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We're all busy and life seems increasingly chaotic, so how do we find the time and focus to write? In today's show, I talk to Jessica Abel, a comic book artist turned prose writer and creative teacher, about finding your focus and moving past procrastination to get your creative work done.
You can listen above or on iTunes or Stitcher or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.
- Moving from hand-sewn books to print-on-demand
- The problems creatives have with focus
- Tips for organizing and managing creative projects
- Figuring out how you are actually spending your time so you can focus more on creativity
- Knowing which projects to start and finish
- Jessica's Creative Focus Workshop
You can find Jessica Abel at JessicaAbel.com and on Twitter @jccabel
Transcript of Interview with Jessica Abel
Joanna: Hi everyone. I'm Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I'm here with Jessica Abel. Hi, Jessica.
Jessica: Hi, thanks for having me.
Joanna: Oh, it's great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction.
Jessica is an author, cartoonist, and creative teacher. Her books include the award-winning graphic novel “La Perdida”, “Mastering Comics”, as well as “Out on the Wire” about the storytelling techniques of the best audio producers in the world including Ira Glass.
Her latest book is “Growing Gills – How to Find Creative Focus When you're Drowning in Your Daily Life” which I know many listeners will care a lot about.
Jessica, why don't you start by telling us a bit more about your creative journey and how you got into illustration, comic books, and became a writer?
Jessica: Well, it goes way back as it does for most authors. I started making comics when I was in college. I was in a club where we made an anthology together and I never studied art formally, I was in a literature program.
I learned a lot about the language part of it but not as much about the art part of it and had to make that up for myself. This was in the early 90's or late 80's, pre-internet.
There was a really robust self-publishing scene for cartoonists doing alternative adult comics, not superheroes, not any of that other kind of stuff. The stuff I was doing is really quotidian stories about young people going about their lives facing the daily problems they have and that sort of thing. And it's not a mainstream, has never been a mainstream thing to be in comics, meaning the top-selling kind of thing.
And so we, I and other people in my positions, were doing what we called mini-comics, it doesn't necessarily mean small, it just means that they're self-published and by hand like photocopied and stapled and maybe rubber-stamped and you do stuff to them.
I did a series of mini-comics which were not very small, they were actually like eight and a half by 11 over a series the sort of the early 1990s and my omnibus title was “Art Babe.”
It was a collection of short stories on different topics. It wasn't sort of one ongoing story. But each one was hand-sewn; the bindings were hand-sewn and they had prints on the cover that I would hand-print with in one case with potatoes or with rubber stamps. It was very arty kind of stuff.
And in 1995, I won a grant called the Xeric Grant which no longer exists but it was a very important launching pad for a lot of alternative cartoonists throughout the 90's and the 2000's. I was in the second cohort of that group. And that's a self-publishing grant.
It's specifically to support self-publishing and it was founded by Peter Laird who is one of the two people who created the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” which is a self-published book.
Joanna: Oh, there you go. I didn't know.
Jessica: Yeah. They're a huge, huge success story of independent publishing in comics which has a longer and more we haven't had to battle for respect in the same way that I think people in the print world have. It's a very different feeling. It's like, “Yay, comics, let's all do it,” instead of, “You aren't real,” you know what I mean?
Joanna: Yeah.
Jessica: There'd been a bit of that but because we were coming in with an entirely new way of making comics and new way of thinking about stories there was no place for us in the mainstream comics world. And so what else are you gonna do, right?
So Peter Laird started the Xeric Grant in order to support specifically self-publishing. So it's not a Grant that supported creation. It's a support that actually paid your printer bills, paid for distribution, paid for marketing.
You would put in a business plan essentially for your book as part of your grant application. And I won that Grant in '95. And so I put out my first professionally-printed self-published issue in '96. So that's “Art Babe” Vol. 1 Number 5.
And when I had that in hand that's what got me access to a publisher called Fantagraphics which is small, it still exists, great publisher, one of the top art publishers of comics. And they published all my heroes, all the people I looked up to and they offered me a book. So I started publishing with them individual issues.
Those individual issues then led to a book deal with Pantheon for my not for “Art Babe” stuff but for a second book which is a graphic novel meaning a complete story not a bunch of short stories called “La Perdida.” And that came out. The complete version of that came out in 2006.
