Project Description: Week 15
I’m trying a new approach this week, based on something that seems to be working well on another project I’ve begun for the summer. I’m including below a sketch of what I’d like to create for this weeks project.
It’s something that I avoided doing in the beginning. I wanted to give myself the maximum amount of flexibility to take baby steps, and give myself permission to create something. Even if it was small… even if a part of me was going “this shouldn’t count…”. While very helpful in the beginning, I feel like this approach has grown a little stale and that I’m not challenging myself enough. I want to try setting a more clear and specific goal at the beginning of the week for what I’d like to have done at the end of the week and see where that leads me. I want that goal to be S.M.A.R.T., which can be tricky when you’re talking about something that’s creative. So far I’ve done well with “Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely”… I want to get more specific with exactly what it is I want to create.
Rather than jump completely into the deep end just now, I’ll give myself a couple of options.
Plan A
Since I have an opportunity to work with a very skilled guitar player tomorrow, Plan A is to create a piece of music that includes his playing.
- Write (a minimum of) 32 bars of music that features the guitar, and is accompanied by (at the minimum) the bass.
Plan B
My backup plan is:
- Write one scene of dialog.
Plan B is definitely valid because I’m not sure what my guitarist friend and I will come up with when we get together.
One of the challenges to creating a specific plan like this is that on the face of it it seems more difficult to turn “writing a song” into a widget to crank (to coin a phrase from David Allen’s Getting Things Done.) It seems much easier to get specific about writing (plays, scripts, novels) than it is to get specific about music. If you write 1200 or so words of dialog, you have approximately one scene of a script.
I suspect that this is probably in my head and based on fear. I have less invested in whether or not the scripts that I write are any good, thus I’m more willing to “just write” and not care as much about the output. If I turn out the 1200 words then I’ve been successful. I figure that eventually I’ll learn how to write something someone might want to actually act in someday.
With music I have a much larger ego investment. “I’ve spent the better part of 20 years doing music…I should be able to write something great…” my ego says to me. It makes it much more forbidding to commit to the specificity of “write a minimum of 32 bars with these criteria”. My “standards” say that I have to make something great because I’m a great musician and that gets in the way of creating anything at all.
That pretty much sucks so it’s time to try something different.
We’ll see how this goes. Look for an update in 7 days!
–update: 7/1/07–
Beginning the week with a Project Description was helpful and kept me more focused. There were definitely moments during the week where I had doubts as to whether I could create something that sounded decent, but I’m pretty happy with the results.
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