Unfinished building restoration, Chelsea (Photo © Nick Jones)

Over the holidays my son piped up from the back of the car. “Dad, I’m working on a screenplay. Want to hear what it’s about?” I look into the rearview mirror and I think of course I want to hear that, but I cringe momentarily.

I’ve been a tinkerer, writer, designer, ruminator, learner all my life. I’ve dreamed up a million projects in a thousand different places, laid the best plans—set my tools out on the bench, selected the perfect color scheme for my text editor—and then…nothing. I get out of the gate and I go promptly nowhere. I get bored, things stop feeling fun or productive and I just quit.

I’m not alone in this, I know. Most people quit, if I’m honest. Finishing is really difficult, maybe the hardest thing there is.

But I can tell you a small secret that separates the shipped projects from the ones in the archives: I didn’t tell anyone about them. And I know you want to tell people. I do, too. I want to ruminate and chat and yap about this cool thing I want to build.

But I also know that the fun I will have doing that will sometimes feel like it’s enough; it will steal the desire I had to learn while doing the project itself. My little ADHD brain will think oh cool we don’t have to do the hard work now! and it’ll move on to reading about Mesopotamia or ghosts or eating cheese or whatever.

Over the last year I’ve actually sent some things out onto the showroom floor, and here’s what I did to make that happen.

1. Keep loose notes. Make a little file and type dumb stuff in there. Remind yourself that no one will ever see this note. It doesn’t have to look cool or be spelled correctly. It’s just for you.

2. Seek and use help. Try to understand the difference between creating something new and learning the skills to create something new. Those are not the same. When I’m learning a new skill I tend to put myself into “help starvation mode”; I feel like in order to learn to swim I need to nearly drown. Ok, fine. But when I’m trying to use those hard-won skills to actually make something, I’ve learned to recognize my skill gap and ask for help.

3. Don’t tell anyone. Just don’t say anything. Work away on your thing. Hide it if you have to.

I’ve been more fulfilled working in this way, because I don’t feel like things have to be “good” or “cool”. Every creative endeavor has an ugly phase. You are absolutely going to want to stop in that phase. And worst of all is if you’ve talked about your amazing plans it’s going to make stopping in the ugly phase feel even easier. This sucks you will say to yourself, correctly. I can’t show this to anyone you will intone, understandably. And then you will quit, depriving the world of a social network for people who love cold eastern European soups (BorschtBook, obvs).

I want to hear about your screenplay. In fact, you have no idea how much I want to hear about it, and talk about it, and then talk about my own screenplay ideas.

But more than that I want to see your movie. Don’t tell anyone. Create your thing and show it to me when you love it.

— Nick Jones