Navigating Doubts

I like writing because when I write, I gain insight and clarity into my own thoughts. It’s a space where I can make conscious all the undifferentiated, inarticulate energies that move me. I write to illuminate my internal world and it is a wholly rewarding experience that I regularly look forward to. When I approach it as an act of self-discovery in this way, I don’t overly identify with the writing and so I have fun with it.

Sharing my writing is kind of the opposite though. I feel anxious, risk averse, defensive. I identify myself with the quality of the work, worried about what other people will think of me when they read it. It doesn’t much matter how people actually react, no amount of positive feedback can relieve the anxiety. In fact, sometimes the positive feedback triggers a new anxiety of having to match the previous success.

Writing for myself is an almost guaranteed positive experience of insight and growth. Sharing my work triggers the all the neurotic, anxious, and fearful parts.

I could just write for myself, as a personal activity, entries into a journal and leave it at that. But there is something compelling and important for me about sharing these thoughts with other people. The promise of connection, of knowing that these thoughts that bubble up in my internal experience might not only be mine privately, but a common experience shared by others. That potential for a deep connection through the work is an exciting prospect.

My better self realizes that it’s worth the risk, but my neurotic self simply won’t get on board with that idea. Not without some cajoling.

So, in order to obey the bigger me who understands the value of putting my work out into the world, I need to find ways of navigating around the reluctant self. I need to circumvent that self that looks for any and all ways of weaseling out of being vulnerable.

One way I’ve done this is to brute force it. To just write and go and not think and run with my eyes closed. This usually works for a little while, but as soon as I stop to catch my breath, I get tackled from behind. A month, maybe two, but I’m soon completely derailed.

No, if I’m going if I am to make a long term, sustained go at this creative stuff, I need a more considered approach. I need an approach that gives me plenty of space and time to recognize that the perceived danger is an illusion. I need the mental space to allow the voices of doubt to say their peace and settle down. Once they have made their voices heard, I know where they all are, and they become more manageable. I can navigate to my destination without crashing into them.

When the work is done, they go back to where they came from, chattering amongst themselves in the dark, ready to emerge again the next time they sense danger. In the meantime, I’ll start a new creative project, in my safe little corner of discovery before it’s time to cross their territory again.

Three Things

A game that I sometimes like to play to generate ideas is another one from improv called Three Things. It’s normally played with multiple people in a circle, with one person passing a category to the person next to them. The receiver then has come up with three things in that category as quickly as possible.

For example, I might say to the person on my right, “three blue things”. That person would then say the first three blue things that come to mind. Something like blueberries, smurfs, and the aliens from avatar. The idea is to go quickly, accuracy is secondary to speed.

While I enjoy playing with other people, I sometimes just play by myself when I don’t have an idea, or want to create divergent directions for something I’m working on.

Say you’re trying to come up with a story, you don’t really have anything to start, so you just generate ideas. You might tell yourself, three places with a castle or three planets. Don’t overthink it. Then immediately launch into the three places. So three places in England might be Stonehenge, a bog, and London Bridge.

The point is not to have a good idea. The point is to be obvious and go fast and take the first ideas that come. Obviously, you don’t want to trip over yourself, so you just have to try it several times to find a solid rhythm.

It’s the most fun when you surprise yourself. Maybe you make a mistake, but that mistake leads you to an idea you wouldn’t have thought of, something you’d like to pursue. The point is not to get it right, but to subvert your normal inhibitory thoughts and allow your subconscious to speak for you.

And of course there’s no reason you have to stop at three. You could do five or ten. Too many though, and it might interfere with your ability to come up with ideas quickly.

It takes a little practice to find a rhythm and flow, but it can be an excellent tool to help you get out of your own way.

Constraints

It can be invigorating to live within walls and work within restrictions. Such things can, oddly, be liberating, as we are forced to learn to evade and elude. 

Abbas Kiarostami

The quote above, from the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami calls our attention to a counterintuitive fact about constraints and creative freedom. Often we seek to maximize freedom, believing that rules hold us back, preventing us from truly saying what we want to say. But the opposite is often true. Working without constraints can lead to meandering, muddy results in our work. Or worse, too much freedom can often lead to paralysis and an inability to get any work done at all. 

