Lesson Info
11. the cliche
Lessons
Look at Me
1seen, heard, loved
08:35 2knowing your butt
06:07 3why we're here
05:55 4your work is a gift
04:45 5a song to sing
03:31Love
6love (the assignment)
07:42love (the crit)
28:49Always the Other
8the ass divot
01:48 9like tarantino
04:30 10always the other (the assignment)
12:06 11the cliche
11:12 12always the other (the crit)
45:13Explodes in the Brain
13Explodes in the Brain
30:32Big Nothing Little Nothing
14big nothing little nothing (the assignment)
01:54 15don't fall in love
04:35 16big nothing little nothing (the crit)
53:23There Ain't No Rules
17ain't no rules
01:16 18yesterday, today, tomorrow
08:33Allow Freedom
19allow freedom
01:41 20show & tell
22:29Born (wildly) Creative
21born (wildly) creative
01:48Subscriber Bonus Lessons
22do the work
34:35 23show & tell (part 2)
16:04Lesson Info
the cliche
We need to, we need to um use the proper language. That's a cliche we used, need to use little images or marks or words or sounds that we all understand the problem with the cliche is it can be dangerous because we could be using them in the same way all the time or we could be using them in a non, not in, in, in an exciting way, but in a cliche way. Here we go. Second assignment. Uh But I wanted to talk about something just so we're all on the same page because it's an idea that's been floating around. We've mentioned, I've mentioned it once or twice. You guys are thinking about it. You guys are totally dealing with it. Um It's called the cliche, right? You guys know what the cliche is, right? It's just something that something that has been so habitual and so so much in our lives that it's become ordinary. I think that's a good way to put it ordinary. Um There are different words we use like boring or banal or vapid or hackneyed or Zhijun my favorite. Um But the cliche is part of our...
lives. It's what we live with and what as creators of any kind, even a dancer there are in a day in dance, there are cliche moves, right? Like if someone's, if someone's got an original dance and all of a sudden they do a few seconds of Michael Jackson, you're like, what? Right. There are, there, there are, there are, there's the cliche in everything. Um And the cliche is good. It's a tool like the alphabet is a cliche. The words we use are a cliche, right? They're just, uh, they're, they're acceptable reference points, but when we start to use them too much or over and over again, they become meaningless. We worked with love yesterday. That's a huge one. A big clumsy cliche, right? Um, but when we start to really think about it and investigate it and be curious about it, which is a big part of what we're doing here when you guys are gonna start putting, work up here and we're gonna start looking at the symbolism and the metaphors. Uh, and the myths that you're pulling from the precedents, right? Um We're gonna start getting into the cliche and when we get into the cliche, we realize that the cliche is not just the marks that we leave on a paper, but there's cliches in our lives. I live in a small town in Texas. There are cliches about how one lives here. Right. There are cliches about Texas aren't there? I mean, you come here and you meet some people who were outside of that cliche. You're like, or if you go to Paris and you're like, wow, I thought French people were different. Right. There are cliches and a lot of them are just like that. They're presumed or assumed. They don't come from a place of knowing. So we need to start in the, looking at the cliches in the larger picture. Right. Seeing the cliches in our lives, seeing the cliches and how we lead our lives where we come from, the houses that we live in the cars that we drive. You know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a designer. I'm a uh an aesthetic. I like beautiful things and I tend to drive around, looking at cars and going, that's drive, that's like, that's like driving a hearse, that person is driving a shoe box, you know what I mean? It's like you get kind of critical of things. You wanna, you wanna, you wanna shape the world, you wanna see it in a better, more beautiful place. I quite, I quite frankly want people to live better lives. I want them to have more beautiful things from their salt and pepper shakers, you know, all the way through to their relationships in relationships. There are cliches, right? Who wants a cliche relationship? I do. I do. Right. No, nobody, nobody. So it's really important that we start thinking about that here and that's how born creative extrapolates outward. Because when we start looking at it in our, in the things that we make, we can start looking at it in our lives, we can start looking at it in our work. We can start looking at it in our relationships, how we deal with other people, how we talk, how we create poetry or music, all these things. OK. So the cliche is really important and it's a, it's an important vehicle, an important tool, but it's super important that we change it, that we don't accept it all the time that we question it. You know, me as a writer, I'm constantly trying to, trying to put, I, like I've taken, I take uh spell check off of everything because I wanna spell things wrong, right? I want to spell things wrong. I want to use words in a wrong way because it's interesting to me, it's kind of jarring it. It, it brings up a question. There's this wonderful line um from uh uh Romeo and Juliet. OK. