Creative projects and judging your own work

[action9000]

Just a quick rant:

For as long as I can remember, it's always been a serious challenge to me to judge the quality of my own work.

Basically, here's the cycle that keeps coming up. Each part of the cycle will have a "confidence" rating from 1-5. This is basically a subjective measure of how happy I am with my work and how good I think it is

1) Get idea. Think it's the BEST FRICKING IDEA EVER!!
Confidence: 5

2) Start making it. Be SUPER EXCITED because it's looking/sounding as AWESOME as I hoped!
Confidence: 5

3) Keep working on it and get to some part where it looks/sounds less awesome than I'd like.
Confidence: 3

4) Tear up that section and rewrite/redo it.
Confidence: 2

5) Repeat 4 until I either give up or get something really cool. For the sake of this post, let's say I figure our something really cool.
Confidence: 4

6) Keep working on it for awhile longer. By now I'm quite invested in the project and have a significant amount of work done on it. I've seen/heard it for many hours and am at the point where the novelty is wearing off.
Confidence: 3

7) The longer I spend on it, the less confident I get that it's very good after all. It doesn't matter what it is. I can know that it's at least "decent" or "not bad" but I'm not longer feeling like this will be something great.
Confidence: 2

8) My desire to work on the project decreases as I lose hope that this project will be the greatest thing ever. The project starts to get less and less attention until it eventually just rots in a folder on my computer for years, unfinished.
Confidence: 1

This happens after having a lot of exposure to whatever I'm working on. I start to see all the little things that aren't masterfully-crafted and aren't "perfect" for whatever reason. I start to feel like this is just something some hack put together and isn't worth the effort to complete. I feel like I can do better if I focus my efforts on something else, at which point the cycle repeats.

I don't want to talk about how much unfinished work I have on Google Drive, USB backups, external hard drives....ugh.  

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When I was younger I didn't have this problem. I just started something that, as long as it was RELATIVELY good for what I felt capable of, I excitedly finished it! Now my standards are so sky-high, I'm never impressed with my own work, struggle to accept it for what it is and just give up on it.

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The stupid thing is, I know my work isn't awful. I'm not delusional; I know my work isn't the greatest thing ever made in the history of humanity but I know it's competent enough that with effort it could be genuinely good. When it comes to really sitting down and working on it though, I seem to be incapable of letting that sink in. I see all the little things that I don't like - little things that I don't know how to fix - and let them eat away at me until I look at the project as crap, with little hope of redemption.


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I know this sort of thing is common with creative work where you're personally invested in the project.

I'm interested in getting a chat going about the creative process and staying focused on a project. Please feel welcome to chime in with any thoughts.

[RockingScorpion]

Oh I do know that one just too well.

I have found some ways to deal with it over the past few years though. The first one would be:

Taking breaks:
It happens every now and then that I'm working on something (mostly drawings in that case) and reach a point where I think I have a huge load of mistakes in the piece and then I try to fix them, but it doesn't really work out, basically, I'm not seeing the actual drawing behind all those "mistakes" anymore.

I do wanna continue but I know that it won't help the result at all at this point, so I'll take a break, do something else that's totally unrelated for a while. Then usually, when I look at it again, I don't see what got me so worked up before, and if there are some mistakes, it's easier to spot and fix them.

Working on more projects than just one:
This one depends on how you wanna do things personally. I just noticed that having two things to work on and being able to switch between them when you don't feel like continuing on one of them can help, too.

Finish what you're doing:
I really don't like leaving projects unfinished. Sure, it happened because I lost interest after a while in some cases, but that's rare. The thing is (for me at least), if you don't pull through, you never really know what could happen. This has led me to rather bad results already, but sometimes it's not the point to create a masterpiece, sometimes it's the point to just finish it, learn from the mistakes you made and move on to something new, only that you know now what can be done better.
And once again, it is finished, and no matter the result, you know how it turned out, good or bad. It avoids that you can ask yourself the "what if" question, and that can help a lot.

But yeah, all those tips are just my way to handle this. I don't think there is some kind of "universal method" here, because everyone does things differently.

To finish this off, I'm going to leave this here. That one helped me when I was in a creative hole a while ago.

[Ducky123]

I think we've all been there  

If it helps you, I'd offer to take a look at your stuff and see if it's good or if it needs improvement. Your projects are usually music-related, aren't they?

[action9000]

If it helps you, I'd offer to take a look at your stuff and see if it's good or if it needs improvement. Your projects are usually music-related, aren't they?

That would be awesome, Ducky. Here's one example:

One of my current projects is just a stupid little remix of something that I've been wanting to do for years, basically a homage to a game I loved as a kid.

The original music is from an N64 game called Snowboard Kids. It (and its sequel) has one of the catchiest soundtracks of any game at the time and I fell in love with the soundtrack growing up.

My personal favorite piece of music from the game is this one:
Snowboard Kids - Silver Mt. <-- This is the original track from the N64 game so you know what my remix is working with.


I have been working on a symphonic rock remix of it for some time just for fun but I've COMPLETELY stalled out on it! I'm at the point where I honestly can't tell if it's any good or not. On one hand, I think it's amazing. On the other hand, I feel like it's really just kind of loud and obnoxious without capturing the "epic, goosebump-worthy" sound I was going for, that it's just kind of pretentious and "pretending to be good" rather than actually being any good.

Here is my work in progress on my remix so far:
For the Souls of Mt. Inferna

Thanks again. It's just bugging me so much, I can't tell if it's worth my time or not anymore... haha.

(On a side note, playing this project file back in real time makes my computer practically explode.   )

[Ducky123]

Well, I think it sounds quite epic compared to the original soundtrack