There’s nothing in the world as tempting as a good idea, and nothing nearly as fickle. I’ve followed the same pattern for years now: a project begins, but it won’t finish itself. I dive into theory, probing deep into what it means to make a certain kind of art, how its structure evolved, its genre - but I’m never fast enough. Before I learn how to complete the project, it slips away. Gone back to wherever ideas come from. They can flow so easily, but leave as quickly as they come.
So it repeats, and I find something new to fixate on - always learning, debatably improving. How many more failed projects before I’m fast enough to capitalize on inspiration? I don’t know.
“I’m not much of an artist”, I thought. Some people have the knack, and some don’t. Actually, that’s not quite true. I think everyone has the knack in different ways. My knack just isn’t the kind that lets me synthesize art out of feelings and memories like plants pull pure energy out of sunlight.
I knew this website was going to slip away from the very first day I started working on it. I could see my old habits flaring up: acting hastily, planning poorly, jumping into a process I didn’t fully understand.
“So be it,” I thought. “There’s always next time.”
Projects come easily, and they’re supposed to leave easily, too. This time, though, something was different. Something was wrong? Letting inspiration fade away was easy. It had never left me feeling so… empty before, so disappointed; how much of a failure was I to never finish anything at all?
I needed to keep going. I needed to understand. So, I threw myself into research. If I learned to pick apart every design element of a website, I’d know how to make mine. Upon finishing it, I would finally have something I could call my own.
Out of the 1.5 million websites Neocities hosts, there are probably tens of thousands of personal websites made by independent artists. You can browse them all randomly, it’s a great way to kill time… and more importantly, there’s plenty of data to analyse.
Most personal sites tend to have a common shape to them, the same kinds of pages:
- An introductory page that takes you to the main page. This serves as a front cover or prologue to the rest of the website. It sets tone.
- A main page, with links to everywhere else in the site. The main page doesn’t do much on its own, but it will sometimes hold webrings, status updates, a hit counter, it might even play background music.
- Any number of pages that showcase the creator’s art - paintings, music, poetry, you name it. It’s important to know that these pages almost always serve as portfolios for tangential art. You make something, then put it on your website, but you didn’t make it for the website.
- An about page, possibly with links to the creator’s social medias of choice.
- A Guestbook, a page where anybody who visits the site is welcome to write a message - whatever they sign is appended to a list of messages everyone can view. This is surprisingly common; it’s something of a tradition carried forward from Net 1.0.
- A personal blog talking about the author. It’s usually about life events, or media they’ve been consuming lately.
I can replicate these things. I’ll incorporate reader feedback. I’ll add comments to my next blog post. I’ll put so much effort into the main page, the page people will see the most, despite there being no real point to having a main page. It’s a formality more than anything. A page whose only purpose is to take you somewhere else-
“No,” I thought, “what am I doing? If I overthink these kinds of things, I could probably convince myself there’s no point in making any kind of page at all. If everybody has a front page, it must be the way to go. Maybe it’s time to step back and realign my priorities.”
I learned a lot about how to approach art from a book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but many of my own philosophies are entirely propped up by his writings. If you read it, you’ll get what I mean. One of the book’s underlying assertions is that although comics are a composite of two other art forms - the art of drawing and the art of writing - a comic has the ability to tell stories in ways that neither drawing nor writing could tell alone, and thus qualifies as its own art form, worthy of respect and analysis. Is the same thing not true for websites? This is an interactive art form!
With the right motivation, you could come up with stories that could only be told in the form of a website. What do any of those stereotypical elements actually do to serve that purpose? If I let go of all the preconceived notions of what a website had to be, I could harness an infinite number of possibilities and make truly unique art. All I have to do is hold tight to my inspiration-
And when I looked around, I realized I was further from my goal of making a good website than I had ever been. I had started in a murky forest, with dozens of branching paths, and in trying to deduce the best direction to go, I had stranded myself in a black void. No landmarks, no handholds, and I nearly got enlightened for my troubles. Failure again. I just don’t have the knack. I opened my hand and let the inspiration slip away; those new, empty, painful feelings reframed my failure as it departed.
It floated a few feet away… then stopped. They usually keep going until I can’t see them anymore. Apparently, this idea was determined to stay, barely out of my reach. None of this fit the patterns I was used to. So I started following it, why not? Something was different about this project, or maybe something was different about me. If I ever find my way back to the forest, I’ll choose a new path and I won’t even look behind me.
Thank you for reading this blogpost, it’s a bit different from the others I’ve done so far. The first draft was much more like a standard essay analysing trends in websites, and their potential as an art form, copying a lot more of Scott McCloud’s homework (seriously, you should read Understanding Comics). At the end, I realized I was just analyzing for the sake of analyzing (the suffix -lyze literally means to break apart) and when I was done, I had no conclusions to draw, no opinions to express, no point to make. And I hated that feeling. So, out it went, and in with something weirder. When I draw good conclusions, I’ll be sure to write a whole big essay about them. Don’t worry.
In terms of actual business: like I mentioned, I found a service that lets you embed comment sections into web pages, and you can see the first one at the bottom of this page.
I won’t be talking much about anything besides the website stuff in this particular update. For the past few weeks, my secret rule regarding the blog posts was to make one every five to seven days updating about everything I had been working on, but honestly, if I hadn’t made much progress in a given week, I found myself either making a pointless lackluster update, or rushing myself to get something, anything done just so I could make an update about it. This is obviously not ideal.
The current plan is to make updates focusing on a singular topic as soon as I do enough to write a full update about. That might not always mean concrete progress; I’ll also try and document significant things I’ve learned. Hopefully, I can still make posts regularly. I liked having some amount of schedule, but I’m also not going to force myself to needlessly write updates. You can expect the next post to be either a Paranormal Accounts update, an essay about acting techniques, or maybe I’ll change my mind and run off in a completely different direction.