When I attend the Jazz Club on a Wednesday night, I order the same drink and the same meal. After my first four or five visits, the bar tender asked me if I wanted “The Usual”.

There’s something nice about “The Usual”. To be able to order “The Usual” means that someone else out there in the world knows you exist, remembers you, and knows what you like, even if it’s in the most narrow sense like a favourite drink or meal. This other person knows a small piece of you and what brings you pleasure.

Of course, the usual can also impose artificial limits on us, limits that form ruts, habits, and assumptions that, for whatever reason, encourage us to act automatically, often without interrogating whether what we want this particular time might be something… unusual.

You could prompt a generative AI service to make you an image, or you can prompt yourself.

I think that most people who don’t draw assume that a drawing begins with a clear vision or image of what’s in one’s mind. The drawer simply takes that well-formed image out of their mind and commits it to paper. But, in reality, a drawing is a series of prompts. I make one mark, I analyse it for shape, colour and quality, then I make another mark in response to the first one. Then I make a third one based on the relationship between the two marks that now exist. And so on.

Instead of helping to build a more robust neural network and pattern recognition system for a large tech company, the simple act of drawing builds my neural networks and pattern recognition skills. In fact, making anything at all will do it.

A cook adjusts the flavour of a dish as they go – season, taste, assess, respond. The more often you do it, the better you get at recognising the how much salt is too much and in what context. We build a ‘model’ of how to cook.

A jazz musician is constantly being prompted at rapid speed by the sounds they make, and the sounds made by their band, to help them generate an idea of what notes to play next. A gardener learns how to care for their plants through repetition, trial and error. Too much water this year, not enough fertiliser, I planted it too close to the pond etc. We take action, we receive a reaction, then we in turn react to that.

By prompting ourselves with stuff that’s based in the physical world like music, art, and the nature, we build our own neural pathways: our sense of touch, taste, smell, feel, and sight. And, just like when we prompt a large language model, chances are our response will often be imperfect (too much salt, too much potash, a pencil line or music note in the wrong place). But, what any failed prompt does is help clarify our thinking and get us even more in touch with our senses. What we end up with is a life and that is glorious.

It’s what we say when we never saw it coming: it came outta nowhere. The truck that speeds through the intersection, the flowers from a colleague you thought was platonic at work, the death of someone ‘taken too soon’, the proposal on the beach. Surprise can be devastating, alarming, joyful, and rapturous. It is, in many ways, deeply human because we are narrative creatures.

Surprise is a function of the narratives we build for ourselves about ourselves. Whether we know it or not, we’re all writing future chapters of our story based on the life we’ve lived so far. We say things like, “At 65, I’ll retire and travel the world.” Or, “At 35, I’ll have a husband and child.” Or, “In 3 years time, I’ll be Vice President of my company.” Or, “I’m getting a cricket bat for Christmas from Santa.”

Writing the future helps us understand where we are now and also provides something to look forward to. In some cases, these expectations can give us a reason for doing what we do today: I’ll drink that green smoothie now so I’m more prepared to run a marathon in 6 months time.

But our story is not ours alone to write. The truck that speeds through the intersection, someone taken too soon, the flowers from a colleague, the marriage proposal; these are all actions taken by others that necessitate the re-writing of our own story; a story that needs to be re-written to accommodate the pain or joy that ‘came outta nowhere’.

Grief, it seems, is a response to this narrative re-direction. We were ‘supposed’ to be travelling the world with a loved one in retirement but now we find ourselves alone because of that truck at the intersection that ‘took her too soon’. That’s not the way it was supposed to be. Now what do I do?

Thinking about our futures as unwritten stories may then, be helpful in dealing with those surprises in life: My life is a loose plot, but I wonder where the supporting characters of my story will take me. And yes, those paths carved into our story by others may mean that the path we saw for ourselves is no longer available to us, but that doesn’t make the story worse, just different. We still get to take the next step, to write the next page, to approach the future curiously – I wonder what will happen to this person, me, next.

I’ve recently been overwhelmed by lots of small tasks. Getting back to people about workshops, responding to feedback about art for a book, doing various small home maintenance tasks and so on. These ‘bits’ of life shrapnel have been orbiting my brain for a while but each have never felt important enough to pluck them out of orbit and get them done. Always de-prioritised in favour of bigger things: new ideas, materials and art media to explore.

So, I made a list. Like a beachcomber collecting shells, I gathered all the disparate bits, put them in a line, and ticked them off, one at a time. And sure enough, the progress felt good. Lists work. I should make the more often.