And then I've done a bunch of other comics with other publishers. I've worked with a bunch of different publishers. I was also the series editor for “The Best American Comics” for six years, with my husband, Matt Madden.
And so we were the people who collected all the material and gathered it for the guest editor each year. And I've just been involved with traditional publishing really deeply for over 10 years now.
But I was getting really burned out on it. I was feeling really like my last book, “Out on the Wire”, I had great support for it. Love my editor, she was amazing and she made the book what it was and like having that editorial feedback is rare in comics because of the work process because often what shows up on editors desk is like much closer to a finished product than the manuscript is. And so we worked out a system by which, she could actually get in earlier and make it better.
I did that but she left before the book came out which has happened on every single book I've done where the editor who bought the book changes jobs before the book comes out which is just like oh, it's always such it's just this moment I'm like, “Oh, my God, really, again? I can't believe it.” And is something wrong with me? Is it me?
Joanna: It happens a lot actually, that seems to happen to so many authors, yeah.
Jessica: All the time.
Joanna: Yeah.
Jessica: And it's not our fault but it just, it happens. And that means that the person who loves your book and who bought your book because they love it and because they want to stand behind it and they want to really be the hero for it, they move and then you're just in somebody else's pile. In that sense and my new editor was great, she was fine but she didn't have that whole history with me.
And then I had really good PR and marketing support. And still, I felt like it didn't make the impact it needed to make. It's growing slowly. I mean, it's a book with a lot of legacy, a lot of things that you can do in the future.
But it's still something I can't affect what happens. I can't go into Amazon and change my categories, like I can't-do anything with it, I can't give it away, I can't there's like so many things that I want to be able to do with this book and I just feel like it's not fully mine. And that's just got too frustrating for me.
So when I decided to do to write “Growing Gills” and “Growing Gills” is my first. I've written two textbooks about making comics. And those are books that are in text with lots of illustrations but they're not just prose books. It's not the same thing exactly. So “Growing Gills” is my first prose book actually, just prose.
When I decided to do that and I knew that the self-publishing process would be more direct like I wouldn't have to deal with the image issue. I would put some images in it but it's not like I'm reliant on that. This is my chance. I'm gonna try independent, I'm gonna try it use the Amazon platform and use their Print on Demand capability for print and just try it. And so I did that in…put it out in May. And I have no idea how I'm doing it because I have no like benchmarks at all but anyway that's what happened.
Joanna: Yeah, well, and it's such a great story because it sounds like you started out in the independent space and you were empowered and doing stuff and then traditional publishing gave you a different platform but they slowly disempowered you because you have no control. And now you're back to being in control again. But it's still quite all over the place which is it's a great journey and really interesting.
I have a few questions coming out of that.
Circling before we come back into the publishing what's actually in the book. I wanted to ask just about the comic world because obviously, you mentioned that the physical product of hand-sewing and doing potato-printing unlike physical copies and now you're doing there are these Kindle comics, Amazon book Cosmicology, a lot of people reading on tablets.
The comic book world itself is less physical and now you've got this book which I presume is selling more in digital form.
How do you feel as an artist with this sort of change? And how does it feel to have a Print on Demand not a beautiful kind of hand-sewn book?
Jessica: It's complicated. There's some very good things about it and some negatives.
I love having artisanal objects. I love having hardcovers that are the few produced and all that other stuff. I have full confidence I will have that again.
This is all my artwork stored over here behind me, you're watching on video, you can see these boxes. I mean, that's just the art, that's not the books like storing boxes of books and shipping them out is no one's idea of fun.
I am perfectly happy to have the POD option via the Amazon. But the thing for me is, with a prose book, obviously, design is very important, being able to read something well and have it flow and I worked with a great designer who helped me put a lot of features for the e-book together that are make it really comfortable to read. So that's all important.
But you can flow it on any device, you could make the text larger, you can do all the things that make it accessible for more people when you're using prose.
When you're doing comics you can do e-comics and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that but one of the key factors of a print comic, one of the key features of it rather I want to say, is the fact of the spread.
So when you open a book and you have one page on one side one page on the other side, when you're reading something visual like comics you are absorbing the entire page at a time even though you're reading in detail moment by moment. You're reading in a certain order but you can see what's gonna happen in the future, it's like time traveling.
