Grantblings

Creative Mondays #017 – Keep moving forward.

Keep moving forward.

Like Dory from Finding Nemo says, “Just keep swimming.”  I think this is great creative advice.  Keep creating and by this I mean, yes you should create every day, but also work on something, complete it and then move on to the next project.

When we started The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd, the first episodes are not really amazing.  The sound quality, the pacing, several other little things could use a tweak here or there.  But early on in the process we came up with the unwritten rule, just keep going.  Get the current episode so it’s the best it can be in a certain time frame and then move on to creating the next episode.  This is still a rule I employ today on all the projects I work on.

We could have spent forever tweaking ten different episodes of Dr. Floyd until they were perfect.  Instead, when an episode was as good as it was going to be right then, we released it and moved on to the next episode.  In the end we had over 150 episodes of the show and that large number of produced episodes impressed people when we went and pitched the show.  There were over 150 stories that could be converted to a new format from the start.

Now I’m not saying rush through your project to get a big number, not at all.  Wheat I’m saying is know when to say, “This is good enough, let me start the next one.”  The great thing about this is you will only get better with each project.  Mistakes made on one will be ocrrected in the next.  Something that was ‘just quite not right’ about one, will push you to make it more to your liking in the next one.

Being in Los Angeles as long as I have, I’ve known a handful of people who have one script they are constantly working on, tweaking, polishing to get ‘just right’ to pitch.  They work years on it when, instead, they could be writing more and more scripts and, with each one, becoming a better writer and building up a great ‘back catalog’ of ideas.

So, just keep creating.  Don’t stop.  Know when to move on ot the next project and don’t stagnate on one project forever.

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Do you have a project that you’ve been languishing too long on?  What can you do today to start wrapping it up and move onto a new one?  Let me know below.