Advice

Giving advice about creativity is rarely useful. No one knows the context of your life or what you want any better than yourself, and people tend to only follow advice when they agree with it anyway. What I find most people really need instead is encouragement or new perspectives to reflect on.

Another drawback to advice is that it’s often presented as how to do something. How do I break into the industry, how do I write a screenplay, how do I become a better actor? When you are meant to be a creative person, looking up how to do something makes a copy. Everyone who looks up how to do a particular thing in a particular way are all drowning out each other. It is a loss of the only thing that really offers a unique edge: you.

Figuring out your path is a rite of passage that reveals who you are, sometimes to yourself as well. A lot of people don’t truly know what they want, and they will lie to themselves about it if that helps avoid the unknown. In fact, they’ll look anywhere else except inside themselves with honest eyes. Some fear others will judge them negatively for what they want, or they downright don’t think they are allowed to want a certain path. This can make them sanitize their own life goals to conform.

The illusion that rules exist drains more originality than everything else, though it’s hardly advice to say you should be yourself.

Lessons

Technical and practical advice, on the other hand, are really lessons. That’s what teaching is for. Learning how shadows work when you draw, or which lens does what on a camera when you film, you don’t need advice for that, but teachers, books, and a heap of trial and error. It’s absolutely possible to make a film without knowing about lenses, dollies, and what different shots are called, but they’re tools that can help avoid friction and potentially save time.

Just remember people have built sturdy houses without using nails. Whether that’s worth the hassle or concession is a personal choice.

For writers it’s useful to format a screenplay according to the standard, because that way everyone who will work with it has an inherent familiarity even if formatting could be adjusted before production began. A person who throws away a good story because it had the wrong margin size is an idiot, but there is also no point in creating friction that has nothing to do with the work. What you actually write, though, is entirely yours. No one is forcing your hand to be exciting in the first ten pages. Do what you feel is right. Spend more time to set up a slower burn if that’s what you want. People reject great works and will reject yours. If no one wants it, make it. You are unlikely to create the worst movie ever.

Just make sure it’s yours.

The obsession with making something a lot of others might want instead of what you want is not productive. That shallow feeling a lot of works have when you sit through a film, a few episodes, a book, and so on, it’s a lack of vision. People are willing to forgive the occasional cheesy effect, a line that didn’t land well, or even a lower production quality altogether, as long as there is a vision they can connect with, but they can’t always get over the hollow feeling that appears when things have no soul.

One Piece of Advice

Instead of avoiding the question completely I have one concrete piece of advice for creative people:

Don’t say no to yourself, make it other people’s job to reject you.

Acting, writing, and film making in general has a lot of rejection built in already. Other fields, too. There’s no reason for you to filter yourself out of contention. Take one more to the chin and try to do the thing instead of staying away. Apply for the job that seems like a reach. Ask for the role. Call that manager and find out if their actress wants to do your film on a shoestring budget.

Creatively speaking, no is a road sign that means do it some other way, find someone else, find an open window. It doesn’t mean you should stop. Try the front door first, but see a string of “no” replies as things that have been crossed off your to-do list instead of as a terror to avoid.

It’s old wisdom and still true: the people who made it are all among those who kept going, and most of them did it their way.