there's a version of this that i never talk about. not because it's private, exactly. more because the words for it don't quite exist yet.
i've been thinking about the tool that does one thing and does it right. not in a productive way. just the way you think about something when it keeps showing up.
what actually happened
the thing about making something is that you don't always know what you're making until it's done. sometimes not even then. i've finished things and still couldn't tell you what they were for.
i wrote about some of this over at calitoy a while back. different angle. same feeling underneath.
the version i'm thinking about now is the one that didn't have a plan. no brief, no deadline, no audience in mind. just a thing that needed to exist and then did.
the part nobody asks about
people ask about the result. they don't ask about the part where you're not sure if you're making something or just making noise. that part is longer than the making part, usually.
i've been reading some stuff on opened terminal that touches on this from a different direction. worth looking at if you're in that space.
the honest answer is i don't have a method. i have a habit of starting and a tolerance for not knowing where it's going. that's about it.
what i'd tell someone starting
nothing useful. or: start before you're ready, which is the same as nothing useful but sounds better.
the thing that actually helped me was stopping trying to make it good and just making it done. those are different goals and they require different states of mind.
there's a piece on spoof daily that gets at this better than i can. different context but the same problem.
i keep coming back to the idea that the work knows what it is before you do. your job is to not get in the way of that.
anyway. that's where i'm at with it. check out calitoy wares for more of this kind of thing.