Don’t give the suck energy, you boob! Make something anyway. Something sucky. Write something shitty and dull. Paint something awful and derivative. Compose some cliché vapid music with awful lyrics. Work on your vanilla, unoriginal blog post. Take fershit pictures outside.

Do your work anyway.

First of all, what will you do instead? Scroll on your phone? Watch Trump videos predicting his downfall only to find out he’s still out there and farting? Eat? Sleep? Read Substack notes about how total strangers want to read your stuff if you are below the cutoff number of followers?

Will any of that stuff get you to where you want to go?

Will you feel better about yourself after throwing the day away? Throwing your time to work away? You’re already feeling bad because you suck, and now you’re going to feel worse because you suck AND you’re avoidant? That’s a move you want to make?

Go work. Try not to sit there and stare at whatever it is blankly, willing yourself to make something happen, to feel better. You know you can’t think yourself into feeling better, right? If you could, you wouldn’t be feeling that you suck.

If you could think yourself into something, wouldn’t you be rich and having loads of sex?

Work. Make make make. If you’re afraid of wrecking a thing you’ve been working on, maybe pick out something smaller, or invent a low-risk project. Instead of painting the 10’x10’ abstract, maybe do a few ink wash self-portraits. Paint that sucky li’l face. Or, if the 10x10 has been sitting for months, have at it. Work that sits there unworked on is soul-eating. Maybe doing something sucky to it is what that damn painting/song/novel needs. It needs its ass kicked by your sucky foot.

On days when I have no ideas and I suck, I put down blobs of watercolors and then draw whatever the blob suggests with a dip pen. I dig the baboon.

Write down story ideas. Go through old notebooks. Take a song that you like, rewrite the lyrics, and then write new chords for it. Do SOMETHING.

But don’t use the word “suck” while you’re doing this. Suck is a self-fulfilling prophecy. What you think is probably going to be what you get, so shush up the judgment in general when you’re making things. Just make them. Don’t tell your brain how to think about things. Try to get your self-judgment out of the studio.

A couple of things might happen as you work. You might make things that suck. But you will have tried, so you don’t suck. You had a bad day and you still showed up and worked. That’s admirable, isn’t it?

The second thing that could happen is you make something that’s good and that you like. Suddenly, things don’t suck, and that is totally because you did the thing that was hard to do. You got over yourself.

I’ll be the first to admit that what I’m telling you to do is incredibly difficult. I can’t always do it myself. There are days when being an artist is a torture. Mindset is a huge obstacle, and getting control over it is a bitch and a half. Bad days will definitely happen. But if you can steer the Titanic of your will past the iceburg of the cowardly part of you and make the work you want to make, you’ll start getting a grasp on that mindset, and you’ll start proving to yourself that you can show up and work like a professional.

I’m writing about creativity every Wednesday, illustrated with a typically ridiculous painting. Or maybe more often. I actually revised this one because a bunch of the writing sucked. So I fixed it.

But do you know what was really important? That I got it out on Wednesday, misspellings or not. That is a whole other thing to write about.

Open the Doors are meant to be short and actionable. You can actually do stuff in mentioned in this post. It’s concrete.

I hate platitudinous advice, don’t you?

I’m writing about creativity every Wednesday, illustrated with a typically ridiculous painting. I have a strong urge to lean on human creativity. I don’t hate Ai, but I don’t want people being less creative, less artistic.

These will be short things, centered around one idea. And practical. Something you can apply rather than pondering concepts all woozy and numinous*.

Our creativity often kicks in when we have to make a decision. Decisions require considering what will happen next, and anticipating what might happen in the future. Sounds like a job for Mr Imagination.

What happens if I go to the right? Will I wind up in the dangerous part of town and be murdered? If I go left, will that take me way off the highway and add to my travel time, and then I’ll get to my destination late, the boss firing me?

Working on art or anything creative is a constant series of decisions guided by imagination. Will this color of the dress wash out the skin tone? Is this the best angle to shoot this picture of an asparagus? A lot of these decisions we make without effort, until we slam into one and it totally stops us. Should the victim (in the story) die from a knife or falling off the roof? A minor chord here, or a major chord?

Pizza or Five Guys? Either? Both? Neither? Baring vegetarianism, the value of pizza or a burger is probably very matched. One isn’t clearly better than the other under most circumstances. We can stand stuck on the street for twenty minutes trying to figure this out.

Pizza or a nice chunk of cow poop? Pizza please!

Easy decision. One is really disgusting; we imagine ourselves getting sick, etc. The values of the two choices are so disparate.

What about horse poop or cow poop? Now the values are very similar, unless you have experience with this I don’t have. You might add a different valuation to the choice: which has the lesser amount?

Pizza or a burger... these are so close in terms of value. Paint it green or paint it blue?

When you’re stuck having to make a decision, and the choices all have the same value, you have to make a valueless decision. There is no way to weight one over the other; your imagination can’t distinguish different potential outcomes.

What do you do? In a valueless situation, it’s a coin toss. Pick one, or the other, and keep going. It’s more important to move than to sit there trying to puzzle it out.

Often, the decision has no big ramifications. Neither pizza or burger will change what happens next. The color can be blue, it can be green, it doesn’t matter. Minor chord is fine. Whatever, just keep the momentum up.

And there’s a bonus: if you make a bad decision, you’ll find out pretty quickly, and generally, you can back up and change your mind. Pizza place is crowded? Let’s get a burger instead. Good lord, that green is hideous. I’ll repaint it blue. The singer hates the minor chord. Ok, so we’ll make it major.

You don’t want to be stuck. It’s frustrating and it opens up space for all those voices your parents and your social experiences have installed in you. You know those voices—the ones that tell you that you suck. In a valueless situation, make a quick decision and keep moving. Fuck stuck.

*Numinous means arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring; also supernatural or appealing to the aesthetic sensibility. So, all the weird stuff you can’t explain, those emotional tingles when you encounter great art or a panoramic vista. Why catching a snowflake on your tongue makes you feel like the kid you no longer are.