I’ve been working with creative and performing artists as, first, a therapist, and then for the last thirty-five years as a creativity coach. I’ve learned from my clients just how hard they find completing their creative work. Many creatives have trouble getting started; many have trouble working regularly; but almost all have special problems near the end, when the finish line is in sight. In this series, I want to spell out twelve reasons why completing creative work is so darn hard.
I’m framing this series from the point of view of a painter’s challenges, but the points apply to someone working in any creative field, from writing novels to game designing, from filmmaking to app development. I’m sure you’ll be able to easily translate the points I’m making to the medium in which you work. If you’d like additional resources, let me recommend three of my recent books: Redesign Your Mind, The Power of Daily Practice, and The Great Book of Journaling. Together they can provide you with a clear picture of how to get your creative work done through right thinking, good daily habits, and the self-awareness that journaling provides.
Here is challenge number 5.
Lack of a “completion checklist.”
If you’re building a house and you’re approaching the end of the project, you create a punch list of last things that have to get done: spot painting, putting in a last switch plate or light fixture, and so on. When you’ve completed everything on your punch list, you can be pretty certain that you are done. Yes, you still have to look around to see if you’ve missed anything. But you can feel pretty confident that, because you got everything checked off your punch list, you are probably really done or very close to done.
By contrast, a visual artist likely has no such checklist or punch list, would probably never dream of creating one, and, even if the concept popped into his head, would probably have no idea what to put on such a list. And yet it can prove helpful to consider this checklist idea and see if it might serve you.
Let’s say you’re a super-realist painter whose current painting is comprised of a tabletop, a bowl of apples, a vase of flowers, and a collection of tabletop mirrors filled with various reflections of the apples, flowers, and the other mirrors. You could conceivably make a list that included each apple, each flower, each mirror, and so on; and, as you completed each element of the painting, you might check that element off.
One painter might find such an approach too mechanical, analytical, or even nonsensical; but another painter might find such an approach useful. Whether or not such an approach seems useful to you, the main idea remains a very important one: because visual artists typically do not have checklists or punch lists that help them complete projects, they must find their own ways of knowing when a painting is done. If a punch list might work for you, excellent! And if it makes no sense to you, then you are obliged to find other ways to know when your painting is done.
More to come!
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