And a prose book you can't, that's not a factor, it doesn't matter. Maybe you could see the chapter title that's afterward or something but other than that you don't get that look at a glance thing. You can't use color for example over a page spread to show a change of mood that gives you a sense of where you are in the story.
You can't flip through a prose book like you can a comic and just like find a spot by what it looks like. So there are all kinds of things about physical books and comics that make e-publishing more complicated and less attractive in a comic that is designed in any kind of interesting way with different panels, sizes, and shapes.
Comixology does a good job of this but what they do is essentially they have a guided reading path where they zip you around up through the panels and basically they have cartoonists, some of them former students of mine, who work there and decide what the reading path is for you.
But if you're a reader you get to decide on your own, you get to figure that out on your own and you can look at it all at once. So there are a lot of compromises that go into it.
And I feel like the compromises that go in with the prose book are actually they're way more on the pros side than on the cons side because I've had people complain about like type size on my book for example, on various books of mine, that they're too small to read. And that's not a problem if you have an e-book.
Joanna: Yup.
Jessica: You could just make it bigger. You can have it on your phone and it's in your pocket at all times. If you're stuck someplace you have something to read and you can get into it.
Those are things that I just really I'm really excited about and they just haven't they literally haven't been available to me as a cartoonist. So there's two things going on at the same time.
Joanna: Yeah. That's awesome and I agree with you. It's so interesting. And I know a lot of writers who've had small print in their print books because of publishing costs, the publishers make the print size smaller and then it's really really, hard to read. So I really get that kind of issue.
On the writing side, when you were writing “Growing Gills”, what lessons did you bring from your comic days and or was it more you were bringing lessons from your teaching work?
Jessica: I would say it's more the latter. I think that as a cartoonist I've had to carefully construct long works and think about the story arc over long periods of time or in non-fiction works like “Out on the Wire”, the sort of essayistic argument that you're making.
I have practice with that but the visual piece of it is not necessarily something that carries over, in this case, the fact that it's comics. The fact that I'm a writer and I've written long books and I have had to do that over and over again definitely helps but.
But that does come more from teaching and working with students and writing, writing my blog, working on my course, like those kinds of things.
Joanna: Why “Growing Gills” and why now? Did you see problems amongst your students who are the creatives that led to this and what are those problems?
Jessica: Well, it's funny. It actually came out of “Out on the Wire” in a weird sideways way.
When “Out on the Wire” came out, I did a podcast version of that book that is a limited series and it's highly-pedagogical and at the end of each episode there's a challenge to storytellers to create something, to create a step of the story and you basically through the season you create a piece, you make a story.
So we had an online group where people would post stuff like the answers to their challenges. We would take some of those and my husband Matt Madden and my producer Benjamin Frisch and I would get together and live critique and discuss the work that had happened in the group. So it was this very interactive kind of thing. So this group was there.
I was thinking about what's my next step professionally? What am I going to do next? I'm not ready to plunge into another three or four-year-long project. I'm still working on a book that isn't done yet. Now, I'm still working on a book. But then, I definitely was still working on a book that isn't done yet.
What am I going to do? How am I going to make my life work for the next period of time?
I was thinking about offering training and teaching on storytelling online but when I actually surveyed the people in that group and the people who were on my mailing list about like what are their biggest problems like what's going on with them.
The number one thing that came back was I can't work at all, I'm totally I'm procrastinating all the time, I'm miserable, nothing is working, I don't know how to do this. I need help. And I read that and it took actually a couple of reads for me to like click that that's what people were saying, that's really the main thing that was going on. And, of course, being able to make the work as a precursor to being able to make the work better, right?
Joanna: Yeah.
Jessica: And I thought you know what? I can help with that. I know a lot about getting huge 10-year long projects, bringing them to fruition, getting them out in the world. I know about that. I can help.
And so that's when I started writing. This was in I want to say late 2015. I started writing about creative productivity and basically the main the crux of it is how to get big deadline-free creative projects done and out into the world. So I started writing at that point.
Joanna: You mentioned deadline-free there. And that's so important especially for independent authors because no one's under contract. And there's almost two extremes as the people who are buying them out really fast and burning out. And then there's the people who take 10 years and are still procrastinating.
