Keep coming back to it

Creative projects benefit from frequent visits

Big projects can be daunting. Writing a book, for instance, or producing an album or a series of paintings, means going from an idea to something tangible through months or years of effort.

A deadline is helpful. A deadline forces a certain focus. But once you have that deadline, my best tip for creative work is to simply keep coming back to it. The more time you spend touching the project the more you’re going to think about it. The more you think about it, the more ideas you’ll have. The more ideas you have, the more likely some of those ideas will be good ones. There is no substitute for this volume of time, and it can’t all happen at the end. It’s the repeated visits with the work, long before the deadline, that make it good.

Three times a week

I’m trying to keep this in mind as I’m working on the book that will be published as Golden Hours (likely in 2027). My manuscript is due in October. So, for the past several months, I’ve been writing “Golden Hours 1 2 3” on my planner page for each week. Each week, I need to visit the project for at least 30 minutes, three times a week (since three times a week is a habit). I sometimes do more, but in a busy week — say, while launching another book — that is the minimum.

The manuscript is a long way from done. But this time spent researching and brainstorming and outlining and thinking has already done a lot. I realized that one chapter really needed to be two because I was trying to combine too many concepts. I read an article that I decided I wanted to reference in a certain section. In one of those places in life where two things can be true at the same time, the constraint of a deadline forces productivity, but having an expanse of time before the deadline helps with thinking more broadly. I really like to have both.

Time is a creative partner

If you’re embarking on a big project that won’t be due for some time, you might find this practice helpful as well. As I tend to do what I write on my planner page for each week, simply putting the “Golden Hours 1 2 3” line on there nudges me to find a time. If your life is more tightly scheduled, you might need to block these times into your life more carefully. If things tend to pop up unexpectedly in your life, you might build in a back up slot too.

But when you keep coming back to it, you and the project become old friends. Because you’ve been talking so much, you find it easier to find things to talk about. You and time work together as a team, and time is a great creative partner.

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Big Time, my newest book, is now available everywhere books are sold! Please pick up a copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Books-a-Million, Hudson, your local book store, or ask at your library. I appreciate the support.