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet and I've had a number of different copies of the book and I bought one once because I, I couldn't find mine and I was going to class and I wanted to talk about Romeo and Juliet. So I bought a copy and it had a, it had a, a translation and it was for students. I didn't know this and I got it. And on the left hand was text on the right hand was translated fucking translating Romeo Shakespeare. I mean, I it's in English that's in English. I don't get it whatever, right? And I finally understood why they translated it. They translated it to make it fucking stupid to take all the beauty out of it, to take all the nuance to take all the subtlety out of it. Because Romeo says to Juliet in one part in one line, he wants to say how close we are, how much he loves them, how much he loves her. And he says, because you and I am one and grammatically that's incorrect. It should be you and I are. But he uses am a single being. That's what he's saying. He says we're so close. We am and I look on the other page and they ruined it. He said you and I are one. It ruins that subtlety and it ruins, it ruins the fact that his work was a gift and his work was a gift. If you were smart enough to find it, that's how he wrote. That's why they were different galleys, right? That's why they were the plebes, the, the, the groundlings, the masses and then the elite snobs he wrote for that. I'm going to leave a really smart joke here if you get it awesome if you don't, whatever. So the cliches are important, but it's important that we investigate them. It's important that we, we think about them. It's important that we play that we play with them because there's no rules. Right? Awesome. OK. Wanted to say that. Let's put our work up and get to it, shall we? Oh, I wanted to show you something. I wanted to share something here. We were talking yesterday about love. Right. And the cliche and the thing, and I found this, this has been sitting in the house like my house is a, uh, a gallery, a museum. Um, it's a museum for, um, five year olds. So, uh I had this, this has been sitting there and uh my daughter did this, Nova did. This is heart. And I watch when they work because they just make these decisions, they make these random decisions. You have no idea and you can't even ask them because they don't really have an idea. Right? And I love that. It's difficult for us to do that. It's impossible for me to do that. Right. People look at your work and they go, oh my God, it's so free. I'm like, oh my God. Are you kidding me? You should see the boss, you know, when she works. But I thought I saw this heart and I thought there's something, there's something interesting, you know, it's not red. She obviously knows the cliche, she knows love, but she's fucked with it a little bit. Right. There's something like blue. The cliche of blue is not happy, right? Cliche of blue. You're blue. I'm sad. Right. There's the, uh, cold. There's, there's a duality. So there's this thing that she did with this blue and this red, which is kind of interesting. And I remember a similar moment when, um, with my niece a number of years ago, like she gave me a, uh, a card. Um, uh, I was gonna show up at their house. I rode my, rode my motorcycle up to Buffalo and I was gonna see them and she made a, she made a car to show me that she loved me. And she knew this, she knew that that's love. And then she also knew this, this part of love, right? That um so what she did was that she had all these hearts, four of them and an arrow going through them to show me how much she loved me. And I thought that was pretty freaking fascinating because she knew that meant love. Well, this obviously means more, write more in the introduction to a book called um Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It's a, it's an instruction, instructional book for writers, right? And in the beginning her, she has a, she has a son who was, I think, you know, five or seven at the time and his name was Sam. And she said the other day, Sam told me that he loved me. 10 tyrannosaurus Rexes on mountain tops. And I love him the same. So here's a seven year old trying to tell his mom I mean, you've been there. It's like I love you this much. I love you this much, this, this finger that wall to that no outside. Like you're trying to express the hugeness of your love. And he chose the biggest thing. He could think of a tyrannosaurus rex and put it in the highest and then multiplied it by 10. The biggest number he could think of just to express love. Right. That's fascinating.
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Ratings and Reviews
Richard Lynch
I really enjoyed the frank style that the class was delivered. Jealous of the 4 students who were in person. I work as an Aerospace engineer and am trying to find a way to relearn to be creative. This class and the exercises made me think and I have noticed that I enjoy taking different perspectives during boring meetings and drawing doodles that make me smile. Unexpectedly, my coworkers have said my work has improved lately. I think because I have become more open to possibilities outside of the tried and true.
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