Creativity

I'm not an ideas person, in fact, its a trait that very few subs have; we're absolutely useless about sorting our own lives out.  However another trait that I've noticed, is that we're all very successful at taking someone else's idea, and working with it, improving it, developing it, and making it happen.  What came first the chicken or the egg?  Whether we do this because we're used to taking and working with an idea from our kink lives, or whether we're like that kinkily because we have that feature in our everyday lives, is anyone's guess, most likely a psychologist's or philosophers's.  I know that to an extend, I'm sub in my sex life because I'm usually the one in control in my everyday life, and its a nice break from that to suddenly be the one taken care of, but beyond that, no clue.

For example, take my teching.  I can design you a set, build it, paint it, gel up lights and create a chase sequence, sound enginner a track and splice it together ready for the visual cue at just the right time, and balance pre/post mixes and treble/bass/mid frequency sound levels to get the right acoustics for a band.  I can even offer advice as an AD.  What I can't do is come up with any of those concepts myself.  I can't work out blocking for an entire play.  I can't envisage overarching themes that you want to be incorporated into all elements of the design.  I can't create the publicity image for a project.  But I can be shown a brief, and I can work with that, I can tell you how to improve it, how to market it, how to direct it to a demographic, where problems will arise; I can take your concept of darkness, of prison, of fate, and make every element of the set, lights, publicity, marketing, sound, reflect that and impress it upon your audience.  I can make your dreams happen.  It's my job.  And I love it.  I just can't come up with the initial idea myself.

It's a wierd situation, and in some ways very restrictive.  I'm always subject to the whims of others, there's always a director, or producer, or financier, who can override me, there will always be creative decisions I will strongly disagree with, but be forced to realize because my role demands I follow others.  But at the same time it allows me so much more freedom, in some ways you're underappreciated, and in other ways people understand that without you, it would all just be pipe dreams and ivory towers.  Most of the 'ideas people' in the world are actually pretty shit at making those ideas a reality.  When a director doesn't get the technical effects they want, most of the time, it's because they haven't explained the concepts behind their production to me, they just say "this scene happens at sunrise, i want sunrise", so you put a uplighting of orange and yellows onto a cyc, because its the best you can do, they haven't explained its at sunrise because it represents renewal, rebirth, a re-evaluation of the entire premise of the play up to this point, perhaps because they've completely missed that point themselves, but without communicating such things to the technical crew, the director limits what they can get before it even starts.

But given a choice, I'd much rather be the dream maker, than the dreamer.  It's a metaphor for my whole life in a way, in some ways I dream a lot, I have such perfected and innocent, childlike perspectives, but yet I know I'm constrained by the real world, and I work within that, even when in conflicts with what lives in my idealised mind.  It's a great thing, taking someone else's idea, and making it into something greater.  Putting a marketer's idea on a billboard takes more than anybody who hasn't done it realises, but its a great achievement for all of you when it happens.  But as the dream maker, and as the sub, you often have to have the ability to quietly appreciate your work yourself, because you wont always get the validation and thanks you want, or deserve, from your task-masters, but that doesn't mean you haven't done something no-one else could.  Some masters don't realize how reliant they are on their subs, how much their subs do forthem that they're not even aware of.  And often we who can realize the world for other people, are glanced over, and the praise is on the the result, and the original idea, rather than the impetus behind that idea.  But without us, the real world, and the world of those masters, would fall apart.