Oh, my standards are slowly normalizing, womb@.
The most important thing in my life in Los Angeles, the piece of information that has made my time in Hollywood vitally useful to me, no matter what else I do in this life, no matter where else I go is that...
If you're rich and/or famous too young, no matter how good the one or two creative endeavours you had in you to get you there... that's where you'll peak. That's where you'll stop. That's where you'll start either doing the same thing over and over and over again or else burn out completely.
The moment you become rich and/or famous is the moment where you stop creatively growing in all the ways that matter, okay?
Because suddenly you're not a normal person anymore, you're not a real person anymore, you live outside of all the things that make the other 5,999,000 of us tick and function and laugh and cry and dream.
You're cut off from all those things. All you've got to say about the Real Human Experience is whatever you built up in your system before you graduated into godhood. Even if you're still a good person, even if you try hard not to be, you're suddenly isolated from the really real world and you have to be... or else you'd be beset upon by beggars until your death.
So if you're 23 and you're suddenly a Star... you won't have lived much real life and you'll probably only have one or two fresh ideas about the real world of living.
After that, you'll either have to write variations on those stories over and over again or... write about being rich and famous and really only have useful things to say to the million or less gods and monsters that walk the Earth amoungst us.
And you know what?
Most of those people aren't looking for outside advice anymore.
So you probably won't sell anymore tickets or books or CDs or whatever creating for those people.
This is what Hollywood'll teach you pretty quickly. And I am thankful for that.
The longer that I thrash and struggle and languish and go mad, the more I'll be building up actual things to say and write about, in case I ever win that fuckin' lottery, literally or figuratively.
But with my friend, all that I'm saying is...
She's such a good writer and she hasn't even TRIED to like... send some poems to a journal or even anything like that. She won't even play her music out in public, despite being a brilliant lyric writer, a beautiful singer, a decent tunewriter and a decent guitarist.
I'm not saying you have to be a success by that point but...
There's something unnerving about not even trying, especially when it's not like... oh, y'know... she's also great at something else that she loves and that's been her vocation for thus far for whatever. She's an amazing writer and a really good singer and those are the only things she's good at that she also enjoys.
I dunno.
It's one thing where, like, my girlfriend for example. She's a brilliant costumer but she hates the business that comes along with costuming, the industry and the backstabbing and all that... so she's a teacher, which she's also very good at and enjoys doing more.
Or my brother who's a brilliant guitarist but he's also a brilliant laboratory scientist and... being a laboratory scientist doesn't involve the kind of travel that he hates so... that's what he does.
These are fine things. These are reasonable choices.
But I, for one, know that the only thing I've ever been good at is making up crazy shit and putting it into words. This is pretty much all I know how to do.
And I've been trying to figure out how to make my living doing it for a good five years now.
I dunno.
I'm rambling now.
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Topic: Need some feedback. (Read 13875 times)