thread: 2006-02-16 : Throwing It Open: Pulling the Plug
On 2006-02-23, Jim Zoetewey wrote:
For me, my creative process greatly depends on the size of the project. With a poem, short story, or short muscial composition, I generally have it knock around in my head for a few days and then spit it out in one sitting.
Longer projects tend to be items of great pain and inconsistent spurts of action. For example, I've temporarily stopped working on my master's project (a computer programming project) due to intense frustration with the API's of some of the libraries I've been using. Some nights I found myself just uselessly staring at the screen, trying to work out how to do what I needed to do.
Instead of that, I've lately been focusing on my novel (draft three of a contemporary fantasy) and my business (contract web programming). In earlier drafts, I remember being able to sit down and just write for a time. As I've gotten further into writing the novel, I've found a need to plot each section more precisely than I did in previous drafts, get to the point more quickly and squeeze more stuff into less space.
Thus presently things require me to spit out my ideas, revise them a little, and move on to the next section, taking care to make things fit with what came before and will come after.
At this moment, I'm thinking that I most enjoy the early stages of a large project and coming up with the shape of things. Later stages are still fun, but getting the piddly little details right isn't as fun as creating the initial architecture.
This makes ethan go "Yes!"
Starting a project is easy. Finishing a project is significantly more challenging.
