Space and Time and the Art of Creating

How to create your best and most captivating content.

Space and time are the same and yet, so apart from each other.

Time is a strange phenomenon. It’s not just a scientific measure but it evokes so much in our minds and our thinking. Working with video and audio, I see timelines all the time.

Today is the one year anniversary of my first writing on Substack! I’d like to share with you another secret I’ve learned about how you can succeed as a creator.

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash

This was my first secret, published one year ago today.

I found out in college that our brains have more space in it than imaginable.

I remember one of my instructors in college telling the class, as he went on with his lecture for the day, not to groan.

“I know, it seems like your brains cannot fit any more information and it’s going to explode. But you’re only using a tiny part of your brain. Trust me, you have more room in your brain than your brain knows what to do with.” He said.

If I tried to express all my thoughts out loud through words, it would be impossible. My thoughts are not restricted inside my head. They are layered, or stacked, sort of speak. You and I can have more than one thought and focus on much more than one thing at the same “time.”

There is not just the conscious and subconscious. There is a spectrum of levels between them. Our brain can think about what we want for dinner as we are preparing to go out, and whatever three or four things we have on our list to accomplish. Not to mention the work we are working on at that moment, and the dog that needs to go outside very soon.

All of these things can be on the forefront of our mind at the same time. As we try to focus on just one, or two of them, the rest are not disappearing. They are like children trying to get our attention. For some people, things can get messy, but for others—we can handle this, and more.

Our voice can only express one of these at one time. It takes longer to express our thoughts than it does to think them.

These things are important to know as creators. Things that we like to keep in mind during the process.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

The space we fill with things we’d like, or need, to do is restricted by a timeline.

The distance between those things is almost non-existent. They are our thoughts stacked on top of each other. When we focus on them, they’re suddenly placed on a timeline. We are not negative people when we believe we cannot accomplish everything. We are simply acknowledging the difference between time and space.

For me, and probably you as well, writing and creating is a challenge. That’s because there is a conflict between time and space that becomes quite obvious when we are in the creating process. Mostly, it’s apparent in audio and video. The time it takes to consume the content is the limit which we are constantly been made aware of during our creation process. I remember my shock that a five minute video took a week to produce. This is true with all media, sometimes that three minute song takes a year to complete. A two-hour film can take years, and so on. The time to consume each is the length of the finished media. Obviously, it takes two hours to watch a two-hour film.

You’ll notice how many blogs have a time attached to each story or article. Medium and Substack are good examples. Videos and music, or podcasts, also do this. They depict how much time it takes for someone to read, listen, or watch. As a writer, the standard seems to be about three minutes average, being the most popular for reading content online.

With video and audio (separately), we are fully aware of the duration of time for each media. A movie of about 90 minutes is a full feature film. A song of about 3 minutes is another norm in the music industry.

There is an awareness of time that we cannot ignore as creators. There is an expected limitation to what we can ask others to spend in their precious time.

Time and space are perpetual.

Inside our minds it’s all about perspective. I used to spend many of my weekends in Starbucks with one cup of coffee working on my film festival. I’d get there as soon as they opened, before 4:30AM to be sure I got a table next to an electrical outlet to plug into. If I was lucky, by a window.

I was not the only one there doing the same thing. We’d have a nice conversation when they arrived, sometimes asking for a chair at my table. Really great people hang out at Starbucks and work or study. At some point, the other person would tap on my shoulder and say, “Sorry to interrupt you, but I just wanted to say goodbye.” It always caught me off-guard as if they had just been there not more than a minute.

Then there are days when it seemed an hour had passed, but less than 20 minutes had actually passed. And it’s the same for all of us. They say for children time passes slowly. But ask a kid to stop playing a game and you’ll realize it’s the same for them.

As creators, we have another element that falls into our equation of time and space. Quality.

The quality of the work we do is conflicted.

How much time it takes to create high quality media depends. It depends on how much time you have, it depends on the quantity of good content you have. Quantity and space are very much related.

The best way I know, and have observed, on how to overcome these conflicts are derived from many years working as a professional in video and media production, plus my studies in media communication. Of course, I also host a podcast and have a ton of conversations with professionals about the subject.