Some of the work I am most proud of, I did under extreme time pressure. The limit of time forced me to think through things clearly, not wanting to waste a minute, and to make direct and bold choices about what I was doing. There was no room to hedge or deliberate and I had to make choices based on what was possible within the limits. I recall these projects with a certain fondness for the intense level of focus each one brought.

Barriers compel us to react against them and manoeuvre beyond, just as a flow of water changes direction when blocked. They help us define ourselves and our work, refine our powers of deception, disarm the means of control. 

Constraints, I have come to believe, are one of the primary means by which we define our voice. Personal style is, in a sense, nothing more than our own limitations coming into contact with a challenge. Our work is an artifact of this limited self coming into contact with and engaging with the boundaries of the creative game.

The constraints of the many strict poetic forms that exist offer vibrant challenges, and the resulting verse often has flavours that the poet himself never knew he was capable of. 

Paradoxically, the boundaries are useful precisely because they give us something push up against. We are faced with a specific challenge of seeing how we can bend and break them. The rules are not sacred oracles to be revered, but like a good sparring partner, they can help us engage all of our creative faculties in our struggle against them. 

What I like about rules is that they forever stimulate the imagination

The rules, as the saying goes, are meant to be broken. That doesn’t mean we dispense with them. On the contrary, we would do well to embrace them, putting them in place precisely so that we can stretch them, along with our creative faculties, to their limits.

For readers who are not familiar with Abbas Kiarostami and his work, he was an Iranian filmmaker who had to work with many constraints in his films partly because of the strict censorship laws in his home country. Watching his films, you’re never aware of this though, and they provide a wonderful lesson in embracing constraints as a path to greater creative expression.

The quotes from above all came from Lessons with Kiarostami, edited by Paul Cronin. I highly recommend it as a source of inspiration, even if you aren’t a filmmaker or know Kiarostami’s work. It’s full of timeless wisdom on creativity and making your own path.

Half-Life

Half-life is an improv game in which players play a scene in one minute. Once the minute is up, they play it again, trying to get through the whole thing, but this time in only 30 seconds. Then again in 15 seconds, 5 seconds, and finally 1 second.

It’s great fun to do on the improv stage, and the shorter and more ridiculous the lengths get, the more fun it becomes. The point is not to make a good scene, but to fail utterly and have a good laugh. 

It also acts to focus us, to get used to working within limits. The extreme time limit places our attention squarely, and we can’t worry about whether or not we’re doing a good job.

You can play with time, as in the improv version, but we can find similar ideas in any art. In painting, there is a common exercise of trying to capture the essence of an image in as few paint strokes or lines as possible. Many forms of poetry have strict rules and limits, and we could easily translate this idea to word counts. 

The main idea is just to play and see how far you can push your own limits. I think it’s best to approach this kind of thing as a game, have fun with it and let what emerges surprise you. 

I came across some frames from “Taxi Driver” on Pinterest and felt inspired to use stills from that movie as my “world” to draw from. When I was younger, studying filmmaking at UCSD, I was big into Martin Scrosese. I always loved the energy in his films and listening to him nerd out about the cinema. Though I haven’t made a short film in years, I still find a lot of inspiration in the movies.

Inspiration and Presence

When we encounter a piece of art that delights us, we creative types feel an urge to invoke that same power in ourselves. It’s not enough for us to merely appreciate what we’ve seen. We want to inhabit that same spirit to express ourselves with the same level of grace.

So, we try it. At first, we might feel that things are going well, but as we spend more time with our work, we might find ourselves encountering our own inadequacy. We look at what we’ve done and compare it to the source of our inspiration and we realize that it is nothing like what inspired us. It falls woefully short of the mark.

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth

— Kurt Vonnegut

Many of us throw up our hands in despair. Maybe we move on to the next thing, the next inspiration. We repeat the cycle, again and again, bringing none of our projects to completion, rarely settling in deeply enough to master our craft. We begin to wonder if we’re just not cut out for this creativity stuff, and we start to resist and avoid our creative work. Some of us give up entirely.

The problem is that inspiration, while powerful, is short-lived. I like to think of it as kind of like a “Nitro boost”. Great for a quick shot of energy under the right circumstances, but it can’t carry you the whole way.

