allowing time
I'm constantly stewing over not finishing things.
It's perfectly fine if I know there has to be an outcome: if I've made a commitment to someone else; if there's a deadline -- something I'm shooting for. In these instances I Know I Will Deliver.
But a lot of the time on personal projects, I'll get three-quarters of the way through and find myself letting little threads go until eventually the towel has been completely thrown in. (It's a bad habit that apparently I started in grade 11 of high school.) At the 60-75% mark, I'll start to loathe the project -- although actually probably loathe myself if we're going to be really accurate about it.
So, after oh, I don't know, 20 years of concerted stuff-making, I'm just learning now how to step away at that lovely self-loathe milestone, in order to come back to it and... actually complete the damn thing. Obviously this means the process slows down a little, and sometimes... a whole bloody lot.
I've always envied people who could iterate and ship quickly. Who have an idea for a project and execute daily. Or those who are really unsqueamish about experimenting in public. God, they're brave and magnificent souls.
It's a model that works for études, exercises, quick short-burst work: illustrations, painting, photography, poetry... but not, as it would seem, as a hard-and-fast rule.
The other day I saw this tweet and died with happiness:
An official permission slip from the cosmos to all self-flagellating artists who think that unless they rush their product, they're officially being under-productive.
(Since when did we start to talk about artwork with industrialised terminology anyway?)
And the truth is I (just like most full-ish-time creative pros I know) am constantly, constantly working across a minimum of 5-6 projects at once. Frequently in different media, with different foci and using different parts of my sore brain.
At the moment, I'm acting in a couple of things (sorry, embargoed) and paying the bills with blissful, divine voiceover work; finishing one short film (slowly, oh so slowly); developing a big-crazy-wonderful-did-I-mention-big hybrid media project; gearing up to redraft a feature-length screenplay; starting to put ideas together for a new, collaborative short-film-for-web series; beginning the reference and research process for a new video art / installation-to-live-music collaboration. Plus other little bits and pieces like submissions, applications, mentorships, marketing, post-writing, writing practice, photographic practice, film study / writing study / professional development, and of course, self-as-business management. And as anyone whose lives are even vaguely as fractured as mine knows, this is 100% normal.
It makes *no sense whatsoever* to be putting agonising pressure on oneself to hurry to complete and ship -- no matter how tempting it would be to receive the world's back-pats. It's just not worth the stress. The rush-job. The sleeplessness of it all.
I think I can be a perfectionist, and commit to move past the curse of non-finishing without forcing completion for the sake of completion. Shipping for the sake of shipping.
About a month ago when I made the commitment to write weekly emails and blog posts at roughly the same degree of regularity, the effort was for consistency and to shove me out of fear of showing the work. But there's a danger in pushing (especially when you're just one person) that quality -- and purpose for that matter -- will get lost in the process. So, weekly emails became fortnightly, and now they're... roughly fortnightly (which means, between-fortnightly-and-monthly if I'm doing well).
In order to art (as a verb) deeply and openly and honestly, sometimes we can work and ship and show quickly, but sometimes we also have to press pause on the publish mechanism, and let the work speak to us quietly and softly, and to let us know when it's ready, itself.
