Starting a New Creative Project

Photograph by Walter Chetoba de Boever for Unsplash

“I should have launched my channel by now and I should be working on my graphic novel,” my friend Sarah tells me in a panic. She’s a few days away from uploading the first batch of videos to her new YouTube channel. She’s behind schedule and has been trying to get to work, in parallel, on her next project – a graphic novel. There’s no way she’ll stop to acknowledge everything she’s achieved with her videos, no way she’ll sit down for a celebratory drink because all she can think about is the graphic novel. And yet, when she tries to work on it, she keeps hitting a wall. She just doesn’t know where to start. “It’s so unprofessional!” she tells me.  

I’ve heard this many times – creatives struggling to shift gears. They’re approaching the finish line for one project at full throttle, and every now and then, they slam on their brakes, go back to the drawing board, and start setting the foundations for their next project. They want to keep up the pace that took so much effort to reach in the first place. And they want to make sure they won’t fall into the trap of the ‘in-between-project-slump’ because they don’t trust themselves to flow into their next project. So they start drawing up an outline for their upcoming novel – racking their brains – at a time when they could be enjoying the fact that their channel is about to be launched out into the world. 

I know the feeling. I, too, have a tendency to start new projects as I’m approaching completion of the previous. It sounds reasonable and yet, it invariably leaves me feeling scathed. It’s like  driving on a freeway in fifth gear, cruising along with a nice sense of control and perfect visibility on a sunny day. “Just follow this route and you’ll be ready to submit your book in two days.” But at the back of my mind, I’m thinking about the next trip. So I take my foot off the accelerator and slow all the way down into first gear. I take a side road onto a bumpy track to catch a glance of my next project. But there, I hit thick fog. The idea I had for starting a podcast suddenly looks bland and useless. I just want to race back to the freeway and pretend I never had such a stupid idea, but I need to figure something out, so I stay for a while, looking for ways to make it work. 

I thought that spending time planning my podcast would get me excited about it. I thought it would make the transition from writing a book to diving into the world of podcasting much easier. But it didn’t. Instead, it’s left me feeling anxious about having broken the flow on my book, and depressed at the thought of adding to the long list of ship-wrecked podcasts in a saturated market. So I rush back to my book project and wrap it up as quickly as I can. I rush into the podcast project, taking no time out. And then, I hit a wall, a massive wall. I spend days agonising, trying different approaches and being unproductive until eventually, the headaches and insomnia force me to take a breather. I stop everything I’m doing. I give myself a break. Then, as if by magic, I flow back into work. The coast is clear. The perspective is thrilling. And off I go.

It’s a messy time that period of shifting gears. We’re so keen to be professional, to anticipate slumps, that we can end up punishing ourselves. But our job is to work towards creating periods of flow – in whichever way we can – and self-flagellation rarely works. We need to understand how we best operate. Some of us thrive on juggling several projects at once. Others need to compartmentalise and be in a monogamous relationship with our project, while others feed off the tension of external pressure to keep a pace they like. It’s all about trial and error. Repeated errors which we eventually learn from, until we get better at adopting our favourite pace.

So tell me, do you ever sense you’re caught between gears and you simply can’t engage in a new project? How do you move on? I’d love to hear from you. Tell me how you deal with it by emailing me here.

I wish you all the very best with your creative endeavours!

Charlotte