How to Persist When You Don’t Feel Like It

3 Ways to Get Rid of Unfinished Objects

This was a week in which everything that could go wrong in the studio, did. I wasn’t so surprised that so many things went wrong.  What I was surprised at, though was why I didn’t give up.  Why in the world did I persist, putting up with all of that stuff? Before I give you my thoughts on that, let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

For starters, I spent a couple of days painting my background fabric like I did with last week’s piece. Wanting to push the envelope a little more, I experimented with more new ideas.

So after doing several coats of paint, I let it dry overnight. The next day when I woke up to look at the painted fabric, I didn’t like it. Well, that’s not quite true.  

I did like it very much. I’d been successful in creating a nice fabric design  But it wasn’t what I had in mind for this week’s sketch. It was too patterned and I was looking for something a lot more solid.

So I went back and did another painting, this time on canvas and that came out just like I had in mind.

Next, I enlarged my pencil sketch to fit the size I wanted to work in. That’s when I realized that, I hadn’t drawn my pencil sketch in the same proportions to my finished piece. 

More Resistance …

So yet another hiccup – my enlarged piece wasn’t looking quite like what I wanted. An empty space had been created on the bottom right-hand side.
Although I labored over the enlarged design all day and night, I couldn’t fix it. And then just before turning in, in the wee hours of the morning, I figured out a solution that I was satisfied with.

When it comes to the hiccups I encountered while stitching, I don’t even want to get started. All I’ll say about that is, I learned something new about threads. 

You can have one terrible spool of thread among an otherwise high-quality batch of threads.

Granted, persistence is an important characteristic of creativity. We’ve talked about that here many times but my question is why do you persist even when you have good reason to quit.

After careful thought, here are the reasons I came up with.

3 Things That Make You Persist with Your Creative Project

1. Accountability: Having someone or a group of people that looks forward to seeing your work persist even when you want to quit. I remember once at an art group meeting someone said to me, “you haven’t shown any work in a while”.  This was a couple years of ago but I still remember.  When you have an accountability group, creating work ceases to be solely about you and more about those who enjoy seeing your work.
2. Deadlines: I create every day because I’d set a personal deadline to create one piece every week. If you have deadlines, whether self-imposed or otherwise, you’ll persist until the end. You know how when you have a deadline, you keep procrastinating till the deadline is close.  Then you jump to action and work hard right to the deadline, to complete whatever project you have?  Yeah, deadlines have that effect on making you persist to the end.
3. Personal Satisfaction: Being able to accomplish a feat, to cross it off your to-do list sometimes, can also be enough motivation to persist in your creative endeavors.

So if you have challenges with how to persist in creating, you should incorporate these 3 things into your creative practice. Join a critique group, set deadlines for yourself and have a to-do list of things you want to create. That’ll surely help you avoid having lots of Unfinished Objects (UFOs) lying around.

Your Turn

What are some of the ways you have employed to help you persist in creating even when the going gets tough?  Can’t wait to read your comments.

Warmest Regards,