A New Way To Work

Can inspiration be forced?

For a long time now, I’ve chosen most of my scrapbook projects based on the upcoming calls to which I want to submit. I look at the list of calls, select the ones that I think I have good pictures for, prioritize the order to work on them based on their publication quality, and work through the stack until the deadline is reached. This seemed to me to be the most efficient way to submit the most well-targeted work to the most calls.

But under this system lately I’ve grown more and more personally unhappy with both the quality and the quantity of the layouts that I have been creating. And due to the lack of page requests I have received recently, I’ve been professionally unhappy with the results as well. I haven’t been enjoying my scrapbooking like I want to either. There hasn’t been much joy in it. It has become “what do I need to work on today?” instead of “what do I want to work on today?” Instead of being excited and proud of my finished creations, I am mostly just relieved to have met a deadline so I can cross that item off my to-do list and have another completed page for my albums and another item on my active submission list. And it has been taking me a ridiculous amount of time to complete a single layout. Something obviously has to change.

So over the last month or so, I’ve done some soul-searching about my method of choosing my scrapbook projects. Creating a few recent projects were turning points in my process towards finding a new and better way to work. Three recent projects in particular that I completed came together very quickly and I was delighted with the results. Why? Because I was inspired to complete them. One was for a page call but I chose a topic close to my heart and inspiration quickly took over the layout in a way that it usually doesn’t take over my “created for the call” layouts.

The second was an Altoids tin album of my daughter I made as a Christmas gift for my mother.

The third was a holiday card for the Basic Grey card contest. Because I was in the holiday spirit and excited about using the product, the entry just came pouring out of me.

I enjoyed making those projects in a way that I hadn’t enjoyed any project in a very long time. And I was much more pleased with the results than I had been in a long time. Inspiration is a powerful force. You need it to make good art. I had been trying to force it with my old system of planning.

I decided that you can’t force inspiration and get quality results.

The solution that I finally reluctantly came to was that I am going to stop creating for the calls. I am going to go back to creating for ME, what I want to create, what I am excited about creating. Then I will take what pages I have on hand and submit them to appropriate calls when they are issued.

In the short term this new approach will mean somewhat of a break in submitting while I build up a library of completed pages that I love. In the long term it will hopefully mean better results from my submitting. (It couldn’t possibly bring worse results than my recent submissions!) And in any case, it will definitely mean more and better completed projects that I love, and a return to the joy of creating.

I already have a huge pile of pictures and list of projects that I am excited to do. Not that I have to do, but that I am excited to do, that I want to do. The first project, a decorated scrapbooking journal, is already underway.

I’ve discovered inspiration again.