What Is Your Thing?

Plenty has already been written about Jonathan Coulton’s Thing A Week experiment, the self imposed journey that forced Coulton to write and post a song a week for 52 weeks straight. It put him on the map, so to speak. Recently my own internet prowling has drawn me back to the idea. Mark Zuckerberg has amusing annual challenges he gives himself (this year he’s slaughtering all the meat he eats himself). Before that, RejectedJokes.com’s Ben Schwartz was entertaining us week after week with a mock-performance of jokes that weren’t accepted by the latenight talk shows he was pitching. Garbrielle Bell just finished her month of daily comics. As strenuous as it appears from the outside, it must be satisfying somehow, right? They’re producing! They’re making what they want to make. On my car ride home yesterday something clicked with me, and I became obsessed with the question, If I were going to do a thing a week, what would I do?

A video? That seems to be the most obvious. A scene from a film? Maybe it makes sense, but that feels a little impractical. It would seem that the idea works best if the thing you’re making is part of a whole. You make songs, then you have an album at the end! You shoot a scene a week, and then you have a movie!

There’s something wonderful and elegant about making a song a week, because an album doesn’t need a macro-world view from the outset. As an artist, you needn’t sit down and say, “this is what this album is about” the way you need to with a film.  You don’t need a plan. You can just write. Over thinking gets in the way. Though over thinking can be an obstacle in filmmaking, I know myself as a writer, and without a plan, I’ll wind up with a ton of unusable pages. So how do you apply that same devil-may-care work ethic as a filmmaker? A catalog of short films, I guess? Inevitably, there’ll be some sort of cogency- a through line- just because I will be the one making them, but that answer doesn’t seem satisfying.

Coulton wanted to be a professional musician, so he wrote music. So what would you do? And what does that say about who you are, and what you want?