Are you going to finish that?

I'm an idea person—I've always had lots of ideas. I keep a list in a notebook in my purse and try to hoard enough of them to keep me going and minimize the amount of time spent wondering "what should I be working on?" Ideas are fun! Ideas are the easy part.

 Turning those ideas into finished projects is another story.

"Are you going to finish that?"

The terrible truth is that it's only been in the last four years or so that I've started finishing things at all. I don't know if it was the result of my feeble long-term attention span (which we know isn't atypical for one's teens and early-twenties) or a lack of direction (what would I do with these things when I did finish? I had no idea), but I'd surely started and failed to finish hundreds of stories, comics and art pieces by the time I turned 22.

I try to think of all these false-starts as opportunities for creative growth. They were practice. I'm reminded of this quote from Monica Wood in The Pocket Muse: Endless Inspiration:

"Imagine—in full, horrific, Technicolor—that the first thing you ever wished to publish had actually been published."


It's good to know I'm not alone in my cringing there.

But at a certain point, you have to say "I'm ready and I'm going to FINISH THIS PROJECT once and for all." And then you realize "ready" may have been an overstatement and you type "how to finish things" into Google to procrastinate.

"Finishing something" shouldn't be much different than "working on something," right? Is there really more to it than "just keep going"? It certainly feels like there is—personally, I associated finishing with late nights, stress-eating, and breaking dates with friends so I can sit in front of my computer or art desk and slog along in lonely isolation. Since I'm not THAT terrible at planning projects, this is more often a fear than a reality. But some associations are hard to shake!

Still, despite these associations, but I have to say that a hard deadline—however unpleasant at the time—is the best motivator I've encountered in the battle to Finish Things. A friend relayed this anecdote to me that has stuck in my mind about how Oliver Sacks used the hardest of deadlines to finish a book he was struggling to write. He told himself, "You have ten days to write this book; if it's not done by then, you commit suicide."

And it worked: Under the "imagined threat," he managed to find his stride and finish the book with a day to spare. I'd think most of us need not go quite that far, but hey—it worked for him.

You can hear Oliver Sacks' story (and more) on this Radiolab podcast. (Thanks to Julie for the link!)

Girls!

This is a piece I started for the Illustration Friday prompt "vocal" last week, but didn't get a chance to finish. I've been doing a super-cartoony Zodiac series on my Tumblr (round-up coming soon) and I wanted to try my hand at something a bit more realistic. Ideally I'll do a couple more like this to put on my next round promotional materials. Maybe I can even come up with a good caption for this one...

I'm working on a textier post about my relationship with Finishing Things that'll hopefully appear in the next couple of days. Yes, more blog posts with words! I'm not sure what's gotten into me.