What we need when we’re trying to make any kind of meaningful art is a foundation to carry us along. We need the right tools, habits and sense of purpose to show up day after day so that when inspiration strikes, we can make the best use of it.

When we are present with our work, we can begin to construct this foundation. Presence allows us to see what we need, to seek help and to develop the tools for the job. Presence gives us the ability to slow down and take stock, to assess what is happening and to temper our expectations so that we can play the long game.

Instead of unhelpfully comparing our own works in progress to the beautiful work that inspires us, presence helps us stay engaged with what is right in front of us. We can see that no matter how inadequate we might feel, we are doing what we love to do at this moment. By putting our pencil to the page, there is already magic happening.

When we learn to focus our sights on the small moments of the present, we can take each step forward, and instead of seeing how far we need to go, we learn to enjoy the journey. And when the time comes to run with our boost of inspiration, we’re ready for it.

Page of Suck

A technique I like to employ when I’m feeling stuck, especially when I am feeling the unhelpful pressure of self expectation, is a concept I like to call “Page of Suck.”

It can be especially helpful if I’m just getting started, or if I’m frustrated with the way things are coming together.

The idea is simple. You identify what you are trying to do well, and you do the opposite. You try to make the worst drawing you can, or write the worst story possible. Ask yourself, what am I trying to do well, and what would it look like if I did a crap job?

There are a few benefits to this exercise:

First, it takes the pressure off. You’re not trying to reach a skill level that you may or may not have. You’re not trying to make things flow well or communicate clearly or make a powerful statement or look cool. Instead, you’re going against your better instincts and you’re allowing your gremlins to rush out into the open, wreak havoc on your art, and have their way.

Second, in trying to make it suck, it can help to identify the elements that make the thing work or not. The shift in focus to the opposite, to what makes something bad, can help us understand what might make it good.

A third benefit is that it can open up your view to other possibilities that you hadn’t previously considered. It can help you see from a new perspective and give you insight into an alternative solution to your problem.

Sometimes we hold our projects too preciously and we need to just let go. We need techniques and practices for getting out of our own heads, and the page of suck is one of my personal favorites. If nothing else, it can be a fun way to have a good laugh at yourself.

Recently, I’ve been playing with drawing as a kind of visual music making. I don’t know if any of these read that way to the viewer, but the direct process of seeing and responding to what sparks an interest feels, in a weird way, like dancing to music.

It goes along with some of what I’ve been thinking about with regards to finding joy in the art making process. Here I’m letting go of explicit meanings and allowing the forms to simply play off of one another. To see how the lines interlock and flow to create a rhythmic harmony within the drawing.

It’s a direct process, more akin to improvisation than anything deliberate and thought out. There is no brief, no purpose, no plan.

When we listen to music, it feels like a kind of spontaneous emergence. A song starts with a pattern. Those patterns evolve and new ones arise. The song builds and changes. There are moments of familiarity and moments of surprise. 

Each movement depends on what came before. You don’t get any satisfaction out of a song by jumping to the end. The best part is the best part because of everything that came before.

We listen to music not to have listened to music, we listen to music because it feels good as the song is playing.

Often, when we’re creating, especially professionally, we can get caught up in our creative process as a means to an end. The work can become impersonal and feel like a chore. We forget why we got into this work in the first place.

What we need to do when we find ourselves in this place, is learn to find joy in the journey again. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Something to Try

Two Dances

Often, when we’re in the thick of our professional lives, we can lose touch with what inspires us. There are obligations to fulfill, people to please and tasks to get done. We hardly have time to think about or feel into what truly moves us. 

Here is a simple exercise that I found helpful in reconnecting with what inspires me.

Pick two songs. Two songs that you can dance to, whatever that means for you. The first one should be one that you don’t care that much for. Maybe it even kind of annoys you. 

The second one should be one that, when you hear it, it lights you up. Pick one of your all-time favorites. Maybe something you haven’t heard recently, but you know you love it.

Play the mediocre song first. I encourage you to get up and actually try to dance around to it. The more of your body you can use, the better. Moving our bodies and paying attention to the sensations that we feel can give us insights that we simply can’t get by listening alone.

Try not to worry about whether or not you’re a good dancer. If it helps, don’t think of it as dancing. It’s an experiment in moving to music.

Notice how it feels to dance to this song. Pay attention to how you are moving and what kind of effort it takes to continue. Try to get through the whole song.

