie is so good. Because it asks questions that you only stumble on when you get your hands really dirty with real life. Those are the kinds of philosophical burdens that you accidentally find when your life becomes a little more niche and the universe accidentally shows you its edges and loopholes.

I think I'm going to keep practicing, because that is how you improve at anything. You gotta work. Nothing good ever comes easy. But I think I'm going to also spend time thinking about what deserves to be written. What do I have to say about myself? My own experience? And why does it matter?

I gotta practice feeling. Because that's how you practice art.