Hello from Marseille, where I’ve spent the week meeting my new nephew!
I received lots of nice notes after last month’s letter and — after a little hesitation — some questions! They are all smart and purposeful and I’m excited to answer them all.
But there’s room for more! If you have a question you’d love me to answer, click here!
🕰️
Staying the course
How do you keep your motivation on long projects (like for your graphic novel)? Do you have any tips to keep your excitement about an idea or to continue believing in it as on the first day? I’m really curious to know your take on that.
Elise, Brussels, Belgium
Dear Elise,
The first stories I was paid to write were for radio news bulletins. They took no longer than 15 minutes each to put together and I would spin out 15 or so in a shift.
When I started making video essays on YouTube, they each took six to eight weeks to finish. I remember how frustratingly slow that felt, how easily I was distracted by other ideas and schemes. I wanted to give up all the time!
But slowly, I got used to it. I was driven to ship — knowing that a piece of work can only teach you something once it’s finished.
A few years later I made Parallax, a 12-month commitment and after that Operation Infektion, which took 15 long months.
Each project tested my patience — and increased it. Which is to say that I built my motivation up like a muscle. My drawing journey is the same. One-page stories I finished in a morning became six-pages, which became 30 page zines and so on.
Elise, you asked for tips and I’ll give you three.
First, remember that — inverse to how we think about it — motivation often comes after action, not before it. If you’re feeling unmotivated, work anyway, and the motivation may appear.
Second, design yourself a creative system: that’s the daily commitment to spend an amount of time at your desk, working on your project. Make it six days a week and make it non-negotiable — in time the system will become automatic (you’ll act regardless of motivation), and compound interest will start working in your favour.
Third, bigger projects, especially stories, are really smaller stories strung together in a line. A scene or a chapter is usually a story in miniature with its own dramatic rise and fall. I’m writing a graphic novel, but I’m really just writing 27 short stories which, arranged in the right order, tell a bigger story. Each scene takes about a month and completing a scene is an opportunity to feel like I’ve shipped.
But these are really just hacks for working around motivation. And Elise, I want you to feel motivated!
So now I’m going to try and get at the truth of the matter.
Tai's Captures, via Unsplash
Watching my new nephew’s doting new parents this week, they are hyper-aware that they are responsible for this precious and utterly vulnerable human. He wants to live, but without his mum and dad he can’t do it.
I’m not a parent but I put it to you that your art, your stories: they are like newborn babies. Each one is both precious and utterly vulnerable. Your story so desperately wants to be told — it is the purpose of stories after all — and for whatever reason, this story is relying on you to make it manifest. It is looking up at you with those big eyes and grasping with those tiny hands. If you don’t see it through, no-one else will (or at least, no-one else will do it like you, which is how this story wants to be told).
I feel this responsibility keenly.
I went many years without any stories in me and at some point feared that I might never have a good story to tell.
And now, for whatever reason, a story has chosen me and believes that — out of all the billions of other people in the world! — I am the one to tell it. I mean, it could have popped into Tilly Walden’s head or Adrian Tomine’s, but it came to me.
I want to honour that trust and do whatever I can to get this story told.
So what keeps an artist motivated through the long months or years of a project? Perhaps it’s the same force that keeps a parent through their 18+ year commitment: love and gratitude.
Until another Sunday soon,
