Hey, Creative LJ Peoples!

[allizon]

Maybe this is only an issue for those of us who are all ADD, maybe not, but:  

When you're thinking about/planning/even vaguely considering a Big Project, one which can't possibly be done in a week or less...how do you get started on something Big?  How do you know where/at what point to dive in -- how much planning or prep work is enough?  How do you measure your progress?  Or maintain your enthusiasm for the project and not let it just all...drift away?

I'm very curious here.  I want to do something Big but can't seem to keep my focus on any one project long enough, so I wonder if I'm just Doin It Wrong.  Help?

ETA:  So I successfully completed National Novel Writing Month -- I did just over 53,000 words in 30 days.  That was Big, right?  But it also had a very small window attached to it, and an external deadline (of a sort).  So I can sprint toward Big, but I think the kinds of Big Projects I'm vaguely thinking of here aren't so much sprints as marathons.  I clearly need marathon planning/training.  :)

ETA 2:  As I was responding to various comments below, a link to this post about discipline on Zen Habits popped up for me in Twitter.  Thanks, Universe!

Comments

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

WoW, have I *ever* had this problem!

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. :)

[badlittlemonkey.livejournal.com]

I was sincerely hoping you'd answer. :)

You've touched on something here that I'm considering very strongly: namely, Making Shit Up As I Go Along. Or, more accurately, not planning too far ahead. I know that when, for instance, I think about writing a story/novel/screenplay/whatever, the more I figure out the story before I get started, the more I sap my enthusiasm for continuing with the project. If I already know all of the story, then I don't have much left to discover in the writing...it's just transcription.

Also, this bit:

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.

...very helpful! I think I've tended not to do enough of that in the past.

Thanks very much for you insight! I'd love to find time to talk to you more about this some time in the future, especially if that gives us an excuse to hang out. ;)