How to make art that speaks from the soul

A few days ago I wrote a post about why emotion is the most important thing in music. I promised to make a post about how to make art that seems to speak from your soul and that connects deeply with an audience. You can find the previous post below:

So, we established that the most important thing is to transmit powerful genuine emotion from yourself (the artist) to your audience. We’ll also take the option of revealing your true emotions, instead of elaborately crafting an entire new identity for the public.

To do this, you have to cultivate what John Keats called “Negative Capability”. It is the ability to stay in a state of discomfort and uncertainty without ego and judgement. Our minds have the tendency to attach to previous thought patterns and use them to avoid discomfort and inject some sense into our experience of reality. But this rarely, if ever, allows us to be truly creative. By putting ourselves consciously in front of a blank canvas, screen, or page, and allowing ourselves to perceive reality with as little bias as possible, novel ideas will usually come. A lot, maybe most, won’t be very good. But the process must be respected. Without doing the work the results will remain imaginary.

There must also be some constraints (write a fantasy novel, write a rock song, paint a landscape, etc.), that provide a little bit of structure to prevent the anxiety and discomfort generated by negative capability to overwhelm you and freeze your progress. I’ll talk about constraints in a future post.

Now go and make something awesome and new!