HAVING a deadline is vital for any creative endeavour. This might not necessarily be what you may associate with “creativity”, especially how “creativity” and “the arts” have been marketed and promoted in the imagination and popular media.

There is still a big gaping disconnect on how the creative arts operates in the present capitalist world we live in and the romanticised history and perception of what is involved.

It is probably useless and instructive to put on a pragmatic proverbial cap to think clearly on how you may pursue a fulfilling but yet also intense pursuit.

To the general public, people who pursue something creative are assumed to be driven by some limitless “passion” and that the fact these individuals are equally imbued with such passionate drives and creative gifts or talents is something almost mystical, unattainable to the regular person.

As someone who has been dabbling in the creative arts for a while now, I disagree with this notion. I personally believe everyone has the capacity to be “creative” and “passionate” in equal measures – human beings are essentially creative problem-solving beings.

Our industriousness as a social characteristic and the ensuing cultures that emerge are testaments to how human beings challenge nature and other adversities in order to fulfil something greater than our finite physical selves.

These are often the romanticised ideals we see represented and embodied in the discourse of sports and the arts – and to a certain degree also in the “rags-to-riches” trope of entrepreneurial success stories.

While all of these are loaded with ideological underpinnings, it’s not what I want to share for the time being: I’m interested in exploring how the concept of “deadline” can be used as a creative tool.

While your access to creative pursuits is often predetermined by broader variables, such as social class and access, which can’t be adjusted in the present moment, the concept of time and how finite it is, is important to give you a sense of accomplishment.

One misconception often impeding the modern person is the idea of how “useful” their creative pursuits can be and how they may be leveraged to improve their present economic standing.

Having this though alone is already a speedbump in your pursuit of the creative: let go of such a sense of utility for the creativity serves itself – everything else is a bonus.

Once you have this frame of mind, creativity may manifest itself in some form or another – even the ability to fool yourself it is an act of creativity if it allows you to problem-solve a situation or bad habit you have.

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with my favourite Malaysian singer-songwriter and hero Rafique Rashid about a decade plus ago – we were talking about song writing, the album format, and the trappings of the recording process.

As someone who subscribes to the “first thought, best thought” school of song writing and had haphazardly released a bunch of homemade cassette albums on my own in my early 20s, I asked him about why hasn’t he recorded and released an “official” album (he had shared some recordings of his with other musicians but these were strictly not for public release), he answered succinctly: ‘What if the songs are never finished?’

It was profound answer that got me thinking about my own pursuit but one that I could reason with myself – recorded songs to me were just documents of the version of the song at the time of recording, nothing more nothing less.

Also, being from the underground music scene and subscribing to the do-it-yourself ethos, every performance or gig is an opportunity to share or sell my songs and these often times were embodied in a physical form: a recorded album or EP.

Every gig was a deadline to produce something, even in its unvarnished and rough form, for the pursuit itself was the point – not necessarily the glory of the product.

I’m not saying bands and musicians in the underground music community produced substandard and half-cooked works – it’s far from that and in fact of greater variety than mainstream artists as the ecosystem of underground music meaning making “market” also includes other merchandise, such as band T-shirts, badges, and stickers (sometimes even a barbecue).

A deadline should be treated with excitement and cherished for that is the agreed date in which you will give birth to your creative work and unleash it into the big bad world – of course, the type of deadlines I’m talking about here are ones which you yourself impose on yourself in order to give your creative pursuit a finite timeline.

It takes time and practice to actually know how you personally react to self-imposed deadlines and this time and practice are in itself a creative endeavour because it involves a sense of self-improvement without resorting to the usual binging of self-help books or YouTube videos.

To be passionate is to lose yourself and surrender to the moment and to do so one needs to self-insulate yourself from the noise that is this world – but give yourself a deadline or else you may not find a way out of it and that would defeat the entire purpose.

Detach the usual association of the word “deadline” from the office and work – maybe the word “dead” is distasteful to you, it’s OK to change it but don’t fluff it too much: it must have a sense of impending end for it to work. A negotiable deadline is cheating – they are of the parlance of politicians, not artists.

So, what are you? You have until the end of each day to decide. Don’t cheat. – March 19, 2021.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.