It’s always a temptation to ignore the starting line. I can approach a new project with enthusiasm, real glee – from a distance. Once I get up close to the actual beginning of writing a script, or drafting a piece, or the initial “work session” around a collaboration the butterflies in the stomach get to flittering and I think “I simply cannot write today if I don’t clean that toilet.” “I cannot write today if I don’t know how many gems I’ll have in my wedding ring…” “How could I possibly get started if I don’t write this email to…..anybody!” The blank page is one thing. It’s not that that scares me most, though. It’s getting 3/4 through and stalling. I can see it, just beyond the starting gates and way before the finish line – that period where I’m totally insecure about the quality of the work I have done, the necessity of having gotten started, and now the choice to quit or press ahead. If I quit, though I’ll have to start anew and face all this again without reaping any reward for previous effort. A cycle of unfinished projects with hopeful beginnings and pathetic endlessness…es.
So here I am again, a new year of projects is getting underway. I can put “Keanu” to bed (I wish! I mean the project, you perv) once and for all. I have new scripts to write, a performance project or two shaping up, and a world of puppet designing and crafting to embark on. And some projects I haven’t wrapped up yet – old dusty bags of ideas that are half shaped, half forgotten now, probably worth finishing, there may even be a magnum opus – but how can I know if it remains unfinished. This is the very anxiety that I am feeling now. What if I abandon this one too? Easier not to even bother and get started? To hell with it!?
This makes diving into a project with unchecked enthusiasm far more difficult than the dreaming/talking/bullshitting that goes into thinking up projects. Art-making theoretically is much easier than actually making it or literally writing it. Rejection is the least of my worries, in fact. It’s the giving up before I’ve got to the end of the project that is my biggest enemy. My reluctance to tread through uncertainty keeps the start of a new project from getting underway (or getting underway with any joy.)
A joyful process. That’s what I’d like. I’ll put it on my Christmas list.
