Time can’t split. Projects eat time.

Thursday, November 7, 2024

No matter how productive I can become, and no matter how skilled I become, I still have twenty-four hours in a day. Much like nothing exceeds the speed of light, no productivity pipeline will break the time barrier. This has never been more evident to me than when I started drawing.

I have been in the habit of writing for a few hours every day for a few years. While I don’t manage to actually accomplish this every day, the habit is formed. If nothing comes up in my day, if no events are happening, at around half six, I’ll start writing. On a weekend, I tend to write from around two in the afternoon. This is my default and I find it calming, productive and rewarding. I think my consistency has made me a better writer and I have, so far, managed to publish/share five (5.5?) books which, I feel, are of a reasonable and increasing quality; each better than the last.

Drawing, however, has been something which, over the past few months, I have greatly enjoyed. Drawing replaced video games as a pastime for me and slotted neatly into a timeslot which was previously for watching TV and playing games socially. I find drawing rewarding. It’s fun, I have progression, and I like it as a potential story telling platform, with my end goal to be one day making my Denouement novel into a comic.

This hobby was all going really well, then, like the goon I am, I started working on a little comic which was intended to be a ‘test’ of how to make a comic. Nicerferatu was birthed. Again, this was, at this point, totally fine, reasonable and enjoyable. I produced a few pages, which are of, I think, increasing quality.

Sounds great, what’s the problem?

Well, the problem, is that the other week, I had a terrible idea. I had the idea of making a multipage comic, something which extends out across around twelve pages in total. There’s no rush to get this finished, right… right? Nope. All I have to do is work on one page at a time, follow my storyboard and script, and receive joy at the end when it’s done. Great… easy.

Did you notice it?

Yeah, I missed it too…

All I have to do is follow my script and my storyboard. 

I’m a writer, not an artist, and certainly not a comic-book artist! Having a version of my story framework in my head is not something which works for a visual medium. I needed to think in images now words.

It took me a while to figure out how to make storyboards. An easy theory, but why not use the storyboard as an initial sketch layer? Well, then I needed to have a storyboard with proportions which match the final work. So that took time.

Okay, what goes on each panel or page? I have a vague idea what I want to accomplish, I should do what I know best and write something, ah, yes, a script! I know how to do that… For the following week, after this revelation, my writing time was not spent working on my current project, but on Niceferatu scripts. (For those who asked, yes, the current writing project is Denouement 3, with the working title, ‘A thousand years north.’)

Shockingly, my twenty-four hours did not stretch with my projects. One project suffered at the polite but merciless vampiric hands of the other. I am in a fortunate position of being someone who creates things as a hobby. While I would like to think I produce good quality writings, I don’t have a publisher to sate, or a release schedule to hit. But, the lesson is there, despite the aim of my drawing being to fill a time-slot, as soon as it became something I enjoyed, it leaked out of its temporal container and ate its sibling.

Much like entropy, no force can fight the universal rule of content creations:

Projects eat time. New projects eat the time of more established ones. 

The reason for this, in this case, is simple – a new thing feels more pressing than an old thing. My writing is an established habit that has a constant satisfaction and progress. This new project is about learning things and will only take a few weeks to have a sharable thing, something to show for it. Whereas writing takes months. Each project probably only see the light of day after six to eight months of thoughtfully tapping buttons at my desk. The appeal of a shorter term project is appealing.

The darnedest thing is, though, that amidst all this lost writing productivity, I am not mad at my drawing project. I have learned a lot, brushed up on script writing techniques, thought about characters in more visual ways and had a loverly time watching movies while I drew my silly cave rocks and goblin cats.

Making things is fun. While I will probably always consider myself to be a writer first and foremost, learning to draw has been hitting a different creative urge, and I am finding it immensely satisfying, even if it has slowed my writing down a great deal.