always missing deadlines

The ultimate cliche of the one-trick pony is the using of the phrase one-trick pony. That doesn't stop the majority of us from being one and pimping out that one-trick as many times as we can in the hopes that we will find somebody who hasn't yet seen it. You run out of viewers really fast that way and if you give any kind of damn, you'll get sick of yourself after a while. But damn if it isn't hard to realize when you're repeating yourself. Maybe it's tied to the reward system of body-made drugs that tell us to tell the same joke or listen to the same song or answer the phone in the same exact way thousands of times in our lives. It's well documented that human beings like consistency in behavior and try like mad to make sure all of life can fit into color coordinated boxes or folders or plastic eggs in the carton. Maybe that's why Easter sucks so much.

It is impossible not to be repetitive. The sheer amount of information we have to process guarantees that we redo a healthy percentage of our lives on autopilot, if only to keep us from going insane. For some of us, routine makes up a more significant portion of our lives than others, but we are all guilty. For that reason, when we see originality (especially if we see if "first") we can't help but get excited. Finally there is somebody willing to break down the walls with their wrecking ball of creativity and lay down all kinds of groundbreaking foundations. That is, until you realize that they are just doing something similar to something somebody else did fifty years before. Son of a bitch, why can't I just write something one time that nobody else has thought of and be recognized for my genius because clearly I am forging ahead into the uncharted territory of art and human contribution!

Tough shit, because no you aren't. I, for one, actually like repetition. I like using it to my advantage when I can, raising tension or building up a sound. Sometimes I do it just to do it. That doesn't make me bad. It isn't even that repetition is bad. What's difficult to stomach more than doing the same thing, is being unwilling to try to do something else. This isn't always consciously done. It might not even be done consciously at all. That's what makes it such a fight. For anybody who wants to create more than one thing in any given form, the ease of falling back into familiar territory can be too overwhelming to conquer. I can tell you that I've written the same story as many times as I've written stories. They may be tangentially different in the surface details, but there's no conceit that what you're getting is a fresh story. I struggle with that all the time and there are moments in every project where I want to delete or throw away every word I've penned in order to force myself to work towards a new end. There is also a deep desire to just give up and face up to being unoriginal.

I don't have advice on how to find the balance between experimentation and the comfort blanket of repetition. I haven't yet found it. Maybe the first step is just recognizing that this problem exists. Is there a twelve step for chronic sameness addiction? You can try combating it with just exposing yourself to as many things as you can. You can try sitting on your hands and refusing to use them for anything but making food, driving and touching yourself. But if you're like me and you have things that you want to tell other people, you're going to have to do it in a way that won't bore them after they've experienced it the first time.

On second thought, maybe this article won't be of any help for that.