Finish that draft

On the creative process.

“Two Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas” (1856), by Camille Pissarro

A while back, a few friends and I decided to start an anime club. Initially, the idea was to just do the kind of viewing party people do for things like Game of Thrones and Succession, except for Chainsaw Man — we’d meet once a week to watch the newest episode and hang out for a while. Chainsaw Man finished airing its first season at the end of December, but we’ve kept going. And the club has morphed into something like an anime sampler dish: we’ve got one regular title¹, but otherwise people are free to suggest whatever. Which is how we’ve gone from something like GTO to, say, Skip and Loafer.

At our meeting this weekend, after a round of fried and steamed dumplings and a bit of wine, we started the first episode of a show called Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! It’s about three girls in their first year of high school who meet, befriend each other, and start… an anime club.

Though their goal is to make anime, not just watch it. It’s a pretty meta premise. But the show ends up being a love letter to the creative process: it’s as much about how satisfying it is to come up with fantastical ideas as it is about how hard it is to turn those ideas into reality.

I found the interplay between Kanamori, the group’s money-obsessed producer, and Asakusa, their gremlin director and storyboard artist, incredibly accurate. Kanamori is constantly reminding Asakusa that she has to actually do things like figure out the plot so that everyone else can get their work done — telling her, in other words, that it’s not enough to have a fantastic concept and nothing else. Meanwhile, Kanamori tells Mizusaki — the amateur model whose parents don’t want her making anime — that the decision to, say, hand-draw every cut will require severe concessions.

I sped through all twelve episodes in a day². I’m a person who spends a lot of his time making things — for work, for fun — and it felt weirdly affirming to see these three lovable characters work through the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about³. It’s not enough to just have a good idea; the execution is the important part, because it’s what people can touch. You do need someone to keep you on track who can also make room for you to daydream.

If you’re a creative person, there’s a lot in there that I think you’ll find useful. It’s nice to have a behind-the-scenes look at someone else’s creative process, even if it’s fictionalized. I find it pretty easy to forget how most of the stuff I see online is a finished product — the output of a process — and not just a draft. Something considered and then reconsidered and tweaked, not just a first crack at a first idea.

Anyway. The point of Eizouken, I think, is simple and twofold. First, that nothing matters but the finished and delivered product. And second, that art can change people’s lives, even if you, the artist, find it unbearably flawed. That’s something I’ve been trying to remember lately — the idea that putting things into the world is infinitely more important than just having a good idea. Perfect is the enemy of good, but it’s also the enemy of done.

With love,

Bijan

1. Tower of God, lmao

2. Here’s a link, so you can speed through it too.

3. Honestly, if nothing else, Eizouken is a paean to good producers. Also: the theme song rips.