8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: accomplishing something

  • Baby Steps

    I have a piece of advice that I’m writing mostly for myself here: stop thinking so big. 

    Start small.

    Start with the achievable and work your way up.

    I have been planning this novel-length audio production, writing words, making scripts, composing music, mixing sounds, and—nothing firm has been done yet.

    The big project is simply too overwhelming.

    Oh sure, I see the forest, but I can’t seem to plant the trees. It all feels like I’m jumping into a new plan, a new skill, a new concept without knowing if any of it will even work—and more importantly if something critical will fail. And the result is paralysis incarnate.  

    Something smaller has to come first.

    In my case, maybe instead of trying to make a novel, I record some audio blogs first. Then maybe after I do that, I work on making a few one-pager short stories into encapsulated one-off samples of what I’m hoping to create on a larger scale. And then, maybe something else, and something else after that, and maybe… eventually, the real thing will fall into place.

    I’m sure many great people have achieved great things in one fell swoop… but the rest of us may need to build up our stamina first.

  • Derailed

    To say it is easy for a creative person to get derailed in the span of any given day is almost not worth saying, it is so obvious. Stephen Pressfield in his wonderful little book The War of Art, a must read for any creative soul, calls this a kind of resistance.

    Resistance is the force, says Pressfield, that keeps us from doing our work as creative people.

    Today, I found my day full of resistance, derailed and amok.

    I will spare the details of the chaos in this post, but needless to say that I ran up against a lot of external resistance in the hours when I would usually be creating something worthy of the concept.

    And yet, here I am and I have opened my laptop late into the evening to fight the resistance that swelled up over this day and to finish off the waning minutes having done at least a little of something.

    It is easy to get derailed, but it is important to find one’s way back to the tracks sooner than later. Resistance is tricky like that, always tempting you to take the easy route, go to bed having accomplished nothing, when all it takes is to resist right back.