Doubt and Inspiration

Hey there blog readers,

I had a bit of inspiration tonight. After a long day, during which I went through approximately a ream of paper making completely unusable sketches--yes, unusable--I finally had a breakthrough on a story I've been working on. The manuscript clicked and the sketches started to make sense.

It felt a little like this:

And then, after a day of not getting things done and a long evening of productive work, I took a break to scan facebook (grooooan, I know) and listened to this:

 

It really struck a chord. 

It's Ira Glass (of This American Life fame, and if you've never heard of Ira or This American Life, stop right now and get thee to the website, browse the vault, and subscribe to the free podcast in the iTunes store this instant... I promise you won't regret it)... ahem, Ira Glass talking about people who tell stories and who do creative things. It really struck a chord. We all experience doubt about our choices, our careers, and the things we make, and in the  process of learning, we all make things that fall short and disappoint us. But, as Ira says so well, the best thing to do is to keep working, to keep at it, and to fight through it.

It feels good to look back at the day knowing that though the first stack of sketches wasn't what I had hoped for, I couldn't have produced tonight's drawings without all of that work.