Followup: What’s Next?
Monday, 31. July 2017 0:37
The last post was about that depression that seems to happen regularly to artists when they finish a project. Originally, I suggested that the best cure seemed to be jumping into another, even frivolous, project to pull oneself out of the doldrums. But then it occurred that if one is depressed, the last thing s/he might be able to do is to come up with a new project, no matter how lightweight it might be.
As I was pondering this I ran across a blog post by Austin Kleon entitled “Want to be an artist? Watch Groundhog Day” (If you are not receiving Kleon’s newsletter or reading his blog posts on your news feed, you should be.) In the post, Kleon argues that the creative journey is much like that of Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) in Groundhog Day.
His point is one that has been made here before: “The creative journey is not one in which at the end you wake up in some mythical, happy, foreign land. The creative journey is one in which you wake up every day, like Phil, with more work to do.” And Kleon makes his point quite forcefully.
Along the way, he includes a quote from Ian Svenonius’ book, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group: “[Art], however, is different. You will never know exactly what you must do, it will never be enough… no matter what change you achieve, you will most likely see no dividend from it. And even after you have achieved greatness, the [tiny number of people] who even noticed will ask, ‘What next?’”
This is the question that we always find ourselves asking after the end of a project, and in the depression we’re feeling, the answers are hard to see. New projects do not usually just jump up and introduce themselves at our bidding. So what to do?
My suggestion is absurdly simple, but for some reason, the idea has eluded me until very recently: make a list of potential projects—not just a list of projects you could do or might be interested in doing, but projects that you really want to do, given the time and opportunity.
If your experience is like mine, you might find that the ideas for new projects come when you are the busiest on a another project. Make notes on them for future reference. And when I say notes, I mean just that—not just a list of project ideas, but some sort of document about each idea with enough detail to allow you to remember what you were thinking in full. So now, instead of just scribbling the idea on a post-it note, which subsequently became illegible or lost, I now make a Word document for each idea and keep those documents in their own folder on Dropbox. Some files contain only a single sentence or phrase; others have multi-page outlines of projects—whatever time and the level of development permit.
This folder provides a place that I can go whenever I am between projects to insure that I keep working, when I have additional developmental ideas, when I need to do the “something small every day” that Kleon advocates. I can open a project, refine it, edit it, add to it, develop it—a little at a time. Some of these potentials grow into projects; some get abandoned when I realize they are unworkable. Still others morph into a project different from the one I had originally envisioned.
It may not be a perfect system, but it works for me. You may want to give it a try.
Category:Creativity, Productivity | Comment (0) | Author: Jay Burton