Over the weekend, I decided to take the first two pages of Resonance Men and complete them. Draw them all the way to conclusion. I have lots of ideas about this book, but I hadn’t finished a page yet.
So I did.
I finished the first page on Saturday while my family was napping. Then I stared at was is likely one of the best pieces of art I’ve made to date…
And slowly, a familiar voice creeps in, This is all you can do?
The voice nags at me. I tweak and tweak and tweak… all weekend. I finish the second page… and then I go back to the first and tweak some more.
And still the voice whispered… This is it?
All weekend I heard that voice, and on Sunday evening… it beat me. I allowed that voice to have access to my brain and my heart and it broke me. It was a very quick spiral down fueled by deep seated fears that everyone will find out that I’m faking it. You expect people to pay for this? How will you ever make a 200+ page story… and have it look like this? Who’s going to read this? Why do you even try?
I sat on the ground, heart pounding in my chest, wanting to cry but some distant sense of pride and logic kept me trapped in a state of flux for a while.
What do you do when you know in your brain that what you’ve made is good, but what you feel with your heart and your passion is discouragement?
I know all of the cliches and all of the sayings. I know that I have to create things to get better at them. I know that I can only get better by making mistakes and learning from them… but none of that stops it from hurting… from feeling like you’ve let yourself down.
It takes a lot of willpower to press on after a day like that. I’m not even sure how exactly to cope with the feelings, but just because they’re there doesn’t mean I can’t keep pushing into the next pages.
Writing is hard. Drawing is hard. Art is hard.
If we never move past things being hard, or feeling like a failure, we’ll never get better and we’ll never finish anything.
There’s a great quote from Ira Glass about storytelling.
All of us who get into creative work… we get into it because we have good taste, but it’s like there’s this gap. That for the first couple of years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good… And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you… A lot of people at that point, they quit… You’ve got to know that it’s totally normal, and the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Because it’s only by going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap.
So, maybe you’re in this gap with me. Maybe you had a small break down over the weekend and need to know that you’re not alone. We’re all there. I’ve been making comics and publishing them online for almost 7 years. It happens, and the only way to get through it is to keep working.
In the Disney movie, The Robinson’s, they have a family motto that I love: “Keep moving forward.”
I’m going to muster up the strength to keep moving forward, and I hope you will too.