My So-Called Freelance Life - Michelle Goodman [82]
“Sometimes the things that I like to do wind up getting clogged with deadlines and then it starts to become something that I just have to do—even things that I wound up loving and had a lot of creative control over,” says illustrator Ellen Forney. “That’s part of the artistic process: to feel so much pressure to do what it is that you’re doing well that you’re just hating it. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that you have to go through that in order to make your best work.”
On the flip side, it’s easy to go to the opposite extreme, working 99.9 percent of your time on pay-the-bills projects alone. So how do you make room in your schedule for the work you really want to do? There’s only one way: by making it a priority, just as you would for exercising, meeting friends, or buying groceries.
“One really has to say, ‘This is the time where I am going to make creative work and I am not going to do my laundry or clean up dust bunnies, ’” says illustrator Nina Frenkel. “The longer I stay out of this practice of making time for my own art, the harder it is to reinstitute a practice—it becomes almost scary, unnecessarily so. The only way through this is to get my butt in the chair and do it.”
In other words, the longer you stray, the tougher it is to coax yourself back into the work that feels like play. If you’re not one of those freakishly regimented, compartmentalization-happy folks who can do two hours of creative work at the start of each workday without fail (don’t worry, I’m not either), don’t despair. You have options. The most common is to build a couple of short stints in the creative hot seat into your weekly schedule—thirty minutes when junior’s down for his nap, an hour before you hit the hay, whatever you’ve got—so doing your own work becomes habit forming. I do suggest making an actual appointment with yourself, though (even setting your Outlook calendar or cell phone to remind you), so you don’t forget or let it slide. And this will of course mean scaling back on money work by 5, 10, or 25 percent, depending on how much time and income you can spare.
While embroiled in an all-encompassing stretch of pay-the-bills work, at least take a few minutes a week to record, jot down, or sketch all the creative ideas that come to you. (Trust me, you will have them.) Most likely, you’ll crave these small snippets of brainstorming time more than ever. “While I haven’t been making a lot of my own pieces I have been sketchbooking up a storm,” says Nina, who’s been managing a team of subcontractors on the same beefy animation project for the past eighteen months. “It’s been a place to explore ideas or put notes to self—’Here’s an idea, here’s an image’—and to plant seeds for later when the space and time is there.”
If you’re juggling more balls than a Barnum & Bailey circus clown, when you go to change gears from your money to your creative work, you may experience a little problem I like to call “How in the hell am I supposed to have a crazy one-night stand in my boring old marriage bed?” syndrome. Sometimes changing your workspace when shifting from a bread-and-butter job to a dream project can help shake loose the cobwebs; for me, grabbing my notepad or laptop and relocating to another room in the house or to a café usually does the trick.
And if, like me, you’re a bit of an ADD case who, at times, has trouble keeping the pedal to the creative metal for even one damn hour, find yourself a study buddy or three who’ll swap creative projects with you and offer suggestions, encouragement, and tough love as needed. Pick