The five ingredients for uniqueness in art

Respecting the intricate relationship between commercial viability and the process of artistic creation.

Neve Campbell is acting her ass off.

That was the unadorned thought I had watching Scream this Halloween (a tier one Halloween watch we can’t go a year without).

That’s not to say I think her a great actress, moreso that she left it all out there. Just like the rest of the cast (and writers) of that film, she didn’t pull her punches. Without her performance, would I watch Scream (at least the original) ten times per decade?

It’s hard to say.

But that performance struck a chord and got me thinking about the ingredients for creating something unique. Whether that’s unique for ourselves or commercially (a big distinction behind the curtain of artistic endeavor).

Deep down, I think there’s a case to be made that uniqueness is at the core of art, but I’m more interested in the foundational task of creating something that someone else can’t. Which is an easy thought in principal, but in practice involves:

• Abandoning the labels of good and bad

• Keeping commercial viability at arm’s length

• A strongly cultivated set of micro-habits while creating

Let’s start with the fact that…

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There’s no absolute good

There is commercially viable and not commercially viable, but good versus bad is not a factor in it. And while I think trying to find an absolute form of good and bad is detrimental to me as a creator, there are **helpful proxies for it:

• Work I’m proud of versus work I’m not

• Work that’s authentic (to me) and work that’s not

• Work that feels complete versus work that doesn’t

And whatever our medium, those are always spectrums we can operate on (and ones that are a hell of a lot more meaningful than good or bad). But whatever one we operate on deeply impacts our own sense of better or worse.

So deeply in fact, that this spectrum becomes the ONLY factor in whether a piece of work succeeds or fails in our mind. Unless we also think in terms of commercial viability.

**You’ll notice the concept of taste is absent. I consider taste a factor of consuming, not creation. And the further we intricate taste into creation is the more we chip away at uniqueness.

When we choose to think in terms of commercial viability

Not everyone who creates chooses to think in terms of commercial viability. But anyone who hopes to benefit off their works does.

Like an author does when they wade into the world of publishing, self or otherwise. Or a band does the second they upload a track to Spotify. It doesn’t have to be money. It could be for visibility. It could be for notoriety. It could be the sake of the challenge.

But when we do choose to think of it, commercial viability presents a second spectrum on which we’re forced to think about our art.

And when we add this to our adopted sense of good or bad, it’s not just a spectrum anymore. If you create for ANY OTHER REASON in addition to commercial viability, then your landscape for evaluation is a grid, not a spectrum.

What we create lives not only across a sense of good and bad, but also across the spectrum of commercial viability. Because to think of our work as one dimensional (good or bad, commercially viable or not) is ignoring the deeper foundation of creating.

Do those exist who create simply in the vacuum of commercial viability? I bet there are. But odds are that’s not you. As a quick exercise to find out where you sit on this spectrum, pick all that are true for you:

1. I’d do anything to sell my work

2. I have a line I won’t cross to sell my work

3. I’m influenced by what is commercially viable

4. I make work whether I can sell it or not

If your only choice was number one or number four, you might not find this post all that helpful. If it was anything else, creativity operates on the aforementioned grid.

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Time and commercial viability

Okay, so there’s a grid. What of it?

Two things:

• Every creative choice we make can be viewed with a great context (but that’s not license to over-analyze)

• The fourth dimension of time comes into play as we seek to marry what meets our sense of good as well as commercially viable

Meaning, it’s all about the relationships. Wrangling commercial viability comes at a cost. And that cost is variable and optional.

We can make something more commercially viable while making it worse in our own eyes. We can make something that’s better in our eyes but that is less commercially viable.

But regardless we make choices. Those choices can be large choosing what story to work on next, or small, like choosing to go up a fourth or a fifth note to complete a melody. And in a best case scenario, the “viability” of a work is met and we can call the sum of our choices worthwhile. At worst, we wreck our respect or motivation for the entire endeavor.

