Lyrics by Indi Riverflow

You have your priorities straight. The process comes first. You have strategized a plan by which you will periodically be free to sink, undistracted, into the blissful timeless space of craft and invention. You are focused on your project, fixated on your subject, and racing toward your object with all due electricity.

Unfortunately, it often appears that life does not share your exalted vision. Interruptions large and small invade your neat little process. Mundane emergencies intrude. Even pleasant distractions, such as a surprise visit from friends, or some unplanned but unavoidable gathering, can present a maddening wrinkle in your fine-lined plans.

Maintaining a sense of humor and flexibility will lighten these moments considerably. These glitches are part of the texture of the process, and inevitable as they seem to be for all but the most solitary creators, learning to make use of the emotion of frustration can be a most empowering triumph.

One reaction to the involuntary pauses which may be plaguing your process could be to reformulate the workstream. Are there ways you can adapt to reality, when it won’t adapt to you?

For example, perhaps you are writing a novel and every time you get your bearings, the phone rings. One solution might be to write at night, when most people are asleep and businesses closed. Or, you may not be able to go nocturnal, but you can let all your friends and family know that you prefer text messages while you are at your labors. Find a way to accommodate both process and life, bending each as much as is practicable.

Economics is a matter few artists really revel in, but understanding the personal economics of creation is key to a really productive flow. By this, I do not mean merely the costs of materials and living expenses, although these are also a factor.

Rather, the artistic economics I am referring to are reckoned in units of time and space, hours and sense, as opposed to dollars and cents. Hours in which one is able to devote to creative endeavors are finite. There will be ebbs and flows to the busy-ness of life, and optimizing the precious moments life leaves free lets the Muse have her way.

The space in which you can allow your work, also, is logically constrained by certain conventions of your form. You may stretch the boundaries in this regard, but at some point you will have to yield to an absolute minimum and maximum expenditure of space for a single piece. Managing this dynamic, the length (and breadth, as the case may be) of a particular project is a job for your critical faculty to plan.

For a novel, conventions dictate that it be somewhere between one hundred and one thousand pages, but tending toward these extremes will tend to disqualify the work from being regarded as a novel, pushing it toward a different structure. Thousand page-projects are best thought of in terms of trilogies, if not reconceptualized into a more punchy narrative which would fit into a more manageable length of three hundred pages or fewer.

In the generative phase, the tendency is expansive; a great deal of material is often allowed to pass into the process despite being shallow or flawed, out of anxiety that there will otherwise not be enough to fill the space, leading to a bloated construction that is difficult to hone into presentable shape. For the steadily rising percentage of those who intend to self-publish, another, more material economy can come into play, as the print-on-demand model leads to the absurd position of paying by the page to expound at length.

Another anxiety which bothers new artists more than it often should is a perceived paucity of ideas, which cause some to thriftily string a few promising notions together with long periods of reduced content density. With a little faith, perseverance and reflection, new ideas will present themselves, so it is probably better to invest in a deeper process so as to best utilize your designated palette.

Mature artists come to understand that concise, effective expression trumps often long, drawn-out affairs, and that utilizing the space available to maximum artistic advantage is a more pressing concern than running out of material.

Regardless of the medium or form, there are concrete constraints that have more to do with the delivery of art than the production of it. Every moment devoted to an expression is bounded by all the rest of existence competing for the attention of the audience, and must therefore be rich to command the flitting eyes and fickle ears hardwired into the minds you wish to reach.

There is another economy to consider here, too; what an artist considers to be the span of duration is, on another level, translated into time experienced by the audience. With this responsibility in mind, one best approaches the planning of the project with respect for the time your audience will entrust to your hands…or fail to, if they feel you are you too wasteful of it.

Managing your dynamics of space and time puts you in charge of your pace and rhythm. The most definite limitation on one’s creative output is set by the finite hours available in which to generate it. Your most valuable resource is not any tool or device. It is your scarce and ever-diminishing opportunity to engage in art at all, bounded by factors of a future few have the privilege to foresee.