30d • General discussion
The Brain Drain Problem
Here's the thing that's been driving me bonkers lately - be prepared to get out your tiniest violin... unless you can relate: Paid writing work is stealing creative energy. Not in some metaphorical way. Literally. You spend your best hours making someone else's words work, and by the time you sit down with your own project, there's nothing left in the tank. My Dad used to say: "Build your own dream, or just get paid to build someone else's..." Ouch. We all need money, that's for sure. But more and more I feel like by the end of the day... I'm done.
This is the brain drain problem. And I think the biggest reason personal IP projects stall out.
It's not that we don't care about our work. It's not laziness. Creative energy is a finite resource, and we keep spending it on other people's projects first. Then we wonder why our own stuff isn't moving.
So here's what I actually want to talk about: how do we stay on track?
Not the motivational poster version. We all know we "should" make time. The real question is how we do it when the paid work is eating our lunch every single day.
The scheduling piece is trickier than it looks. Blocking off an hour for your personal project isn't enough, it's not just about when you write, it's about what state your brain is in when you sit down. Grinding through hours of interviews or the soul sucking accounts of true crime and then jumping straight into your feature script/novel is a great way to stare at a blank page and feel like garbage about it. I feel like I need a buffer in there... just some time to do nothing (or drive the boys to soccer, which is more likely).
Some people protect their sharpest hours for personal work first thing in the morning, before the paid stuff even starts. Some do it late at night when the day's noise has finally died down. Some break their paid work into smaller chunks spread across the day instead of front-loading it all at once. None of these are magic formulas. But you need something, a system, a rhythm, whatever you want to call it, or your project just keeps sliding to tomorrow. And then tomorrow becomes next week.
The accountability piece matters just as much. When it's just you and a file sitting on your desktop, it's way too easy to keep pushing your own work off. That's one of the reasons we're here, to have people who actually understand what this is like.
So let's use that.
What does your week actually look like right now? Where does the paid work sit, and where does your personal project fit in - or where does it keep falling off the schedule? What's working, and what keeps breaking down?
Drop it here. Let's figure this out together.
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The Brain Drain Problem
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We are going to write a piece of original IP, and then take it all the way to making a feature (or tv series if we get lucky).
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