In other words, these choices inform our perception of whether time was well spent or wasted, and in the long-term, our floor or ceiling of what we’re capable of creating.

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The case for uniqueness

The one thing that truly leaps off the grid of good/bad and commercially viable is uniqueness.

True uniqueness.

It’s a counterproductive notion, because the power brokers often defy it. They want what works. But what works can’t be manufactured.

A story about a supernatural place called with “Upside down” with the best that 80s soundtracks had to offer? You can’t manufacture that. A time-traveling soldier narrating us through his temporal crises as a result of his World War II psychological trauma. It doesn’t come out of the box.

What then, are the things required to make something unique. What are the ingredients?

Number one: Nobody would have made anything unique without being solely and gravitationally focused.

In other words, concentrated on one single thing. Not giving in to distraction and layering one action on top of another. All effort, little wasted. Nobody writes a line that echoes for decades or records a song that guts you emotionally while half-assing it. Say what you want about her, but Neve played the hell out of the role she was given. And if she were in any moment but the present, that just wouldn’t have been the case.

Second is leading with excitement, even when there’s fear (or especially when).

Imagine two circles (realms of possibility even). One is the most likely outcomes when we’re driven by excitement. When you approach ideas ready to run, ready to let them flourish. On the other side are the most likely outcomes when an idea is driven by fear. When we act on the impulse to not be bad (or worse). Which could also include being driven by comparison, where the more we don’t want to be something the more that we work it into existence. Which of those circles pushes your ideas to where you want them to be?

The third is full-on sprinting away from our self-protective instincts.

Maybe the only real sin in art is the sort of self-protection the kneecaps vulnerability. That tiny, quiet instinct that whispers “don’t make a fool of yourself” sands down edges. Every thing you’ve ever loved was made by someone who ignored that whisper. They looked stupid. Or too earnest or too intense or too into it. Trying to look “anything” operates on the same relativity where uniqueness suffocates.

Fourth is believing harder than the situation warrants.

Every act of creation is has, at its core, faith. Faith that you will (or even can) create something that you love even if it never loves you back. Which is doesn’t, because outside of self-esteem or confidence, how could it? Anybody can muster belief for a short period of time. But it takes a lot more than that to create something that lasts. It takes a well of worship, not just of an idea, but of what we’re capable of doing with it.

Lastly, seeing failure as fuel.

The odds that we’ll look back on every creative choice and call it a success or less than zero. Some things that start admirably will end up far less than, while some that look wild will be the strongest building blocks we could imagine. Why is this important? Because there is only one reliable pattern when it comes to creating:

We create → we judge → we evolve.

What that means for AI

And now, with AI layered into this equation, the ideas of creation (and uniqueness) might seem muddier. But the reality is, nothing in the grand scheme has changed:

• Our grid for good/bad and commercially viable

• Our time spent creating is still a factor in how well we can create

• Uniqueness is still a driving factor in commercial viability

Does that mean we shouldn’t find ways to use AI? No. But what is does mean is that we need to understand how the use AI impacts us.

The very nature of AI as we know it today is to connect rational and logical ideas. Two things that aren’t exactly the bed-fellows of uniqueness. And the further we let AI into the deepest levels of creation (character development, story design and lyric writing to name a few), the more we close the door on uniqueness.

And whether or not we admit, our use of AI can become a subconscious factor in our how we judge our work. As an author using it in ways that feel unnatural (or less human) is going to dampen the possibility of pride. And we can’t dampen pride without dampening meaning.

Similar can be said for our idea of what our craft actually is. If craft is emotional connection to a concept or work, replacing that with anything artificial will be an anchor upon how we rate it. And even when viewing craft as process, cheapening the process cheapens our perception of the byproduct (if not the byproduct as a whole).

And if artificiality isn’t a cheapening of the process, it’s hard to imagine what is.

Thanks for giving this one a read and until next time.

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