My Four Stages of Creating

The easy part is dreaming and planning. The more difficult part is doing and completing. And the worst part is all the details.

I have always told people, I’m the creative type, I don’t do technical. But as I get ready to launch my first novel online, I realize that is no longer a valid excuse.

One of the most frustrating parts of being an independent artist is that you have no representation, or marketing department to fall back on. You must attend to all the administrative and marketing details yourself. And if you don’t know what they are, you had better figure it out. It’s daunting. Certainly for a person like me, that would rather sit in a coffee shop and dream up stories…and practice my acceptance speeches.

For me, personally, as an artist, there are four pieces of the puzzle.

The first is the easiest and funnest – that is the initial creative phase. Outlining and laying down the First Draft. There is a minor sense of completion at finishing a first draft of anything, be it a novel, screenplay, rough cut of a film. There is no other phase without this. It is essential. But this is far from the end. Sometimes, this is merely years away from the finished product.

The second is the rewriting, rearranging, editing phase. This can be brutal and it is where I struggle to be honest. Phrases, paragraphs, scenes, even words that I have fallen in love with, sometimes don’t work for the larger piece. It is heart breaking. At times, there is a germ of the entire story that no longer fits. Your heart tells you it belongs, but your head tells you it doesn’t. For me, this is not the hardest part, but it is painful.

The third is the administrative work: alll of the interns’ work that should be hired out. Getting the copyright, reaching out to artists, editors, typesetters, etc. Creating the framework for launching the final product. These are not really difficult to figure out, but they are time sucking and need to be done. Because I get lost in day dreaming, it helps me to make daily lists of tasks to finish.

Finally, the worst part for me is the marketing. I have no marketing budget. I have no marketing team. I have no marketing strategists. There is only me. And it becomes a daily grind. Once my FB pages and Twitter account and Instagram and blog is set up, it becomes important to create content. In a world where people are twittering every few minutes and people scroll through their pages at lightning speed, coming up with daily content seems futile. But it does help. Or I want to believe it helps. Although this part of the process is the most grueling, it is also the most rewarding. This is where I truly get a sense of completion. This is where I see my work come to life through the eyes, hits and likes of others.

As I get ready to launch The Road of Fathers, I will see what works and what doesn’t work and adjust. But I am lucky to be finishing up the fourth phase just as I begin the first phase all over again, with The Road to Chaos.