I think that most people would describe a film by Quentin Dupieux as ‘weird’. I find them almost impossible to describe to someone else to a person unfamiliar with his work; someone who expects a ‘normal’ story.

Mr Dupieux’s films haven’t smashed box office records and most of them haven’t had a cinematic release here in Australia. Yet, they are made and I love them because they help me see and think differently about the world.

A Quentin Dupieux film hasn’t yet made anyone a billionaire and most people in the world wouldn’t have seen them. Of those that have seen them, most probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them or even ‘understand’ them. With that kind of expected response, why bother making them at all?

So, Dupieux could just dream up the ideas but never take the next step to make the films he makes because it would all just be too hard, to sell the idea and then to fund it. But, one of the lessons from Dupieux films is that it’s not always about commerce. It’s about saying something to someone else by working out what you think and feel through whatever medium helps you. Chances are if that process helps you, it might help someone else. Not everyone. But someone.

No matter how obscure or weird, if Quentin Dupieux follows through with ideas, maybe I should to. Like him, if I do it for long enough, some people, the right people, will probably notice and may even enjoy them.

It’s difficult to play a sport or a board game without rules; guides for things you can and can’t do, time limits, a definition of what’s in and out of bounds. These limits make the game or sport fun to play. The same goes with creative work.

I do my best work when I’m bound by rules: a deadline, a limited set of materials, a limited colour palette, a limited surface on which to create. All of these limits are useful boundaries that help guide and inform the choices about what I make and why.

You’d think that, to have more energy for creative work, one would need to conserve or ‘save it up’ from other areas of life. An ‘easy’ or ‘boring’ day job should mean that when I clock off at 5pm, I’m raring to go with creative energy for my own projects. But it doesn’t work that way.

It’s a bit like running a 40km marathon. I’m not more likely to run one well if, in preparation, I sat on the couch to conserve my energy for a week. I need to work up to it with consistent and routine work.

What my creative work seems to need is something comfortably uncomfortable. A day job that is stimulating, intellectual, and collaborative but with little emotional labour. This combination keeps my brain and heart warm so that when ‘personal’ time arrives, I’m more likely to be able to run the marathon it takes to make great art because I’ve already been on a slow jog.

I am growing fonder of in-person energy; that physical, three-dimensional, multi-sensory experience of another person. I find that I’m walking away from 1:1 encounters with more energy and enthusiasm for myself and my art practice. It doesn’t matter if I’ve been helped or if I’m the one who did the helping, it’s the same. I walk away ‘better’, more ‘full’. It’s the complete opposite feeling I have when I interact with someone online. So why would I do the latter?

Calling something ‘done’ is difficult. When I embark on a new art project, I have a loose idea of what ‘done’ could be. But there’s no specific, measurable, or consistent criteria.

One one hand, ambiguity is necessary because it provides space for natural curiosity that needs to be present in the process of making. Ambiguity allows discovery.

On the other hand, infinite discovery without closure leaves me with a feeling of stagnation, incompleteness, of circling but never coming down to land. That’s tiring.

Calling something ‘done’ means accepting, most often, imperfection. When something is done, it’s often not as good as I imagined it would be. It almost always never fully scratches the itch I had that made me begin the work in the first place.

But calling something ‘done’ gives me permission. Permission to stop, rest, come up for air, reflect, or learn something about myself and my work that I didn’t know before. It’s with *that* that I become better positioned to go on my next discovery; to further, deeper, and more interesting places than before.

There seems to be two ways I make marks. The first way is ‘competently’. This involves multiple pencil sketches to mould/sculpt a drawing to get it where I want it to be. The lines are sketchy, the paper is often rubbed raw with eraser marks, but the lines are where I imagined them to be. It also means there is often a ‘stiffness’ in the drawing.

The second way of approaching mark making is ‘confidently’. A single stroke, no erasing, just a mark on a page. If that mark lands where I intend it to, great! But it often doesn’t. Instead of reaching for the eraser, the process becomes more about how I react to that mark. With a ‘confident’ approach, the next mark needs to be one made in relation to what’s already on the page because it’s no longer about what I can see in my head, it’s only about what’s on the page.

The ‘confident’ approach means a ‘less accurate’ drawing compared to what I imagined it to be but it also means a more free/open/unpredictable drawing and for me, a more interesting one.

Perhaps if I spend more time practicing confident lines over competent ones, the confident ones may increasingly land where I intend them to and the best of both worlds will appear on the page.