Less Consuming, More Creating

My YouTube feed is overloaded with tutorials. "How to write compelling dialogue." "Five mistakes killing your screenplay." "Why your pilot isn't working." Everyone’s selling a masterclass, a framework, a system. And look, I'm there for it. Craft matters. Technique saves butts ass when inspiration goes AWOL.

But I think the ratio's wrong. I’m seeing infinite instruction and vanishing inspiration.

Where's the short film that punches me in the face? The interactive story that crawls out of my phone and follows me home? The comic that rewires how I see the world?

All this craft knowledge is supposed to fuel more creation, not replace it. We learn story structures so we can break them in interesting ways. We study character development so we can build people who feel real. We master the fundamentals so we can ship work that’s worthy of audience attention.

But somewhere along the way, consuming crafting content became easier than applying it. Analyzing what works for others started feeling safer than risking what you might not pull off.

I'm totally guilty of this. There are days when breaking down story structure feels easier than scribbling an actual script. When teaching technique beats the shenanigans out of digging into my psyche for new ideas.

When the how-to drowns out the what-if, we forget why we make things in the first place.

Thank God for creators like Joel Haver, who crank out weird short films that feel like fever dreams. MeatCanyon is making animations that crawl under your skin and stay there like a Herpes virus. NeuralViz turns AI data into practical, sci-fi poetry. These guys are not just consuming how-to-craft content - they're using what they know to flood the feed with magic.

That's the dopamine rush I'm chasing. The aspirational achievement I want to unlock

I don’t want to abandon the craft blogs or behind-the-scenes breakdowns. But I want to prioritize the work. The story that stops someone mid-scroll. The online experience that feels like it fell out of a parallel universe. The thing that leaves people asking, “Who even thinks like that?”

All those tutorials, all that technique, all that hard-won craft knowledge are worthless unless they get used to make shizz that moves people. So, let’s put the 'how-to' in service of the 'what-if' and start shipping the content we've been learning to create.