Of what ben­e­fit is knowl­edge? That depends on how well one is able to apply it. We can cer­tainly know a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean we are always able, or even will­ing, to prop­erly apply that knowl­edge when called upon. We may know that eat­ing cer­tain foods can trig­ger aller­gic reac­tions but if we are not moti­vated to act upon that knowl­edge we still eat them — and suf­fer the consequences.

In order for knowl­edge to be truly valu­able it has to become part of our moti­va­tion. It has to trickle down from the brain to the heart, so to speak. Only then will we react in accor­dance with that knowledge.

I real­ized this myself once more. There are things I’ve posted in the past talk­ing about what inspires and moti­vates me to write, only to walk away and return to my writer’s block state of mind. We all tend to some­times look in all the wrong places, maybe because it seems to be eas­ier over there, or we don’t really believe what we know to be true or achiev­able. I’ve known since child­hood that the one and only thing that truly inspires me and moti­vates me to write, more pre­cisely write sto­ries, is music. I know that I learned walk­ing by music, my father turn­ing the bal­ance knob on his stereo and lit­tle me fol­low­ing “the sound of music” from one speaker to the other (they stood sev­eral feet apart). I know my mother was and still is a clas­si­cal music expert and she exposed me to the greats of old from an early child­hood on. I’ve been list­ing to them ever since I can think. And as I grew older I didn’t sim­ply buy music and let it play in the back­ground, no, I sat down, 12/13 years old, and delib­er­ately lis­tened to a whole album, mak­ing out all the nuances while all the while dream­ing, trav­el­ing off to far away fan­tas­tic lands. Van­ge­lis, Jean Michel Jarre, Kitaro, Tan­ger­ine Dream, John Williams, Jerry Gold­smith — all of them and many more have taken me on some truly fan­tas­tic journeys.

But it’s not just lis­ten­ing, it’s also very much play­ing myself. While I don’t mas­ter any par­tic­u­lar instru­ment, I can play a bit piano and flute and cer­tainly key­board, I truly enjoy play­ing with sounds and melodies (I am able to read notes though). I’ve been “com­pos­ing” for years, decades at this point in my life. And with that music came the sto­ries: the title theme to a Sci Fi epic I once wanted to write, lit­tle parts for a fan­tas­ti­cal musi­cal, pieces of music for spy thrillers. And then, one day, it took on much more con­crete forms.

In 2006 I’ve pub­lished “Infil­tra­tor — A Music­novel”. It’s a nine track album, a sound­track to an imag­i­nary futur­is­tic thriller. The music inspired the story. None of the tracks were cre­ated delib­er­ately, they were all a result of the music sim­ply com­ing to me. And as I cre­ated track after track I began see­ing a pat­tern and ulti­mately arranged it all into a story of a spe­cial agent uncov­er­ing a devi­ous threat. I cre­ated an out­line of each track’s events. And then I got curi­ous. I signed up with var­i­ous indie music sites and ser­vices pro­mot­ing the album (which I actu­ally made avail­able as a self-published CD). I got good air­play on col­lege radio and even a few local radio sta­tions, had two of my tracks included on a com­pi­la­tion CD in Asia and even made 3^rd place in the dance cat­e­gory in the 14^th Bill­board World Song­writ­ing Con­test a few years back. I felt truly con­nected to the one thing that inspires me the most. And then I aban­doned it.

It wasn’t because I was afraid of any­thing, the feed­back I had received was extremely pos­i­tive, I’ve had the founder of world famous Ger­man elec­tron­ica group Tan­ger­ine Dream com­mend­ing me on my bud­ding music. I received a very pos­i­tive review by a web­site ded­i­cated to sound­tracks only — quite a feat since “Infil­tra­tor” isn’t truly a sound­track. No, it cer­tainly wasn’t fear. I sim­ply felt over­whelmed, not with suc­cess, it was mod­er­ate, but with the shear amount of work involved in pro­mot­ing my music. I had joined many web­sites, includ­ing the infa­mous MySpace, made some nice con­tacts but ulti­mately felt dis­il­lu­sioned. I came up with the term “Lemon­ade Stand Syn­drome” or LSS for short. What is LSS? Imag­ine two kids sell­ing lemon­ade but doing it where no one can find them. After a while they start sell­ing it to each other. Even­tu­ally all the lemon­ade is gone and the same buck has been passed back and forth. Very dis­ap­point­ing, not to men­tion dev­as­tat­ing to their hum­ble busi­ness. On every site I joined the result was the same: we were all musi­cians look­ing for expo­sure and sim­ply becom­ing each oth­ers’ “fans” with­out ever accom­plish­ing the rea­son for join­ing in the first place — find­ing our audi­ence (aside from the pos­i­tive effect of mak­ing some friends with like minded musi­cians). More than that, all of these sites charge musi­cians to use their ser­vices, most of them being rather use­less truth be told. Thus I closed account after account until I felt like I had never made much progress.

I am cer­tainly not one to be eas­ily dis­cour­aged. But this felt dif­fer­ent. I began to think that being inde­pen­dent was not such a good idea after all. In addi­tion I’ve always been rather shy about my own work, while I can be very sup­port­ive of other people’s work, and all this self pro­mo­tion felt sim­ply odd, des­per­ate in a sense.

The rea­son I am talk­ing about this expe­ri­ence is that I know there are many cre­atives out there who share sim­i­lar feel­ings. Some­times we set out explor­ing, won­der­ing what might be around the next cor­ner, only to find our­selves in an envi­ron­ment that’s not excit­ing at all any­more and we may have to back track and find the path we were orig­i­nally on. The promise of the web is inde­pen­dence from estab­lished struc­tures, like pub­lish­ers, by seem­ingly empow­er­ing us to do it all on our own. And that’s where it gets dif­fi­cult. Because we can’t do it all on our own. The more time we spend on pro­mot­ing our­selves the less time we have to be cre­ative. There is lim­ited time each day and the more time I spend on one task the less I have to spend on another. We are, indeed, not inde­pen­dent at all, we depend on oth­ers. We need peo­ple to do the things we sim­ply don’t have the time or energy to do. We need sup­port. We even need endorse­ment. It feels great to be writ­ten about on the web but it feels even bet­ter to be men­tioned in or on a respected mag­a­zine or site or to be rec­om­mended by a favorite artist of ours.

To recap briefly and to con­nect the dots back to the begin­ning of the post, need­ing to apply knowl­edge for it to be truly valu­able, I have acquired knowl­edge not only of what I am truly pas­sion­ate about but also how one can exude a lot of time and energy on the wrong approach to share that pas­sion. Now I need to ensure I apply that knowl­edge and not repeat past errors while also apply­ing the knowl­edge that, if I want to write sto­ries I need to com­pose music first. Thus I am open to sug­ges­tions — and expe­ri­ences. How has your cre­ative pro­gres­sions been on the web? Please feel free to share your story in the com­ments or point me to your post.

This post was in part moti­vated by Diana Baur’s post titled “the sim­ple art of inter­de­pen­dence” and I highly rec­om­mend read­ing it. My wife Holly Becker also wrote some­thing sim­i­lar a few years back.

And at the very end of this post, reluc­tantly so due to the odd feel­ing asso­ci­ated, I do like to point to my music being avail­able on iTunes and Ama­zon.