Start before you’re ready.

When is the best time to start a creative project?

The answer is nearly always now. We all have projects we dream of doing. But we’re waiting for the time to be right.

We tell ourselves we need to think about it a little more, to wait until we’ve got more time, more space, more money. Until our day job is less demanding, the to-do list is done, the children are a little older or we finally have a workspace to ourselves.. 

We convince ourselves that we need more experience to start, more skills, an expensive bit of kit that we can’t quite afford right now. We need to hang on, until conditions are perfect. And then we’ll begin. 

But here’s the thing.  Life will always get in the way, because that’s what life does. But in every moment, you have a choice. You can begin. You can come back to the work you were meant to create.

No time? 

Then make time for your creative work. 

• Switch off the TV tonight, and make art instead.
• Get up an hour earlier, and write.
• Dedicate the first hour of your working day to practicing your instrument, writing songs. Then maybe work a little smarter to get your money work done. Or work an hour later.
• Sketch a new design in your lunch break, every day.
• Carve out a few hours at weekends as a sacred space for creating.
• Stop scrolling, and instead choose to think. 
• Read my post on time management for creatives.

Need equipment?

• Can you hire it, borrow it, buy it second-hand?
• Can you start without it?
• Is there anything you have access to already, that could be repurposed?
• Before this bit of kit was invented, was there a way to do what you want to do?

Sometimes, not having all you need can give you an advantage. It makes you invent, innovate. Creativity often comes out of constraint.

House music was largely created in the late 80s by clubbers in Chicago and Detroit using cheap, second-hand synthesizers intended to give a bassline or percussive beat to accompany learners while they played their instruments.

The Japanese inventors of little machines like the Roland TB 303 had no idea they could even make some of the sounds the early house producers created by using them ‘incorrectly’. Yet the hypnotic, stripped-down electronic beats they made using the most basic of tools endures to this day: house music has continued to fill dancefloors now for more than 30 years.  

Need space?

Once you start looking for spaces, you’ll see they’re everywhere. 

• Steven King worked as a labourer, then a teacher and wrote four novels before finally getting one published in 1973. He had two small children at the time. “I wrote my first two published novels, Carrie and Salem’s Lot, in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer,” he says in his book On Writing, “pounding away on my wife’s portable Olivetti typewriter and balancing a child’s desk on my thighs.”
• JK Rowling still likes to write her first drafts by hand, in a notebook, sitting in coffee shops. 
• I’ve worked with countless big names in music who recorded their first hits in their bedroom on a second-hand Mac loaded with pirated software. 
• Artist Vinca Petersen made her best-known body of work while living in a truck and travelling all over Europe, while painter Richard Friend used cycle to his office job in the City early, so he could make art at his desk before anyone else came in. 

Need clarity?

Ideas don’t ever come fully formed, even though that makes a great story for press interviews. They need to be fleshed out, developed, their short-comings solved. The clarity comes, in other words, from working on them, from making your ideas real.

When you over-think it, plan every bit of it, and map it out in its entirety, your project might get stale long before you ever finish it. (If you start it at all.) Leave space for magic to happen!

Need inspiration?

This also mostly comes from simply showing up and doing the work. This blog post, for instance, came from sitting down at 8am as I do every weekday, to write. I didn’t have a clue what I was going to write about, until I began. There’s an oft-repeated quote about this, which I’ve seen attributed to everyone from Somerset Maugham to William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler – a sure sign that it holds a kernel of truth.

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

An important proviso here. You also need to fit in the rest and play that enables you to create from an inspired place. Walk regularly, and look around you. See exhibitions, performances, talks. Read, and day-dream. Go to inspiring shops or markets. And hang out with other creatives. It all helps inspiration turn up, when you most need it.

Need support or accountability?

We tend to see the creative path as a lonely one, but that doesn’t have to be true. We need to connect with other creatives, to learn from them, spark ideas off each other – or simply be with other people who face similar challenges and struggles. We’re always stronger together.

In London, when my son was young, I earned my living mainly as a journalist. If I was asked to do an interview at short notice or had a deadline, I had friends who were parents but also actors, directors, musicians, artists, designers. One close friend was a stone-mason. They understood how it is when a job comes up at the last minute, or when you really need some clear time to just push a project forward. And all of them were willing to have my son over for a play-date at short notice because they knew I’d do the same for them. But more than that. In the playground, in the pub, over dinner or chatting while picking the kids up, we gave each other information, inspiration, feedback, encouragement. 

Since moving out of the capital, I’ve had to look a little harder, sometimes. But no matter how strange or esoteric your craft is, there will be an online community for it somewhere. And if there isn’t, it’s easy to create one. From Facebook groups to mastermind groups, professional organisations like the Society of Authors or Association of Photographers, or more informal local support groups. You could also join my creative community, by subscribing to The Creative Companion, a regular email full of encouragement, tips, tools and resources for a more creative life.

Seek, and you’ll find your tribe. And the support you need.

There is always a risk, in beginning

It’s scary. Your idea might not work. Or you might not be good enough to do it justice. If you’re trying something new, you’ll almost certainly fall short. But the next one will be better. The one after that, better still. And in 20 years’ time, when you have a solid body of work you’re proud of, Future You will be so glad that the you of today you took that risk.

The worst thing I can imagine in my final years? Looking back over a life that could have been, and wishing I’d at least tried to make the things I imagined I’d make. And wondering if they might have changed my life, or influenced others. Whether they might have helped make a better world.

So just begin. Before you feel ready.

There are difficulties on every creative project. But these mostly get solved by showing up and doing the work: whenever, wherever and however you can.  What are you starting, today?

Sheryl Garratt is a writer and a coach helping creatives get the success they want, making work they love. Do you want to grow your creative business? Click to get my FREE 10-day course sent to your in-box now.