Then, put on the track that you love. 

Notice the difference. How does your body feel playing the song you love vs. the song you don’t care for? Did you move differently? What kinds of thoughts did you have as you danced to the two songs? 

Notice to the energy you feel with the inspiring song and remember that.

The great thing about music is that we can almost always put on our favorite songs and bring some semblance of that feeling back on demand.

The next time you find yourself wondering if you really want to do something or not, you can conjure up this feeling of inspiration as a point of comparison. It might not be the only factor in making your decision, but it just might help you connect with something important that otherwise would have remained hidden.

Some Inspiration

Alan Watts

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you're dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.

— Alan Watts

Alan Watts has been an inspiration to me for many years now and I often find myself pulling ideas from his work. For anyone who might not know him, he was a writer and public speaker in the who, in the 50s, 60s, and 70s popularized many of the ideas of Zen Buddhism in the west.

For a brief and entertaining introduction to his work, here is a collection of short animations to some of his talks made by the creators of South Park.

First though, this is Nico! He’s a curious lad who often, to the chagrin of his caretakers, disappears for days on end, only to emerge mostly unscathed and with some new pet or treasure.

And now for a few thoughts…

Nothing New Under the Sun

An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them.

― Stephen Fry

It’s a common admonition that, if we are going to distinguish ourselves, we need to find something new to put out into the world. We need to express something that our audience has never seen before.

The problem we face is that we live in an age where everything seems to have been discovered and all of humanity’s knowledge is a Google search away. The secrets that do remain seem locked away behind years of toil and sheer luck. There is hardly an inch of our world that has not been revisited time and time again. We are told that even the slopes of Mt. Everest are littered with the trash of the myriad tourists who attempt to climb its once impossible peak.

Everywhere we go, we are aware of the thousands of others who have gone before us. When we pick up a new novel, we find ourselves presented with what we thought was our own original idea, already fully realized. Our brilliant concept for a painting, we discover has been done, many times before, by people much more talented than us.

Worse, we find outselves in competition not only with the masses of living artists all over the world, but with every artist that has ever lived. Is it the best we can do to toil in the shadows of those giants of our chosen field?

The task before us seems impossible.

But perhaps it’s always been this way. As the author of Ecclesiastes lamented over 2000 years ago:

Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.

— Ecclesiastes 1:10 - 11

Perhaps the great artists have always understood the impossibility of the task, of looking into the unknown, working and hoping to find something worth bringing back.

The work is hard, and most of us won’t bring back anything that humanity will cherish for ages to come. Most of us will not become eminent artists or authors, because that goal is nearly impossible. 

But by leaning into that impossible task, by attempting to see that which we cannot yet see. By trying and failing, and trying again, we come to see ourselves and our place in the universe more clearly. We find ourselves expanding beyond what we thought was possible and growing into larger versions of ourselves. 

The point, we realize, is not to create something new, out there, but to create something new within us.

Cool Stuff

Here’s a fun read from the Oxford Royale Academy titled “5 Great Discoveries That Haven’t Yet Been Made”

For a glimpse of some of the fascinating animal life in our planet’s vast, yet to be explored deep ocean, here’s the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Research Institute’s (MBARI) Top 10 Deep-Sea Animals on YouTube.

Something to Try

Here’s a tool I’ve been using recently. It comes from David Perell, a writer, teacher and entrepreneur. The tip is to end your working session with a quick summary, noting:

1. Where are you stuck? 

2. What are your goals for the next session?

3. What were you thinking about when you ended your creative session?

In this case, David is talking to writers, but I also have been finding this little discipline helpful for illustration, design, and other creative endeavors as well. 

The next time you start your work, you’ll have this summary that helps you get back into the headspace that you were in when you last left off, which helps you get back into the flow more quickly.

Try it and let me know how it goes!

The most overused word, creativity, should in fact be described as discovery.

— Milton Glaser

Whether we’re writing a short story, or creating an illustration for a client, the best works of art and communication always seem to have a strong idea at the center of them. 

But how do we come up with a good idea?

Some people seem to be founts of great ideas. When we encounter these people, we compare ourselves to them and often conclude that we aren’t very good at coming up with ideas. We tell ourselves, that ideas just aren't our strength.

