Time and the creator

Time moves at different speeds depending on your creative practice.

As a filmmaker your projects move across many years, each second of the final outcome agonizingly negotiated and constructed.

As an author, your work unfolds over years — from the long process of writing to the journey of publishing.

As a musician your projects move in months. A song ready today might be released this winter with a complex calendar of planning.

As a visual artist the creative process is defined by your medium and the rate by which you can show.

As a writer you might operate on a weekly schedule, striving to put out fresh ideas on a predictable cadence.

As an internet poster you operate second to second, every moment a potential to go viral.

Venue as much as process shapes creative time. Digital spaces collapse time. Physical spaces force a confrontation with it. Compare flipping through songs on a streaming service to placing a record on a turntable.

Every moment invested in a work, no matter how seemingly futile, shows up in the final experience. Time spent is a quality more easily felt than seen.

Culture today moves at the speed of the internet, which clarifies why some types of work speak the native cultural cadence while others struggle to keep up.

What we most need from our creative time is generosity. Generosity to learn, the generosity of being open to discovery. Art emanates from the formless generosity of what is and isn’t, drifting in the open expanses of non-time.

When we force a schedule, we can disrupt these patterns. We demand a form that is not true to their nature. Yet it’s also true that when we create on a schedule we become better at listening. Time earns us our luck.

My time is my time. Your time is your time. Their time is their time. We can compare to learn and better understand, but we shouldn’t waste time judging.

Time moves at different speeds depending on your creative practice.

May we all dance to our own time.

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This past week the Dark Forest Collective announced a new book: Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by the author Nadia Asparouhova. This book is very special to me, so I wanted to share a few words about it.

For the past year, I’ve served as Nadia’s editor and publisher on this project — a first for me. While working on This Could Be Our Future, I was fortunate to have an amazing editor. It was an honor to support someone I admire so deeply, like Nadia.

Nadia’s book explores “antimemes” — ideas or forces that do not wish to be seen. Taboos, bureaucracies, and opaque corporate shell structures are all examples — things hidden despite their importance. Nadia’s book teaches us what these things are, how they stay hidden, and how to see them.

It’s a genuinely original book told in a very personable way. If you like my writing then you will love hers. You can be one of the first to read it (it comes out May 27) — available now only on Metalabel.

Extremely grateful for this process, and proud to help introduce what I believe is a significant new work.

Peace and love,

Yancey