This is a selfish article.
It's selfish because I'm currently pulling my hair out over even finishing the first page on a web comic that I've been plotting since freshman year. Every time I clear my desk off to work on it, my stomach seems to transfigure into lead and I just slink off to my room to scroll through Tumblr for about an hour. After all, that's a lot easier than inking something I might regret.
Losing your drive to keep going on a creative project is quite common, judging from my own endeavors and the other artsy folk I've spoken to. And you really think I'd know how to easily finish something by now, with one novel coming down the pike and a 700-or-so-page draft I'm co-writing hopefully soon to follow.
But I'm struggling to see anything good about my web comic's progress right now, and I know that a lot of other artists grapple with similar . So, I'm going to regurgitate what seeing a singular novel to completion has taught me, in hopes that I can unstick both my brain and yours.
Here's what you need to know--and I need to remember--to get a large-scale project to the finish line.
1. It isn't going to be perfect the first time.
Shocker, right? A sketch is never perfect until it is lined, a sentence is never well-written until it is restructured, a note is never in harmony until the singer has had a chance to tune. When you go to the drawing board expecting your foundation to be perfect, or to somehow bear even a remote resemblance to the final product, you're just gonna get stuck in the planning stage and never get anywhere at all. Repeat after me: Good enough is good enough.
2. It isn't going to be perfect the last time.
So you've gotten past the planning stage and now you know where you're going. Great! But does having a GPS and a schedule for your metaphorical road trip ensure that everything goes off without a hitch? Never. You'll run out of Cheez-Its, and somebody is, infallibly, going to need to pee when you're in the middle of nowhere. Just because you've sketched references of your characters, or you've plotted each chapter of your book, or you've practiced bunch of times for your musical performance--none of it means that the final product will be perfect. It never will be, because making art is a human skill, not an assembly line that halts whenever you make a mistake. You mess up, you meet difficulties, you keep going. Good enough is good enough.
3. Create for yourself, not for an audience.
It's easy to toss a quick sketch, a song or a chapter online for instant validation, but likes and reposts absolutely cannot be the dominant force that drives a project. It will lead to its own ruin. Humans are more likely to complete a task and produce high-quality work if they simply enjoy doing it versus if they get a reward for completion. If you find yourself rushing through your work just to put it up online somewhere, it might be time to do some introspection and find out why you formally started your project in the first place.
At the end of the day, creating a finished product requires dedication, introspection and keeping the themes of your work important to you. Now, if I could keep all of these in mind as I did my line-work, maybe I could finish the first four panels of my stupid comic.
