The Task Master

First off, I would like to apologize to the followers of my blog. It has been a little while since my last entry. I have been unusually busy lately with trying to purchase a home in this terrible economy, and have preparing for a visit from my Mother. With that said, the topic of this entry is all about keeping on task.

One of the most important things to think about when taking part in any creative venture is making time to do the work. Anything worthwhile is going to take time to create, and one needs to set the time aside to do it. There are thousands of excuses not to do the work, trust me I know them all, but if one is serious about the work than a schedule should be set up and strictly adhered to. A professor of mine once said “everything in life exists to keep you from doing your work”. He was talking about painting, but that can be applied to any kind of creative task. It’s good to think about it that way. It keeps things in perspective. There are things one absolutely has to do, but one needs to figure out how important one’s work is and make sure there is time to do it.

When I was laid off from my job, I thought it would be incredibly easy to work on my writing. I found out that’s not the case, for me it’s actually much harder. When I was working my time was more structured There were certain things I had to do at certain times, and it was easy to throw in a schedule to fit in that time frame. Now that I’m not working I’ve taken over the all the household chores. There’s always something to do around the house so sometimes I just have to sort out my time better. It’s tough though with the unstructured nature of my day. I, probably like most people get, get distracted easily. Everything demands my attention, and sometimes I feel like I have to take care of everything before I can concentrate on the task at hand. That never works because there is always something that will exist to keep one from doing the work one needs to do. What I do is set daily goals for myself. I set a certain number of words to write every single day. Sometimes it’s easy to do, and sometimes it’s a struggle to achieve it, it depends on the day. What the goal does is help me keep working toward the purpose of finishing my project instead of it lingering on the shelf for way longer than it should, or maybe never getting completed at all. By setting goals I was able to achieve something I never thought possible, and that is finish a manuscript for a novel, and now working on a second one as well. Setting these daily goals can work wonders when completing lengthy works. Give it a try.

A comment to the people out there who say they have to wait for inspiration before they can work. That’s all bullshit. Sure there is a certain amount of inspiration when it comes to creative work, but the bulk of any creative venture is a lot of hard work. I think the greatest inspiration comes when one forces oneself to keep working, even when one doesn’t feel like it. Pushing oneself past creative plateaus is a great way to come up with new ideas and to push the farther than one might have originally thought possible. If one always waits for the muse to strike, or for the feeling of wanting to work to come, then there is a good possibility that the work will never get finished. Now I’m going to take some of my own advice and work on my manuscript some more. Until next time, thanks for reading.