98. Guiding a creative project
Donkeys prefer carrots to sticks.
Dear Reader,
It’s all very well having a to-do list for a creative project – an itinerary of ideas that might transform a script idea to a film premiere, a fashion sketch to catwalk couture, or some lines in a notebook to a worldwide book tour – but without guidance towards where it’s going, a list it will remain.
Reader, I need more than a list to guide my writing practice: I need a plan.
Hang on, a PLAN?
😲
No, not the kind of plan to beat myself up with. Not one to start, all guns blazing, at the start of a new week/month/year, always accompanied by the need to tick every box, accomplish every task, or write a post to match up with every single topic that I might ever have listed as something I want to write about. Not a plan that’s full of unrealistic expectations, shoulds or have tos.
That kind of plan is a stick.
Reader, like the proverbial donkey I would much prefer a carrot: not punishment, but encouragement.
Nobody’s looking over my shoulder, or checking my work. I don’t have a boss in this job, I have the freedom to find my own way, and it doesn’t matter if I get a little lost.
PLOT SPOILER: Heck, I can do lost…! 😉
The schedule
My writing routine isn’t set in stone. In fact, this post has come about because I’ve been on the road for work for a week, and have had to rejig my line-up as a result. It was when I was looking at my posting schedule in the run-up to my trip that I realised I had too much on my plate, so I’ve picked up some notes that I’d put aside a while ago, added to and edited them, and scheduled this post for today.
Did you spot that? The mention of my posting schedule?
Reader, I do have one, and it’s much simpler than even I had imagined.
You see, it’s easy to start a plan – a list, a schedule, or an overview for the week or the month – when you know what needs to go on it. Just as I populate my weekly meal plan with the things I know about first – we’ll have fish on Friday, a roast on Saturday, curry on Sunday and a dish using Saturday’s leftovers on Monday1 – I can build a structure for my Substack habit based on its regular features.
I like – but don’t promise – to post every Saturday, and alternate Wednesdays. Here’s how my August posting schedule looked before the beginning of that month:
I publish a Letter to Terry every other Wednesday, and because he and I like to stick to our routine, I know they’re coming up. I popped those onto my August schedule first:
Our correspondence takes in a whole variety of wild and wacky topics, and I enjoy the cut and thrust of what is a reactive, spontaneous process, given that much of the content of my letters is in direct reponse to Terry’s latest letter to me. In the two-week gap between my letters I’m always on the look-out for interesting things to include when it’s next my turn. I enjoy how I can include brief snippets about a whole variety of subjects that are too brief to include in my schedule as posts in their own right, but about which I relish the opportunity to write.
I’m learning a great deal from Terry, and I enjoy the humour that is never missing from both sides of our correspondence. And there’s no pressure. It’s all carrot, no stick: I can write what I like, and how much I like. Some of my letters to Terry have been as brief as a postcard.
It’s Terry’s turn to write to me on Wednesday, and I’m already looking forward to reading what he’s going to be sending for me to respond to. And it’s not just letters to me: Terry writes ‘Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life’, and I promise you’ll love what he has to say in his posts.
On the last Saturday of the month I like to publish a post in my ‘Art & Treasures’ series, in which I explore some of my memories in both words and art.
I work on each post for this series little and often during each month, and enjoy watching how the posts and the artwork have evolved by the time it comes to scheduling them for publication.
Here’s how August’s schedule looked once I’d slotted in its Art & Treasures post:
Three down, three to go.
I enjoy my routine of posting weekly on a Saturday, but for the remaining slots in my monthly schedule I don’t feel the need to pressure myself into having to write something new. Around once a month, and only in a particularly busy week, I like to dig out one of my favourite posts from my archive to share again, with the title prefix ‘Old gold’.
Reader, I keep a close eye on my diary, so I know in advance when things are likely to feel tight. Last month saw me schedule some Old gold for the end of what I knew was going to be an overwhelming week containing two location shoots, an overnight stay in the van, the online training session for my new insulin pump and an 80th birthday party, and I was glad to have planned for a post that I knew I didn’t have to write from scratch that week.
I didn’t want a stick to beat myself up with for not having the time to write. No, I grabbed the juicy carrot 🥕 of a post in waiting!
With my regular posts plugged in to the schedule and some Old gold released from the vault, two August Saturdays remained.
How was I going to fill those?
Why, with a post I’m already looking forward to writing, of course! Because that’s where my ideas factory comes in.
The ideas factory
‘Ideas factory?’ I hear you ask. ‘Do you mean like a list of ideas?’
Yup. Actually, it’s three lists, and they’re very simple.
Art & Treasures
This is a list of keywords – and some bullet points – relating to posts I’d like to write, which will appear alongside a piece (or more than one) of artwork to illustrate it.
