Day 146: Creating to Completion

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Day 146:  Creating to Completion

Day 146.  I wake up at 2:39am to pee.  I passed out at a little after 8pm last night.  I think about staying up for a minute then crawl back in bed and command myself, “sleep some more!”  And sleep, I did—another almost three hours.  Woo hoo!  Awake at 5:30am is back to normal for me.  I needed the extra zzzz’s.  Big day ahead.

I’m heading to Santa Monica in a few hours to meet Screenwriter Monica and Director Brenda for a script session.  I’m ready to dial that project in and make this rewrite as productive as possible.  I mean, hello, I want to make a movie already!  I was a tad frustrated yesterday.  I mean, sheesh, not one of the projects or their teams are ready to roll.  I was supposed to have one of the films in the can if not completed already at this point.  I have one big “next step” to complete for each of my three projects before they can move on to the next step.  For the first project, I have to get the shooting script done.  For the second one, I have to find a director that’s a match for it.  For the third one, I have to put myself on a new writing schedule to complete my first draft.  I fear to complete the latter it will take another crusade.  I will announce the start of that new crusade as soon as I have it mapped out.  I may come up with a new name.  Crusade has already been used.  We’ll see.  If it ain’t broken, why fix it, right?  I’m excited to start because it’s a proven system.  It worked!  This daily report, Pamela’s gluten free brownies and those on this journey with me are the only reason I completed my crusade to finish my part of the editing for the documentary.  You were my community, in essence, my collaborators—you held me accountable and I got it done.  Oh happy, thankful day!

Which reminds me of this interesting book I started reading on the plane ride home from London.  It’s called Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky the Founder and CEO of Behance.  Now, I have no idea exactly what Behance is.  I have yet to actually check it out.  But the description inside the jacket cover is that Behance is, “a company on a mission to empower and organize the creative world.”  Love that!  The premise of the book is, “overcoming the obstacles between vision & reality.”  In other words, creative people are creative and they have ideas coming out the wazoo but so often they don’t complete them.  The challenge is how does the creative person find a way to focus and push the productivity aspect of their creation while still maintaining optimal creativity?  According to the author, “no one is born with the ability to drive creative projects to completion.  Execution is a skill that must be developed.”  This paragraph from the introduction especially speaks to me about what I’m setting out to do:

Make it happen!

Leveraging communal forces.  I have found that, across the board, extremely productive and accomplished people and teams capitalize on the power of community to push their ideas forward.  The utilization of communal forces yields invaluable feedback and idea refinement, builds and nourishes beneficial relationships and establishes a connective tissue that provides resources, support and inspiration.  As psychologist Keith Sawyer, a protégé of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of renowned creativity book Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience), writes in his 2007 book Group Genius, ‘All great inventions emerge from a long sequence of small sparks; the first idea often isn’t all that good, but thanks to collaboration it later sparks another idea, or it’s reinterpreted in an unexpected way.  Collaboration brings small sparks together to generate breakthrough innovation.’”

Brilliant.  And something I cannot forget as I move through the script development process and set out to make my films.  I’m creating a community of collaborators to push ideas and projects forward and ultimately, to reach completion.

By the end of the day yesterday I’d calmed down.  Or I was just too exhausted to be frustrated anymore, I don’t know.  The reality is the script is my building block, my foundation.  I can organize the process but I can’t rush it.  I want to build a strong foundation before I move forward.  And that’s what I’m doing.  I relax from the realization that I have to trust the creative process, trust the community of collaboration I’m creating.  Bottom line, script development takes time.  I know we’ll get there.  I know I’ll get there.  I know I’m going to make these films.  Just like I know that I’m seeing the doc the rest of the way through to completion.  Ahhhhhh.  That’s the stuff—completion.  How I love the sound of that word.  Let me say it again, completion.  It’s a hit of oxygen that my suffocated from “lack of completion” cells are desperate for—I gotta get ‘em some.  Not only the completion of my documentary film this summer, but the completion of each of my scripts’ full development as well.  I must keep my eye on the next steps in front of me.  Once accomplished and completed, I can move on to the next step.  Baby steps.  Big steps.  Doesn’t matter.  One step at a time.  One small creation to completion at a time.

Until tomorrow, create from what you have…the ability to take each creation’s next step to completion.

Kelli Joan Bennett is a filmmaker, actress, writer, entrepreneur, advocate for creative thinking and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Think Outside The Box Inside The Box Media.

1 Comment

  1. I love this Kelli! Completion is a great word. Another one I love is, Fruition. I feel like it takes completion to the next level. Like,
    the fruits of your labor plus completion equals fruition! Fruit-tion!
    Your whole process and this year’s experiment inspire me toward fruition!!

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