We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful David Flores. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with David below.
David , so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
I have two young boys (ages 3 and 1) and daily life for me is very much a grind. So, this is a question that I’ve been asking myself for a few years now.
Keeping and maintaining creativity in the cycle of life I’m in at the moment is very, very hard. It’s slower, with lower stakes and celebrating the small wins.
This is all intentional. I knew that once I had kids, my creativity output was going to change.
Pre-kids, I hustled like every creative in LA hustles. Nights and weekends were spent writing screenplays, strategizing, networking, hustle, hustle, hustle. Now that my kids are here, I spend weekends at the park with them, rather than toiling away on the next screenplay at the coffee shop.
How do I keep my creativity alive? At this point, I think I’m in the “living my life” phase. Seeing the world through my children’s eyes, enjoying the time with my family, taking vacations, trying new things.
Staying curious. That’s always the spark for what eventually becomes a creative endeavor.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
Hiya, I’m David! I’m an LA-based transmedia creator with Tucson, AZ roots. I tell character-first stories with genre twists. I’ve worked in films, TV, podcasts, comic books and videogames.
My festival-award winning short film, LIKENESS, tells the story of a young woman and her A.I. mom investigating the disappearance of the real mom. You can watch the film now on Omeleto’s YouTube channel.
My horror short film PIT STOP is also now available on CryptTV’s YouTube channel.
My scifi audio drama SHELL is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Type “AudioFlix” and click on “Episode 2.”
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Overall, therapy does wonders and I highly recommend everyone do therapy, be in therapy, stay in therapy. With that in mind, I feel these things have really helped me along the way:
1. Practice reality-based thinking. Especially if you’re a young hopeful trying to break into the entertainment industry, the reality is practically nothing is in your control. There’s very little you can control in this destiny. The hustle and grind mentality leads you to believe that strategizing, stressing and spiraling yourself out can lead to results, but it just destroys you. Little by little. What CAN I control? What CAN I do? Figure that out and let that be your North Star. Everything else is luck and happenstance.
2. Work Won’t Love You Back. That itself is the title of fantastic book by author Sarah Jaffe, which I recommend anyone who’s worked a job ever to read. But, it’s true. You can put your everything into work, into career and it’s not going to fill you up, It’s not going to love you back. That isn’t to say don’t work hard. You want to care less without being careless. Make sure you have a life outside of work that is tended to. That’s the life that actually matters.
3. It’s okay to not know. I recall an interview once with Steven Spielberg. I’m sure I’m horrible paraphrasing it, but the vibe of it was the interviewer asking Spielberg why he’s so awesome at being a director. And Spielberg’s response was something like, “I surround myself with people that are smarter than me and let them do their jobs.” You’re not going to be perfect at everything. You can’t be. Showing humility with that can go a long way on building great relationships with collaborators, but also making your creative work that much better.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
Yes! Always love to meet fellow creatives. I’m at the point in my career where I just want to create. If Hollywood discovers us, cool, but that isn’t my immediate target. I spent years chasing Hollywood, waiting to be anointed by the powers-that-be and that never came. So, I started making stuff on my own and that’s what I’ve been doing since 2022.
An ideal collaborator is someone who’s willing to go the distance with me on a project. Someone who has a love for the project first versus cashing a paycheck. I was fortunate enough to pay my cast/crew on previous projects, but nobody made what they were worth. I work a day job and my creative projects are the side-hustle/passion projects, so someone who gets that is key.
Of course, if a collaborator has money, comes from money or has connections to money, then we’re off to the races. The unfortunate reality is money makes the world go round for all things, even creative projects with low budgets.
If anyone wants to reach out, they can email me at [email protected].
Contact Info:
- Website: https://davidfloreswrites.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidfloreswrites/
Image Credits
Deryk Wehrley, Toby Canto
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