In an excellent and brief interview (included below), the iconic graphic designer, Milton Glaser shares a bit of his process and walks us through some examples of how he discovered his ideas as he worked. He shows us that often, good ideas only emerge after we jump in and start playing around. We might start with the first thing that comes to mind, and put together a sketch or a quick draft. This starting point doesn’t need to be any good, it just needs to get us moving.

When we start moving ideas start to emerge. When we start writing, characters show up and stories reveal themselves. When we start drawing, shapes appear that suggest other shapes. Half formed ideas, aesthetic ideas, and a lot of ideas that won’t make the cut. We might even be tempted to settle on of these early ideas, giving in to a certain anxious feeling that this is as good as it’s going to get. 

The discipline is to keep working, keep searching until we reach the moment where something surprises and delights us.

It’s a special combination of doing and and paying close attention. When we can learn to do this, we can finally gain access to those interesting, arresting, and delightful things we call ideas.

Here’s the interview:

And here’s a little piece I drew of a heroic sort who’s hard at work. Just look at him thinking up ideas!

More Good Stuff

• Nicholas Blechman, Creative Director at The New Yorker Magazine has a nice course on idea generation over at Domestika. It’s a short introduction to a process for idea generation that pairs nicely with the Milton Glaser interview above.

• If you’re interested in a deeper, more conceptual dive, Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From is a wonderful exploration of idea generation and the factors that contribute to them.

Something to Try

One little game that I sometimes like to play if I’m stuck for an idea is what I’ll call the “Alphabet Game”. It’s a very simple game where, instead of brainstorming ideas at random, you go through and brainstorm using the letters of the alphabet as your guide. 

So let’s say you’re trying to find a name for a male character in a story, you might start with Arthur for the letter A, then Bertrand for B, and so on. Go through the whole alphabet, or stop when you’ve found a name you like. I often find that using an arbitrary rule like this helps me break away from my usual patterns of thinking.

“And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.”

― Neil Gaiman

Impostor!

As creatives, many of us struggle with the feeling of being an impostor. We might think our work is just not good enough to share. We might compare ourselves to our heroes and despair at how far we fall short. Or we might struggle just to start for fear of facing our own shortcomings. We might ask ourselves, “Who are we to take up space in the universe when there are so many more eloquent, more skilled, more talented people out there?”

The dancer and choreographer Martha Graham has some great things to say on this subject:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.”

It’s a great quote, eloquent and inspiring. The problem though is that if we’re not careful, we can misinterpret those words in a kind of self important or entitled way. We might think, “If my unique expression in the world is imporant, all it takes is putting myself out there and I’ll see results!”

The problem is, chances of success in the most visible and obvious external ways is very low for artists. When we start to put our work out in the world, we are inevitably met with indifference. No one sees our work but a handful of friends and family. The evidence we see easily overshadows our intial inspiration and we stop creating, unmotivated to keep going because we feel as if there is no point.

And that’s where the second part of the quote comes in. It’s the part that doesn’t get quoted as often, but I think it completely transforms its meaning:

“It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

The second half of this quote informs us that our expectations about becoming famous or even making a living at what we do are misguided. The world does not “need” our work in the sense that it will no doubt continue as it has always done without us. It may well never be important to anyone else that we’ve shown up and spent all of the hours practicing our craft, searching our soul for that particular turn of phrase or stroke of the paintbrush.

It doesn’t matter. She tells us that it is not our business, it is not our job to decide whether or not it’s good enough. What is our job is to be true to ourselves, to speak clearly and learn to articulate that which is unique within us, and whether or not the world gives a damn is not our problem.

To be an impostor is to be a fake. To try to meet some standard that someone else has set. If however, we take Graham’s advice seriously, we can shift our focus from external forms of success to keeping “the channel open”.

If we can learn to focus on pursuing our own authentic voice as our primary concern, then thinking of ourselves as impostors no longer makes any sense.

Cool and useful things by other people

• Here is Neil Gaiman’s post from 2017 where I pulled the quote up top from. He has this lovely little anecdote which many of you may already know, but it’s such a helpful thing to remember that even highly successful people feel the same things we all do. Maybe even moreso!

