Never Give Up Ever I Love You
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“I’ve always thought that two things that make for good records are deadlines and small budgets.”
- Brian Eno
I’ve always been someone that felt deep in their bones that they were capable of greatness.
Do I think my creative output is great? No not always. Sometimes it isn’t even bad. It’s the word before bad. It makes the world a slightly worse place.
And I’m truly an insecure person. I seek reassurance from those I love, I overthink things, I live under a little dark cloud of assumption that everyone hates me. But there is nothing you could ever do or say that would convince me I’m not capable of tiny moments of true magic.
And it’s those moments that I’m fighting for, and it’s a fire I’ll never let anyone put out.
I believe I’m capable of true greatness and that drives me to keep going. That doesn’t mean I jump out of bed every morning swinging my willy around yelling I’m great, let's DO THIS, I mean that might help too, but in this post I’d love to tell the story about some things I’ve put in place over the years to help me achieve my dream.
My dream of not just creating stories that people can hold in their hands, but dog eared books full of stories and characters that people relate to, take comfort in, and accidentally leave behind on the tube and on buses and park benches.
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When you have a job, there’s a structure, right? A skeleton to your week. When you’re choosing a goal in your creative life, it can feel like staring out over the ocean at the horizon and it feels impossible and unattainable. So the first thing I realised I needed was a structure and a deadline.
Nine days ago, I began a 100 day programme.
I was listening to a podcast about movie making and an actor said:
“It was a 100 day shoot.”
I sat up in my chair and realised, that’s it! I need to be in Active Production. Turning up to a movie set. A 100 day shoot.
So I made my own production schedule:
Along with the idea of a structure, like I’m making a movie - here’s my thinking.
Getting up at 5am when it’s cold and your coffee machine is broken (true story, first day), you’ll come up with as many excuses not to climb out of bed as possible. So you need a focused, killer thought in your mind.
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If I get up and don’t have a razor sharp idea of what I’m going to achieve, and where it will end up, it won’t get done. So I’ve designed it to remove as many options as possible. I’m already busy with music production, I’m writing and recording a couple of little EPs, I'm figuring out how to get myself back onto a stage and play live, I’m experimenting with sharing more music on instagram, I’m working on illustrations for my book, and I track all of this in a giant document called my ACP (Active Creative Projects) because I just can’t help myself.
So at 5am I don’t want to have to make decisions. Even about which story to write.
My production schedule involves the following rules, and they’re working:
• No strategising, chapter planning or notes. Writing only. Just write. Get in the flow.
• No decision making about which story to write. First three days of the work week are my novel, the last two are for my short stories.
• Don’t break the streak.
• At least 2000 words on Where Else Can Birds Go, and at least 1 word on my short stories (short stories are harder to set word count goals so it’s just about showing up. Creative momentum is everything).
Let's talk about tracking those 2000 words. When I finished the first 55,000 word draft of my novel, Where Else Can Birds Go, back in 2015, I finished it by using similar rules - writing an hour a day before work, aiming for 2000 words a week and tracking my progress. Here’s what that looked like back then:
You can see from the graph, because of course everything needs a chart AND a graph, I might have stumbled in the early weeks but then I really took off. The green line is what I’d achieve if I stuck to my goal, the blue line was the reality.
Now, ten years later, I’m drawing on my success with this method and going again. Here’s the latest version of the same thing.
Ugly.
I still tracked every week, even the week where I wrote MINUS TWELVE WORDS.
But week 11, ah week 11 is when my new Production Schedule started. I turned up. I was on set at 5am ready to go and while I didn’t reach my goal, I made a pretty good stab at it.
Check out the graph.
You might have to zoom in to see it but, we have lift off!
A reminder, we’re not talking about starting the book. It’s been ‘finished’ a few times, but not up to my own standards, and I’ve learned more about my own voice over the years and learned more about how to tell the story I want to tell. So every time I finish, I tear it up and go again. This really feels like the one though, and this era kicks in while I’m re-writing Acts Two & Three of the book.
I’ve lived in this world for fifteen years. I can’t wait for you to go there.
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I’ve thrown enough numbers and charts at you for one blog entry. I’ll leave you with this. No motivation is too silly, no motivation is too small. I’m saving a lot of little illustrations and coding notes and images for this website at the moment, and I was getting disheartened that I was spinning in circles. I named the folder for all this stuff Never Give Up Ever I Love You and it honestly gives me a little lift every time I see it.
That goes for you too. Find your rhythm and turn up to the movie set.
Never give up ever, I love you.
Russell James ✈︎