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What creative projects have you been working on?
This topic is part of a series. It is meant to be a place for users to discuss creative projects they have been working on.
Projects can be personal, professional, physical, digital, or even just ideas.
If you have any creative projects that you have been working on or want to eventually work on, this is a place for discussing those.
I started on a new book. Have written (& published) two non fiction books before this and now I started my first fiction work.
Actually had a breakthrough conversation with an author I admire a few weeks ago. I asked her how she worked, and if she hates writing as much as I do. She concurred! She said: I hate it too, but sometimes, I just produce something that I’m actually proud of. And that’s what keeps her coming back to her computer.
Also got some practical advice from here on how to write (fiction) that really resonated with me, and gave me the final push I needed to get started.
I have written a lot of short essays and articles with mixed success, but I’ve never written a book. (I would maybe like to one day, though.) It’s dispiriting to hear writers say they hate writing.
Two people I admire who have written books and talked about how difficult it has been for them are Brené Brown and Ezra Klein. Both of them focused on the same thing they disliked: the loneliness of long hours and long months writing alone.
Brené Brown said that she changed her approach to writing for (if I recall correctly) her fourth book, Rising Strong. She rented a cabin for a weekend, invited a bunch of friends out, and just told them stories all weekend in the living room — and these stories became the stories told in the book.
It sounded like the experience was way more full of life for her than how she wrote before and I think the quality of her writing benefitted from this approach.
I find this such a hopeful and reassuring and inspiring counterpoint to the more typical writer’s mentality that anything about writing that causes you suffering is necessary and unavoidable and your only choices are to give up or white knuckle through the pain. There may be unavoidable painful parts of writing, but I am not ready to accept that hating writing and suffering through it is the only option.
Ezra Klein’s solution to the loneliness problem was to find a co-author.
Those are some nice examples, thanks for sharing.
The hating of the writing doesn’t bother me so hard, and I kind of like that writing is a way of creating that I can do on my own. (I also work as a director, a function in which I’m totally reliant on other people to create.)
Writing doesn’t feel lonely to me, it’s fun to wander around in my head. I just find it really really difficult (actually impossible) to translate what i have in my head into words. That’s what I hate about it. But even when it doesn’t work, what ends up on paper is sometimes something I couldn’t have imagined in my head. Something that surprises me. That’s awesome.
So the ‘hate’ I wrote about is no hard grinding hate. It doesn’t pain me. It’s more jovial annoyance. Almost like a family member you can’t stand but love at the same time.
In the conversation I had with the writer, we wore both laughing about how annoying writing can be, how much we can ‘hate’ it sometimes.
But I totally agree that writing (or creating in any way) should be or feel like a punishment. I don’t think anyone should “suffer for the arts” ^^ So very cool to see how different people have different ways to find the fun in something that can be so difficult to do.
I'm curious what the advice was.
Its probably not crazy advice but it resembled the way I like to write and I love what she writes, so that kind of made me have more faith that there’s nothing wrong with the way I write. With that awkwardly phrased preamble out of the way:
of pages. Some days no more than a sentence.
That’s about it.
I would add ‘play a little FarmRPG’ to the list. It made writing my previous book a bit more bearable ^^.
I’ve been stuck on an essay/article I’ve been working on for a long time and reached 95-99% completion in November. It’s an article that fuses abstract exposition and argumentation about technology, digital archivism, and other impersonal topics with intimate personal reflections, emotions, and experiences.
It drives me crazy when an article/essay is 90%+ complete and then it gets stuck there. First, I have to figure out if there is anything wrong with the piece or if the problem is just with my emotional regulation and executive functioning — with my ability to finish it, in other words.
At least once or twice, I’ve gotten to almost the end of a piece and then realized it doesn’t have an ending. Because I haven’t lived that ending or figured out that ending. I feel that the writing is beautiful, moving, and wise, some of the best stuff I’ve ever written. The experience of writing it was, in moments, that feeling of, “I don’t know where these words are coming from, but they’re suddenly coming and they feel true, as if something other than me or something deep and hidden with me is now speaking through my hands.” And yet I haven’t published these pieces and have sat on them for a very long time because there is no ending. And I still don’t know if not publishing them or publishing them with no real ending is the right decision.
My fear with getting into this 95%+ complete place is that I’ll put all this work and time and devotion and emotion into crafting this essay and then when the very last piece is ready to fall into place, I realize it’s not there and the essay doesn’t make sense without it. Or I’ll write the whole essay and something will feel off to me about it, something just won’t sit right, and I might not even quite know what it is yet.
My mind goes to just the wild amounts of patience and trial-and-error that creativity or scholarship requires, and how this doesn’t align with the economic models that can support it for most people.
I also am aware of the danger of perfectionism. I tend to think that maybe the best way to approach writing is to figure out how to worry less if the writing is good and just write, write, write, publish, publish, publish and let yourself learn and improve through experience. I don’t know when I’m getting stuck in perfectionism vs. being honest with myself about the process and what each piece really needs to be “finished” or what I intended it to be.
So, with this 95-99% complete piece that I mentioned in the beginning, I guess I need to look at it again and decide what I feel about it. Is something crucial missing? Or is what’s getting in the way just my fear and dread of the vulnerability of writing, my yearning for my work to be perfect or at least always better than it is, to be beyond criticism, to somehow redeem all my mistakes and failures?
I can only share a different perspective for you to consider: do you have a reason for writing it? Does the essay have a purpose for existing? I believe that creating is akin to giving birth to life. The creation will either step into the light, or it will not. If it does come out, it will stand as it is; imperfections and all. At its base, there is no middle ground.
After several months of work, I finally executed the vision I had for my first art show. It was a bit too ambitious, cost a decent chunk of money, time and effort, and also put me weeeeeeeeell outside of my comfort zone. But, as a reward, I achieved my big, original goal - which was to touch at least one person and make them look at life differently.
I also gained some confidence in my artistic vision, because the choices I made while crafting this experience really paid off, and had the effects I aimed for.
This is a bit of screaming into the void as I get delirious from lack of sleep trying to finish some tight deadline work but...
I've been off and on working on developing a fantasy world for years now, originally intended for running a tabletop RPG (think D&D but most definitely not D&D - my top picks currently are Draw Steel or ICON) but due to my love of world building it has swollen into far too much detail.
The world is called Ultae, and it is a very high magic world. The core conceit is that all of the world is floating continents, with a ball of pure mana forming the cord of the planet. Magical energy rises from this ball to keep things aloft, and the continents are thick enough that the energy is blocked and prevents overland automatic magical levitation/flight (birds, active spells etc are perfectly fine).
I've worked out a bunch of societies with mild to major tweaks on the core fantasy races with almost all of time tying magical proficiency to aristrocracy, a relatively cohesive Theology and system of magic, and a historic timeline running ~10,000 years or so. I also have a fairly nice map sketched out and nations and histories written into it. And I have no idea if I'll ever even write a story with the setting or get to run a game.
But my hundreds of pages of notes remain a nice creative outlet even if they're riddled with ADHD half-completion in most spots.