How do you personally, because just for people on video your art right behind you is very organized. My dad's an artist and his stuff is definitely a lot more, crazy. So how have you organized? Like you said, you've got these tips and obviously, there's a lot in the book.
How do you do your big projects?
Jessica: I do them the way I teach which is to shift back and forth in what I call altitudes and this idea of looking at the entire project and deciding where you are in the project and what needs to happen next in large scale.
And then you zoom down to a small scale and you are like, “What is my next step? What is the next thing I can do?” I don't need to think about the whole thing. If I think about the whole thing I'm gonna get distracted or get imposter syndrome or whatever it is and I'm just going to focus on what's right in front of me. That's the simplest possible version of it.
I think that the biggest thing for the two pieces I think I contribute to this whole dialogue about productivity and time management and stuff is this idea of projects that are self-generated and deadline-free that nobody cares that they exist until they exist. And that you have to bear all of that weight of self-belief in yourself. So that's one side of it.
The other side of it is acknowledging the complications of actual life so that, for example, I have two children and I have a job and I have a whole bunch of other stuff going on. And I so I not only have to do what I just described, about deciding the next steps blah, blah, blah. I also have to block it into my actual calendar in my real week and get those time slots in. And if I don't, nothing happens.
Joanna: I say that all the time. That's like my number one tip, is, block the time in your calendar like you would a dentist appointment or a birthday party or like anything that you would put in your calendar. You have to put your work in your calendar, your creative work.
I have so many questions. I love the altitude thing. I think that's really good. The sort of, you have to, on one hand, be really high-up and look at the big picture and then zoom down into which bit you're in which is cool.
If people are feeling overwhelmed when they're feeling drowned as you've put it, what are the steps for them to work out how to diarize?
Maybe people who are like, “Well, I can't put time in my diary. I don't even have any time or I don't even have a diary?”
How do people work out how to get rid of some of this stuff in their way?
Jessica: I have a bunch of free training about that on my site. And people are welcome to go there.
But the short version of it is, there are a lot of different kinds of things that can be in your way, there could be mindset things in your way, there can be literal things.
But if we're just talking about the calendar, what's on the calendar, step one is time tracking. Figure out what you actually are doing because most people have no idea. They have no clue what they're actually do you know?
You plan out what you think you're going to do for a week or even a day, if a week's too much just do a day then do it the night before, what do you think is going to happen tomorrow?
Literally, every single thing, when are you commuting, when you shower, and when are you eating, when are you going to watch TV show, when are you going to bed, when you waking up, all those things when are you working.
And then what are those fungible bits and if it's only for some people who have three jobs and two kids and whatever, it's gonna be 15 minutes. And for some people who are retired, it could be 12 hours. And what are you literally doing in your day? Until you know that you cannot make other decisions.
Joanna: Good point.
And what about giving stuff up because I find that most people have to give up something to find that time.
Jessica: You know what? You don't know what that decision is until you know what you're doing.
Yes, you'd probably need to give something up but the thing you're giving up maybe noodling on Facebook. It may be something that doesn't actually matter to you. You might want to spend 15 minutes a day checking in with people but you don't need to spend 90 minutes just doing whatever and scrolling your feed.
And then I talk about this concept of dilemma. Dilemma is we use it as writers all the time, right. The idea of setting up dilemmas for characters is really powerful where there's a choice to be made and there are positives and negatives on both sides of that choice.
So some sacrifices can be made no matter which choice is the character chooses. That's really sexy and awesome when you're writing a fiction book, not all that sexy and awesome when you're talking about your own life.
It's really scary and hard but until you identify what those dilemmas specifically are for you, what are you having to choose, you have no way to make that decision. It's not possible.
What you do is you fall into is your default and the default is you're doing one of the two things or maybe a third thing that isn't even one of the two things and you don't really know why and you don't have any control over it.
Joanna: Yeah and there was a quote, I can't remember who it's by, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
Jessica: Yeah.
Joanna: And we think oh, it's just a day or it's just an hour, it's just 10 minutes on Facebook whatever.
I just removed Facebook from my phone and I feel liberated because I go to find it and it's not there and I think, “It's not that great, I could read a book.”
Jessica: Yeah. And one of the things that writers tend to do is they get punitive with themselves about spending time in ways that are not writing. So this is the classic thing. I used to do this all the time. And I still I can't say don't do it now.
