Here's how it's turned out for me. I don't know that our brains work the same, but there may be some overlap.
It turns out that if I plan a project by starting with how I want it to look or end up in the end, I'm pretty much doomed: Sometimes I start seeing the work ahead of me in a too end-goal-oriented way, and like many fine things that really should be savored, thinking about how to finish it makes the doing of it no longer fun, it just feels like a giant to-do-list that I suddenly can't do... all the advice to break a big project into little parts, doesn't help if I start feeling like doing the little parts is a chore, too.
Or, if I know how it's "supposed to" turn out, I keep embellishing it in my head, making the project more and more complicated; or I start thinking about how it's going to be received and how awesome it will be once people see how great it is, and then get hung-up in the details and never finish it; OR then, it's really not really going to be good enough at all, unless I embelish it or polish it more, or, or, or...
SO, the answer for me turns out to be that I will only plan a little bit ahead of myself, and then if I start wanting to imagine what it will look like in the end, I turn my focus back to where I am. Say, for instance that I decided I wanted to do... I dunno, let's say, a 6-foot cube with four faces and a top, all being cut pieces like the ones I've been doing. Cool, huh? Well, If I tried to plan out what that would look like and design it all on paper, then I'd be utterly daunted by the whole project. It would be months and months of work to execute and then would it really turn out to be good enough to be worth all that effort?
If I were going to do that, instead I'd do just enough planning to figure out how the structure would work, and maybe in a general sense what I want the silhouettes to be about. Then I'd design *one* and cut it out. Then I'd design a second to go with the first, maybe according to the original general idea, or maybe changing even that. Over the months the project would take to complete, it would evolve and adapt to what I'd already done and to what it started to become.
The thing is that if a piece of art is going to express something going on inside you, you can't expect to stay the same person for the duration of a really big project. You have to leave lots of room for growth and change and development of you and your ideas, or else it's like growing out of your clothes, but having to keep going to work in them.
Anyway, that's how I've come to handle the problem: plan only as much as I have to in order to get and keep moving, and then keep loose and adapt along the way. And be strict about NOT trying to peek ahead and read the ending first. :)
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-05-14 01:29 am (UTC)Here's how it's turned out for me. I don't know that our brains work the same, but there may be some overlap.
It turns out that if I plan a project by starting with how I want it to look or end up in the end, I'm pretty much doomed: Sometimes I start seeing the work ahead of me in a too end-goal-oriented way, and like many fine things that really should be savored, thinking about how to finish it makes the doing of it no longer fun, it just feels like a giant to-do-list that I suddenly can't do... all the advice to break a big project into little parts, doesn't help if I start feeling like doing the little parts is a chore, too.
Or, if I know how it's "supposed to" turn out, I keep embellishing it in my head, making the project more and more complicated; or I start thinking about how it's going to be received and how awesome it will be once people see how great it is, and then get hung-up in the details and never finish it; OR then, it's really not really going to be good enough at all, unless I embelish it or polish it more, or, or, or...
SO, the answer for me turns out to be that I will only plan a little bit ahead of myself, and then if I start wanting to imagine what it will look like in the end, I turn my focus back to where I am. Say, for instance that I decided I wanted to do... I dunno, let's say, a 6-foot cube with four faces and a top, all being cut pieces like the ones I've been doing. Cool, huh? Well, If I tried to plan out what that would look like and design it all on paper, then I'd be utterly daunted by the whole project. It would be months and months of work to execute and then would it really turn out to be good enough to be worth all that effort?
If I were going to do that, instead I'd do just enough planning to figure out how the structure would work, and maybe in a general sense what I want the silhouettes to be about. Then I'd design *one* and cut it out. Then I'd design a second to go with the first, maybe according to the original general idea, or maybe changing even that. Over the months the project would take to complete, it would evolve and adapt to what I'd already done and to what it started to become.
The thing is that if a piece of art is going to express something going on inside you, you can't expect to stay the same person for the duration of a really big project. You have to leave lots of room for growth and change and development of you and your ideas, or else it's like growing out of your clothes, but having to keep going to work in them.
Anyway, that's how I've come to handle the problem: plan only as much as I have to in order to get and keep moving, and then keep loose and adapt along the way. And be strict about NOT trying to peek ahead and read the ending first. :)