Curiosity & Passion In Creation & Consumption

What connects the artist and the audience, emotionally?

Creating and consuming media are such different experiences that it’s amazingly difficult to create something relatable to people who only consume.

Usually, we connect thru mutual appreciation and the assumption that, as long as you can recapture what you love about the things you consume, you will be able to likewise connect to consumers such as yourself; but it’s because we think this way that so many people bounce off of creativity, realizing how the experience of creation is so different from the experience of consumption. 

Successful artists usually do not start their journeys knowing exactly what they want to do; but in the process of trying to decide that, they usually find out what other people will compliment them for their ability to do, and then lean in on that.

Eventually, you get so good at doing a thing in your own particular way that your “voice” is recognizable in your work; and the question of whether you will connect with audiences becomes less so “am I good enough?” and more so, “does anyone want to hear what I have to say?”

There are two compelling forces which connect the experience of creators and consumers, allowing the continuum of influence between them: curiosity and passion.

Curiosity drives us toward new experiences on the suspicion that they could be emotionally important; whereas passion commits what we feel strongly about to memory. Passion is when you can still remember a scene that you saw in a show more than twenty years later, without rewatching it; and curiosity is when you go back to watch that film again to remember the rest of what happens—determining if there is more to be passionate about than first realized in the experience, or otherwise satisfying that curiosity and moving along when passion is not found.

Creating on the basis of curiosity can be risky, because you might not find passion in what you’re doing and thusly abandon it. Creating out of passion can be risky, too, because you might not be able to get anyone else as passionate as you are about a thing, and your own passion could wane—or even could make you become too precious about a project and incapable of completing it. 

When I’ve talked about my favorite popular creations of my own, I often cite a video called The Great Anime Director Who Time Forgot in part because it had the most satisfying circle of curiosity and passion that I’ve been able to realize in one of my videos. I watched a film out of curiosity and found some passion in it; which led to further curiosity, until I had explored a subject to my personal satisfaction.

The title of the video then created curiosity within my audience, and then the video made them feel passionate as well (at least about my presentation of the media, if not also about the media in question). People that never heard of me and became curious about me had an opportunity to develop a passion and further curiosity toward my content, which also hopefully inspired many of them to be curious enough to watch the director Masaki Mori’s work, and then to be passionate about it in kind.

There is, in addition to the curiosity for passion that compels one to consume, also a passion for curiosity, which I think is what compels me the most of anything. I usually struggle to be passionate about any singular topic, except for whatever also brings new curiosities and passions into my life; and so the act of being curious in itself is more precious to me than most of what I am individually curious about.

I am sometimes passionate about a source of curiosities, but not so much about the curiosities in and of themselves as much as the way that the person with passion for those things expresses that passion.

That feels very vague, and so I’ll give an example. Even though I’ve played about a thousand video games, most of them were short or I didn’t play them for very long, and it’s rare that I will actually sit down to play a game at all (much more so that I will return to one). However, I have seen thousands of analysis and history videos about gaming; and I’d consider my knowledge on the subject far to exceed the average gamer’s even though I don’t self-identify as a gamer myself. 

I’m like this because I grew up with a passion for Pokémon that developed into a passion for reading magazines about Pokémon, and most-especially Nintendo Power; which informed me about way many more games than I ever had the opportunity to play as a kid, and filled my imagination with the descriptions of those games given by reviews and articles in the ‘zine.

I got into anime similarly, with access only to whatever Cartoon Network was running on TV, or which my cousin bought on DVD; but knowledge of dozens more shows, just as a result of reading a single issue of Anime Invasion.

In this way, the collection of curiosities became my passion even more so than I’ve ever really gotten passionate about just one of those things in the singular. While I haven’t played anywhere near as many games as a lot of gamers that I know, and I’ve seen way fewer films than anyone who calls themselves a fan of movies, I can tell you many more stories about other gamers’ experiences with games and about other filmgoers experiences with movies than I can about my own.

I am also very passionate about writing and about using my voice a lot more so than I am about any other type of creativity; and so when I use those skills, I usually do so to try and share my perspective as a collector of perspective.

Everything I do has a “big picture” approach, which can make things really difficult when I can only see parts of a picture that I’m DYING to get the rest of, and have to work thru a bunch of writing and passionate curiosity to get there.

Maintaining that passion all the way to the point that I can push it thru to the next person is the hardest part for me, because my curiosity is more easily piqued than maintained, and I’m always being dragged in the next direction when the last thing proves too difficult to stay in love with to milk for all that it’s worth.

Hence, I remain a short-form writer.