What’s an effective process for completing creative work?
Last updated 2023 October 27 | More of my big questions
Sub-questions
- How do reading, writing, and thinking fit together?
- How do I decide what to work on?
- How can I make progress on multiple projects at once?
- How can I make progress on long-term projects while making time for short-term projects?
Bookshelf
Related books I’ve read since 2021. Links go to my book review.
Start More Than You Can Finish
by
2023-10-14
2k to 10k* 👍
by
2022-09-18
Finish
by
2022-07-06
Workshops, podcasts + videos
- Planning for a summer of writing
- Watched My To-do List Philosophy
- Designing your system for creativity: Outputs
- Designing your system for creativity: Inputs
- Listened to Tender Discipline on Hurry Slowly Podcast
- Make Progress by Being Underambitious
- Watched Plan Your 2023 Writing Year
- Listened to Learning to Reverse Engineer a Book
- Flights of Foundry: Where to Start and How to Navigate Developmental Editing
Articles
Articles or longer responses I’ve written.
- Defining constraints for a new creative project
- How I approach crafting a blog post ⭐
- Discerning the value of note-taking ⭐
- Which projects are worth doing? How to evaluate creative ideas and decide whether to spend your time on them (Cascadia Inspired) ⭐
- Personal Process Improvements
- National Novel Writing Month 2022 recap
- Meta Annual Planning
- The reckoning of the to-do list
- Personal Process Improvements
- Writing Metrics and Capitalism
- SFF writing critique method
Notes
Bookmarks and quotes from articles I’ve read.
Work process
- A note-gathering and idea-making process
- Engendering intimacy through writing on screens
- Share your processes
- Writing fiction vs. blogging
- Dailyish
- Non Zero Days
- Choose the Day’s Highlight at the Start of the Day
- Article pairing: don’t let habits get in the way
- Fail Small, Not Big
- The Daily Grind vs. Sprint Cycles
- It’s Not Really About Being a Writer
Work + rest
- Three or Four Hours
- Rest ethic
- Breaks scale up with project duration
- Monk Mode: time-limited commitments
What to work on
- Create your own niche
- Having the patience to find better goals
- What will be a relief to finish?
- Crack open projects you don’t know where to start
- Decide before doing
- What does your project need?
- Work that lasts and work of the moment
- Rules for New Projects
- Investing time in longform writing
- Legacy Projects
Project planning
Psychology of work
- Written is better than perfect
- Scared by versions of ourselves
- Feeling like You’re Making Progress on Big Projects
- A Gift for the Future
- Actualizing Our Tasks
- The Importance of Maintenance
Fiction writing process
- The Goldilocks word count
- Make a punch list of edits
- Developmental edits on your own work
- Get your computer to read to you
- Write yourself an edit letter
- Using a comic style script as outline
- A Playful Writing Exercise for Description
- C.L. Polk’s Scene Outlining Process
- Getting Unstuck in Your Story
- Reverse Outlining to Gauge the Status of a Draft
6 replies on “Effective Creative Processes”
I have too many pages to fit in my nav! Here’s a sitemap of all the pages on this website. Blog Mind Garden Index Links to blog about Big Questions Big Questions Balanced Lifestyle Effective Creative Processes Writing Fiction Thinking Better Information Diet Future of the Internet Resisting Fascism Building Community Transforming Capitalism Collections Cool…
Spring is here — it was a big wildlife week in the neighborhood! Heard coyotes howling in the greenbelt and the frogs started their evening chorus, saw a doe in the backyard and a hummingbird out front, and spotted the first bees cruising. But, allergies also hit me hard 🤧
I downloaded my Google Takeout data. I’d forgotten they own Blogger and was delighted to discover they had atom feeds for all of my old college blogs! No photos, but still funny to see what I wrote about twenty years ago. I’ve marked the date of my very first post on my calendar so I can celebrate the anniversary come September 😁🥂
I’ve been working on keeping fewer tabs open on my phone. I was doing pretty well till yesterday but left six tabs open overnight 😂
Stuff I Did:
About eight hours of consulting work
Developed a new revision plan for my novel
Started exploring webfonts for my consulting website
Went to Homebrew Website Club
Watched a webinar about home design
Walked with a friend twice
Baked scones
One appointment
Reading:
Read Alien Mercenary’s Destiny by Mina Carter and re-read The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan
Started reading Effortless by Greg McKeown
DNF’d Breath of Life by Jocelynn Drake and Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Added five books to my TBR
Words I looked up / concepts I learned:
cognate
caliginous
No free lunch theorem
New newsletter I’m trying out:
Ann Friedman’s newsletter
Pretty things I saw:
Ryan Swierczek of Swierczek Design Co — I like the color palettes, especially the photo tints, and the photo collages on their posters
Roland Kraemer on ThatBloom.com — lots of neat abstract natural photo series, and I thought the inverted cursor overlay was cool looking (although the size changing was a little confusing)
Parag Sahasrabudhe on parag.micro.blog — a series of colorful doors in Puerto Rico
Website Changes:
New organizing section!
I created a new section called “Big Questions” which organizes a lot of my notes and reading under broad questions that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past couple years:
Balanced Lifestyle
Effective Creative Processes
Writing Fiction – this one hasn’t been populated yet
Thinking Better
Information Diet
Future of the Internet
Resisting Fascism
Building Community
I got some good ideas at Homebrew Website Club that I’ve only started implementing on the ‘balanced lifestyle’ page, so these still have some work to do. I also need to figure out what system I’m going to follow to update them since it’s all manual 😉
New page
I also finally published a page collecting “neat websites” as an addition to my pages for interesting people and cool artists and blogroll. I’d been sitting on it, feeling like it needed more content before I could post it, but whatev, may as well post now and can keep adding 🤷♀️
This Article was mentioned on tracydurnell.com
Replied to Advice on Blogging by Jim Nielsen (blog.jim-nielsen.com) As readers, I think the answer we’re looking for in a question like this…
Right now I’m embroiled in extensive revisions for a fiction novel. I’ve been working on this book on and off for years, first…
Tracy Durnell: Effective Creative Processes – Links to books, blogs, and other resources, with a lot of emphasis on writing resources