• Julian Shapiro’s “Guide to Writing Well”is a short, free, and a very clear headed guide to structuring the writing process. Julian has a great frame for non-fiction writing as a kind of therapy. The idea is that you start with something that is a problem you want to solve. You then use the task of writing to work that problem out and then share what you’ve learned. This makes it less a vanity project and puts it more into the realm of personal exploration, which I always find to be much more rewarding because no matter how the written piece performs in the world, you will at the very least grow as you write it.

What seems like the fast way in the moment is the long way in the end.

— Via the Sunday Brainfood Newsletter from Farnam Street

Just Show Up

Several months ago, I decided to try writing one short story a day for 100 days. The idea was not to generate good stories, but just to get into a daily habit of writing short stories from start to finish. I needed a practice to help me get out of my own way.

Most days I wrote for about a half hour to an hour, but some days, I only had a few minutes in me to put together a story. It didn’t matter, what mattered was that I showed up and that the story had some kind of beginning, middle and end.

Here’s what I learned.

First, I learned that I could do it. I developed a sense of confidence and pride as I saw my library of little stories grow. It turned out not to be that hard to sit down and pull together something that had a vaguely story like shape in a relatively short amount of time.

Second, I learned that by letting go of trying to be good, I would more often than not, find myself in a flow. Once I could just write and immerse myself in the world of the story, I often discovered that quite a few interesting ideas and even some decent drafts emerged.

Finally, I learned that it was fun. It was a delight to see these surprise ideas coming from places I wouldn’t have thought of had I sat down to write something “good”. I often found myself going in directions I never would have thought to take, had I outlined or plotted things in advance.

While I am no longer writing a short story every day, I have kept up the practice of showing up daily for a bit of writing time. And while each day might feel very much like the same, as time goes on, I’m seeing how my work is changing and growing. Whether it’s working on a short article like this, a short story or comic, the daily habit has been the foundation of many of my personal projects.

Recommended

Cool and useful things by other people.

Shut Up and Write

If you want some accountability showing up daily, I’ve found the Shut Up and Write community to be a great way to stay motivated. Just sitting with other writers and working has an effect of making the often difficult task of creative work that much more enjoyable. It’s been a huge help for me in maintaining my daily creative habit day after day for the last few years. 

Shut Up and Write

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Since I’m not a performer by trade, you might wonder what I mean by performance anxiety? Well, what I’m talking about is a feeling that I get when I’m working on something, and it’s coming along and I feel like, hey this is pretty fun. I’m in a state of flow. However, as I add more details and flesh out the image, I take a step back and I see nothing but the flaws. The whole thing feels awkward and ugly. The temptation at this point is to abandon the project and start fresh.

The problem, of course, is that nothing ever gets done this way. Nothing ever gets to a stage where I can feel proud of it.

Recently I’ve come up with a little trick for working through that. I call it choosing practice over performance.

Choosing practice means that I’m choosing to focus on learning, rather than on the outcome. I’m choosing to focus on a small set of particular elements within the painting. I'm choosing to let go of vague judgments, notions of good and bad. It means being deliberate and setting a clear goal for myself.

Sometimes that goal is more mindful, like recognizing the anxiety and continuing anyway. At other times it is more technical, something like looking at an artist that I admire and seeing how I might apply some of their techniques to my work. Sometimes it is nothing more than getting to the end. It can be anything I want to work on and learn, but the important thing is to have some specific activity of focus during the working session. The key is in defining specifically what success looks like for this painting and letting go of the rest.

The end result might not be the greatest painting the world has ever seen, but I will have learned something, and over time, all of those somethings add up to better and better paintings, regardless of how I might feel about them.

So, in the spirit of starting, I wanted to share some of my work in progress as I hash out the visual language of a story I’ve written. I’ve been doing a lot of sketches and exploring different styles, and I thought it would be fun to capture a timelapse of one of those sessions, so here it is.

Once I have a general idea of what the picture will be, I try to sketch out, super quickly, several rough compositions. I’ll generate between 20 and 30 of these small thumbnail sketches, spending no more than a few minutes on each one.

Doing this gives me the opportunity to try a lot of different options rapidly. The idea is to work out the big picture problems, problems like composition, blocking, character poses, etc. and give myself several options to compare against one another. The more time I spend here, the more I can get into a state of flow when I get to work on the final image, and it almost always helps me to a better end result.