Real talk: I suck at prioritizing my creative projects unless there’s a hard deadline I need to adhere to. What I mean is, if someone else is depending on my portion of the work—an editor, artist, etc.—then hell yeah, I’ll churn that motherfucker out and give it
But if it’s just a project that I’m working on “whenever” that has no publisher yet, no certain promise of a future? Well, that’s harder. I’m not even talking about finding the motivation or time to do it (though that is a very real struggle for many, and writer Delilah S. Dawson had a great thread on Twitter about that recently), but rather what do I do NOW vs. what do I do LATER.
The factors that contribute to how something is priortized for me, typically are:
- How long have I been mulling this story?
- Am I at a place with my writing abilities that I could make this story the best I can?
- Is this something I want to read that doesn’t already exist?
- Does this feel like a personal story or does it feel like just a “cool” story (if the answer is “cool,” the project goes to the Graveyard Folder, RIP).
- What is the reality that it would be read/sold if I finished it? (This one is unhealthy, admittedly, and I am working on training myself not to think this way)
I’ve got a document of things I want to do: comics, prose, TV pilots, podcasts, features, even a blog post (like this one, which is really just another form of procrastinating). They are ranked by priority—High, Medium, Low (with Green, Yellow, and Red color coding to match), with self-imposed deadlines to boot. But a Google Sheet isn’t exactly a taskmaster, and I often struggle to adhere to the rules I set for myself. Like when it’s Tuesday night and something has gotten me super excited about an idea that’s “Low” priority, so much so that I don’t work on the thing that’s currently Priority #1.
All of it will get done, but in what order is what I struggle with. For a while now, I’ve been going by this thing that Brian Michael Bendis once said on a Tumblr Q&A or something years ago (I can’t find the link for the life of me, so it could be I’m only imagining it) where he essentially said he works every day, but works on whatever he feels like working on in the moment (as deadlines allow, naturally). So my Tuesday night dalliance with a project that’s low on my Priority spreadsheet, according to this method, is completely valid: the most important thing is that I’m working on SOMETHING. Which, ultimately, is the only thing that really matters.
This is more or less how I’ve been operating for the past few years, and I’m not sure it’s working for me, which is why I tried the spreadsheet. But I, personally, need more structure. Having lots of separate pieces of things done at one time—solid progress on a new novel, but also writing issue #4 of a comic series that we’ve been working on for a little while, but also plotting out a feature I’m co-writing with my wife, but
Let alone the fact that there’s the paralyzation that comes with too much choice (this happens too when I open Netflix, and is largely the reason I wind up just rewatching Cheers or Frasier or Property Brothers). But revisiting a reliable old favorite isn’t an option when it comes to choosing projects to work on—instead, it’s just procrastination, which doesn’t do anyone any good.
But is the trick feeling good about your output or feeling good about the output that the public-at-large can see? That could get into the self-destructive territory of judging oneself by the approval of others (or, perhaps worse, the perceived success of your peers), but for me, I would argue that it’s someplace in the middle.
I’m (mostly) satisfied with my accomplishments to date, but I do think that having more work in the hands of readers is somewhere I’m falling short. And that’s where the difficulty comes for any writer, I would imagine; working in this void of nothingness, where you constantly think to yourself, if no one sees all this work I’m doing, does it mean nothing? Am I nothing? Trees falling in the woods and so on. Well, duh, of course it does. I say this as much to remind myself to stay the course as for any other writer that stumbles across this post.
But as for prioritization? As much as I want to be the writer who can flex from project to project (again, speaking only about those nebulous projects, not things with hard deadlines), I suspect that what I’m learning about myself and my “process” is that I need to finish one thing before I start the next, even when I’m super pumped about a new idea. I’m finding that if I finish that old thing, I’ll be a better writer when I start the new thing. Sounds obvious now, sure, but I had to write it down to figure it out.
You’ve read this far and I don’t really have a grand finale, just that I think it’s important to constantly reevaluate your prioritization methods and what will work best for you. The same can be said for any aspect of the process, for that matter—I hardly ever write longhand anymore, when I used to do all first drafts that way, for instance—and when I figure out what truly works best for me, I’ll be sure to write another rambling post about it to distract me from one of those priorities.
Happy writing!