I mostly don't but it happens where when I'm working I'm thinking about all the things I wanna do that are not working, when I'm actually doing my creative work or if I'm procrastinating sitting in front of creative work I'm thinking about like you know, I'm saying, “Oh, I'm not going to do all those things.”
And when I am doing those things I'm feeling guilty about not doing the work. You're never guilt and anxiety-free in that situation. And that's classic, everybody does it.
So if you, listener, if you are going through this it's normal, everybody does it. That's why I say when you're time tracking, when you're setting up your system, you schedule your essentials first. So food, you know hygiene, job, sleep, like put those things in there, taking care of your children; those things that have to happen put them in first.
But the second thing you put in is recreation and leisure before your creative work because if you put in a slot which is like I'm gonna spend 30 minutes on Facebook. And you put that in your calendar it might feel kind of like, “Oh, that's dangerous. I shouldn't.”
But then you can tell yourself when you're doing your creative work for 45 minutes before that or earlier in the day like I'm going to get to go there, it's in the schedule. I have to. It's on my calendar.
If you have a problem with Netflix bingeing don't go cold turkey on Netflix, that's not going to work. Cold turkey never works for anything. So pick a thing that's going to be a reward for you, a time that you set aside and say, “This is my time to do this and this is my time when I'm not gonna do this.” And now I have both and I can see that I'm gonna get both. So I'm not just this kind of like, “I have to…” You know scratchy anxiety.
Joanna: And then there's another problem which is too many ideas. Some of the struggle is with not enough ideas and other authors I think once you get used to listening to your ideas, you're full of ideas. How do you decide?
And one big problem is finishing. A lot of people have finishing issues. They start all these projects when it's fun and then they never finish. So that's another form of procrastination.
How do you recommend choosing which project to finish?
Jessica: In “Growing Gills” and on my site as well, I have a framework that I've set up for some principles on which to choose.
One of the principles the first one basically is quick wins. So if you have something that's 99% done, your dilemma is probably something having to do with imposter syndrome and perfectionism and you just need to grit your teeth and finish it like do that thing. Focus on just that thing and get it done, whether you publish it or not is another issue, that's another project, it's not the same project but finish the thing.
I talk about the concept of idea debt which is there are two aspects to it. And they both have to do with just you, just lying in bed, thinking about all the ideas. And they're just kind of like flipping through your head.
You have to choose something to work on. And if you keep all of those things in your head at the same time, what you're doing is devoting tiny bits of energy to all of them instead of all of the energy you have available to one and especially if you live a very full-life like we're talking about, you don't have that much energy in a week to devote to this.
Never mind time. You don't have very much life force you can put into this project and if you're trying to divide it up among 10 things nothing will ever get finished. You have to pick.
So number one is you have to decide. Yes, I have to pick. And doesn't mean you have to throw everything else away, it just means you have to put it away and say, “I am definitely not working on that until this thing is done.” So quick wins is one way.
Another one I have there in that list is, follow the money. Follow the money is asking is this going to lead to money? If you're self-publishing and you have a new book that you can put out and even if it's not gonna be a gangbuster right away, it can be part of what's building your future.
And so you'll make a little bit of money with it. And maybe it'll build up over time even if it's not gonna be a huge thing. I mean, do it, publish it, like what are you waiting for? Get it out there, do your thing.
Another one of the things, that relates to that, is platform building or audience building. So again, if you're an independent publisher, putting out work is and having like a body of work is crucial to building your platform. If you have a number of books up, on online platforms, people think, “Oh, this is an author not just this is a one-off fluke,” Right. So that's something.
If you have more another where you can add a book to a series or you can add a book to your portfolio overall or whatever it is, that's the way to go.
Then there's this, the final one which is the really hard one. I might have missed one but anyway.
The big one is future building. Essentially is this the project that really represents the person that you want to be, the way that you want to be in the world in the future.
If you think five years out and you think what you want your life to look like. Is this a thing where you're gonna go like, “Hurray. Thank, God. I did that five years ago,” or is it gonna be like, “Wait, the what? The what? Did I do that? I completely forgot.” Those are different kinds of projects.
