Your year in review (or, How to ensure you get off your butt in 2008)

Happy 2008, people! While the rest of the world has their collective head in the toilet and is making vague promises to whittle down their thighs and/or credit card debt, I imagine you’re pondering how you can make your creative goals for 2008 stick. Allow me to interrupt your list making a moment to share a little exercise that lit some TNT under one the most immobile arses I know — mine. (I promise this isn’t some lame creative visualization exercise where you daydream yourself into becoming the next J.K. Rowling.)

My suggestion: Write a one-page creativity CV (a.k.a. artist resume). That’s right. Create your writing (or filmmaking or illustration or game animation or clothing design) bio. Don’t bother mentioning what you do from 9 to 5 to pay the bills. Just crank out a page listing all your accomplishments in the creative work you’d be doing full time if money were no object and you weren’t already doing something else most of the week to pay off that heap of bills you racked up over the holidays.

Not sure what an artist resume looks like? Here’s one I really like.

Basically, you’re going to list some or all of these:

• Your education and training
• Your creations (stories, books, films, comics, designs, websites, shareware, etc.)
• Awards and accolades you’ve received
• Public appearances (readings, art exhibits, participation on a panel, etc.)
• Any relevant teaching experience you have
• Stuff you’ve done to give back to your community (judging a local fanfic writing contest, showing elementary school kids how to make dioramas, etc.)
• Professional associations you belong to (Glassblowing Babes of Birmingham, etc.)

Don’t worry if your creativity CV is short. Type it up anyway and hang it on your wall, even if the only thing on the page is the header [Your Name], Writer Extraordinaire. Now tell me you don’t want to spend a little more time this week/month/year working on that manuscript or song lyric you put aside back in October of 2005.

I did this exercise a few weeks back while applying for a fellowship of sorts, which involved creating a one-page writing CV. It also involved staring down a cavernous hole on the page where I had expected to find my creative non-fiction achievements.

Yeah, I’d published piles of reported newspaper, magazine, and web articles over the years. And yeah, my book publishing, public speaking, and teaching credits were starting impress even the most skeptical relatives in my family. But the section of my CV highlighting the humor essays and creative non-fiction stories I’d published over the years — the stuff I really, really thrive on doing — was skimpy at best. I mean, I knew I’d been back-burnering a bunch of stories I’ve been itching to write, but that was somewhere in the far recesses of my denial-happy mind. And staring into the void of the “Stories & Essays” section on my CV pretty much hit me like a tsunami.

So I have been making lists, promises, and even a morsel of headway on a couple of stories I’ve put off for far too long. And that’s what I plan to make more time for in 2008, er, just as soon as I get this next big, totally unrelated deadline off my plate.

What about you?

6 comments January 1st, 2008