Dear Reader, I’m lost
This one contains ideas for my Saturday posts, the meat of my newsletter. These are the starting points for my stories of getting lost, about lost items found, projects I’ve been working towards, or general Rebecca stuff about such things as being tall, left-handed, diabetic or – yes – list-obsessed. 🤣This list currently contains – among many others – the following keywords:
Letters to Terry
Bombshell: Reader, it’s my Terry list that I find the most exciting. Every time I come across a crossword clue with the answer ‘CAT’ or ‘CHORTLING’, something I’ve overheard that’s made me laugh, or just a story in the news that sounds completely bonkers, well, those are for the Terry list. 😊Recent entries on this list have included:
Penpals meeting – 70 years
A Jim quote about an irritating fly – ‘I am not a nature reserve’
Found things – Happy anniversary – celebrating backwards
Curry on beach – no pic – LOL!
Shakespeare puddings
Once I’d found the two things in my Ideas Factory that I most wanted to write about in August, my posting schedule was complete.
Reader, writing shouldn’t be about shoulds. A plan doesn’t need to be set in stone, but I find I work well under the guidance of one. Some months are still being planned during the month itself – for example, it was only on August 10 that I found the ticket that I wrote about for my post on August 19. I’d wanted to explore that idea straight away, so I had accommodated it into my schedule sooner rather than later.
Winging it is an option. It’s built in to my plan. You see, as I often remind myself, life is full of changes and surprises, and my plans need to be able to accommodate those. You’ll notice that I haven’t shared the details of my September schedule to illustrate this post. Why’s that? Because it’s almost certainly going to change. 😉
Whatever my writing plan might look like, it will never be a stick with which to beat myself. Instead, it is a carrot to encourage me to do what I want to be doing. 🥕
As any donkey will tell you, a carrot is a much better deal all round.
Love,
Rebecca
📚 Recent reads 📚
Some of my recent highlights in the Substack reading stakes have been the following five posts on planning, diaries and notebooking. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.
1 of 5: This post by
was right up my street:
2 of 5: This post by
about what had become of two diaries is an intense, heartbreaking and equally inspiring read:
3 of 5: My long-term collaborator Terry Freedman, writer of
, served these words up in his latest ‘Start the Week’ post:Changing the narrative
Whether at the moment I have a proclivity for sadness – which wouldn’t be surprising as we are currently remembering loved ones who have, to use that euphemism, passed on – but I have to say I have been feeling a bit down recently. The reason is that I have been scanning and shredding box files that contain ideas I had for books and articles which never got written.
Regular readers of my correspondence with Terry will know that it’s his turn to reply to me on Wednesday! You can find my latest letter to him here, and links to our entire canon of letters here. Do have a read of our light-hearted exchanges about British life over our shoulders!
4 of 5: I eat up
not only for Helen’s insights into her experience of writing non-fiction for publication but for her planning content both here on Substack and on YouTube. If you too are seeking confidence in your creativity, Helen’s is a must-read newsletter:
5 of 5: Last but by no means least is a recent post to celebrate her one-year anniversary of ‘Noted’ by the remarkable Jillian Hess, whose notes on notes are a mainstay of my Substack inbox. I’ve been an avid reader of Jillian’s newsletter for almost as long as she has been writing on Substack, and I am so grateful to have been granted the privilege of reading this post all about her own notetaking history:
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I wrote a post about this here:
Yup. I’m their biggest fan.
Don’t laugh. I’m addicted to it.
Not a typo.
Another metaphorical tack: Writing is a wellspring, not a machine. It bubbles up. There’s no “on” switch. You can’t force it. Rather, you need to listen for the gurgling, and dip your ladle in to scoop it up. And I find that the dipping act itself brings more gurgling. All wet here! 💦💦💦💦
Thanks very much for the mentions, Rebecca. My cheque is in the post. I think your approach to planning is very good. In the last proper job I had, the annual plan I was given was ludicrous, only achievable if nobody was sick or had a holiday, and if we all worked 24/7. The first thing I did in my first meeting with my team was rework the list together so that some of it was actually doable. Jordan Peterson has said that a plan with 200 targets is not a plan at all, but a wish list. I myself plan meticulously; I even have a spreadsheet to schedule it all and map it out. And almost always I end up either writing a ticklist in Google Docs or a bulleted list on the back of old compliments slips I had printed ages ago.
I always assumed that on the Wednesdays you're not writing to me you're going round rummaging in people's recycling bins for discarded shopping lists (I've met your sort before).
Anyway, I always enjoy writing to you and reading your letters. We have a good laugh, don't we. And we learn a lot from each other too. For example, you're going to learn how to make a cup of tea properly when you read my next letter.
This was a great article, very interesting, lovely illustrations. Keep up the good work, but don't give up the day job.