And the thing is if you can't decide, literally flip a coin, spin around and point at something. It doesn't matter. In the end, it doesn't matter, all you need to do is finish something.
Joanna: And as soon as you finish something it will help you get onto the next thing.
I just put up a pre-order for my new Dark Fantasy book because I know now when it's going to edit, I know when it will go publish. And now I'm thinking about the next book I'm like, “Oh, I just want to get into the next one.”
You said that finishing makes you want to start. So we're almost out of time. But I wanted to circle back to the publishing aspect.
You've chosen to go independent with this book.
Are you going indie just because you are ready to go back and what have you noticed about the changes in independent publishing since the early comic days?
Jessica: Well, obviously, the independent publishing I did before is apples and oranges, completely different thing. I'm glad I did do that. So I have some sense of what the moving parts are that there is a printer somewhere, there's a distributor, there's different roles to play. So that doesn't surprise me. So that's good.
Coming back into it, I came back into it basically because I wanted to see the lifecycle of the book essentially. And I wanted to be able to launch it to my own list and my own people and serve those people. I didn't feel like I needed to make a lot of money from this book. That wasn't really the aim.
The aim was much more building my audience and going wide with it although money is nice but that's not where I'm at right now with this particular work.
And I wanted to have the flexibility to set up promotions and give it away with things. It's really a piece of an overall body of work that I'm creating that includes the Creative Focus Workshop which is the course that it's adapted from and drawn on and really inspired by and the blogging work that I've done and a bunch of the other pieces. I took all those pieces and reformed them into this book.
And so I wanted to have that complete piece there. I needed to have the book in order to have something that people could get into my world in an easy, I won't say a quick way because it's long, easy way, inexpensive way and see what I'm all about like what am I doing. I still intend to make an audiobook with my background in podcasting and stuff, it's a no-brainer. I just haven't had the time to do it.
I see the opportunity to re-launch it with an audiobook. And I'm interested from a business point of view and all of those things. I don't know if I'm doing a good job or not as a publisher frankly. I don't have any benchmarks to know but it seems fine.
I gave away a lot for free and I had a five-day free period at the beginning at the launch and I gave away a ton of books and so it's in many, many people's hands, which is great and if that's my goal then, so far so good. And I can continue to do that. It's gotten really amazing reviews. It's going really good in that sense. So I don't know, jury's out I guess.
Joanna: Well, it's interesting because you do so many things in terms of courses and podcasts and teaching and all of that.
You mentioned briefly there that you wrote it from the course and you've got a free course launching, haven't you?
Jessica: Yeah, actually, I think the free course, there's an evergreen version that's available all the time and people can get that whenever they want from my site by downloading the “What's Stopping You?” hand-out book. They'll get invitations to that course.
But the free version that's live will be over by the time we air but the course, the full course, The Creative Focus Workshop, those are from the air date of this podcast, that's when the doors are open for registration and I only open it twice a year. So it's a kind of special opportunity.
And so what that is, is a four-week long live cohort. So there's recorded material and reading to do. And then there's a live group support and calls and all these kinds of things because what I find is that while people get a lot out of “Growing Gills” and some people are able to just kind of take that and run with it you know, because the materials in there. You can get it in “Growing Gills” or some people can take that and just make it work.
For most people, the power comes from the cohort, the power comes from other people going through the exact same things you're going through. Getting feedback and an ability to customize and individualize what it is that you're doing specifically.
Am I heading the right way? Is this the right choice for my one goal? Is this, how do I break this down? I don't understand what the next step is? And you can get all that from that cohort and from me in a way that you can't just from the book.
And so, it's a pretty special thing. And I thought a lot about trying to go evergreen with the course and have it be something I could have available all the time but the magic is in that group. So if you're interested in this, if you're struggling with getting your books finished and getting them out into the world, now is definitely the time to check that out.
Joanna: Fantastic. So what is your website and where can people find you and everything you do online?
Jessica: Well the Creative Focus Workshop is at thecreativefocusworkshop.com. And I, I'm at jessicaabel.com and that's J-E-S-S-I-C-A-A-B-E-L.
Joanna: Fantastic. Thanks so much for your time, Jessica. That was great.
Jessica: Thank you.
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Here's a thing about 'creative focus' I've just discovered that I can listen to your podcast while i'm writing ...