A few weeks ago, I said to a friend: “I haven’t had a single coherent thought in years.” 

When I said it, I meant the comment as ironic and self-deprecating, not to be taken seriously or to linger in the conversation for more than a few seconds. But for some reason, it’s stuck in my mind, and the more I think about it, the more I worry I might have been right. I say that I write (and occasionally, if I am feeling bold, I say that I am a writer), but really, most of the time I spend ‘writing’ is time spent fiddling with existing work, shifting things around, trying a new word here or there, but never really making something new. Whenever I discuss writing with others, I feel like I’m describing a process in the past tense: ‘I used to do this,’ or ‘I would always try to make it feel this way.’ 

When I’m procrastinating or bored, I watch a lot of short films, especially student short films. Apart from being helpful instruction for future personal projects and often very entertaining in their own right, there’s a particular kind of janky sincerity about student filmmaking that’s uniquely appealing. These shorts are often the first tentative gestures of creative expression, swirling thoughts and ideas being pulled into a sort of order, unsteady, speaking with a voice struggling to be heard through the cliches that need to be sorted out organically with time. Often, when watching the shorts that now-successful filmmakers made at school or with a few friends over a weekend, you can see glimmers of what they would go on to create. 

One of Martin Scorsese’s first films (not to set the bar too high off the bat) was just him sitting down and interviewing his parents for 40 minutes. Right there, in the gritty footage of a pokey New York City apartment, is the blueprint for the paradoxical blunt sensitivity that Scorsese paints like no one else. Watching amateur short films feels like brushing dirt from a historical artefact; they allow you to discover stories and context beyond what the object itself tells. 

Not that every short film is good, or even competent. For every short film made by one of the most talented directors in the history of cinema, there are an uncountable number of films that are instantly forgettable, trite, and even annoying. But even atrocious shorts can recommend themselves on the basis that they made it out of the filmmaker’s head and onto the screen. For every one of those films, there are probably a thousand more that never made it that far. 

What I’m getting at by all this is that I think there’s a lot of value to be found in amateur art, not just as the person making the art but as a viewer. They recommend a method of creative engagement that is more compassionate to the one we instinctively extend towards movies we see at the cinema, one that examines potential and not failure. It encourages me to push back against my instincts that everything I make has to be profound and perfect. It is enough to have made something that didn’t exist in the world beforehand. When I watch a film made with access to the same resources I do, their various amateurisms reassure instead of discourage.

Here’s another thing I watch a lot, and of which I carry a much less favourable opinion: filmmaking tutorials on YouTube. A necessary evil if I want to learn how to use DaVinci Resolve, but one that always leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. All these videos teach is how to emulate and reproduce. A video titled ‘How to make your shots look cinematic’ can’t possibly do what it says, because ‘cinematic’ isn’t really a specific visual style. 

But worse, it actively misleads us about where art’s real pleasure and importance come from. Teal/orange colour grading and camera lens recommendations can only get you so far. What gets me about these videos is how cynical they are about why people might want to be creative. Or rather, that they reflect a broader trend towards artistic commodification that makes me deeply uncomfortable. These videos don’t help people to tell stories; they teach them how to make content. (Content, that awful, awful word I have started to hate more than is perhaps reasonable. It is simultaneously meaningless and yet all-encompassing, a tool of destructive generalisation that reduces all the work to which it subjects itself down to something with the sole purpose of filling a gap where profit can be made. The phrase ‘content creation’ is a bitter oxymoron. If your goal is to make content, chances are you won’t end up with anything new.) When it comes to filmmaking, as with writing, there’s absolutely value in attempting to mimic a certain style. The problems start when that emulation is framed as the end of the road. Once you have achieved the elusive ‘cinematic look’ (once you have bought the expensive camera lens and lighting setup), what happens next? A film can be composed of a hundred beautifully considered images that are completely empty and which mean nothing. 

That, I think, must be the reason why I’ve started to become hesitant to make anything new. It’s every creative’s nightmare to earnestly pour your whole self into a piece of art, only to find that it’s instantly forgotten, or worse, reviled. How to cope? Films, books, and music are churned out, then chewed and spat out within weeks or months. It’s hard to attempt originality in good faith when the only things we see that gain any traction are recycled pictures of the same old; it’s even more difficult to see the things you create as having any sort of impact when it feels like it’s impossible for cultural longevity to attach itself to anything. Part of the answer is probably spending less time on YouTube, but I think I also need to think about the end goal of creative endeavour through a more charitable lens. I want to be able to make crappy writing and film without being self-conscious. We are all under the same stifling pressure to turn any inkling of creative energy into a product that can support our careers, or change the world. I don’t want to make bad art, but I’ve got to stop being afraid of the growing pains.