From Start to Finish: Undertaking Big Projects

Hello again, and welcome back to the blog!

For this week, I have something a little different in store for you all. As I mentioned last week, I’m trying to keep this blogpost varied in themes and subjects, just enough to show all kinds of bops, bits, and pieces from all over the writing spectrum. And today I landed on a more process-related, maybe even motivational topic. Today is all about undertaking big projects, how to tackle them, and most importantly, how to actually get them done.

Of course, big projects are closely related to writing. Novels, sagas, bundles, and branching stories all come to mind just thinking about it. Though, the phenomenon of ‘big projects’ is not just restricted to the literary world. There’s countless examples of huge projects, existing in pretty much any field you can think of. And I think it’s safe to assume that everyone has had their fair share of experience when it comes to at least starting such a big project.
But I’m sure it also feels familiar when those big projects don’t quite work out. When you’re losing motivation or interest along the way, all causing you to gradually give up on completion. Even for me, this is super relatable. Just looking through my notes and Google Drive, there’s so many examples I can name of stories, novels, or simply ideas that just didn’t quite blossom the way I originally intended it to.

So, if that’s you too, hop on along on this journey of project management. I’ll start talking a little about big projects and the nature of them, why they are fun, but also why they are difficult to complete. Then I’ll share some of my own experiences, before jumping into the process of big projects, from start to completion. Without further ado, let’s tackle this one.

Big Projects are your Friend... or are they?

Just like any project, it all starts with a simple idea. It starts when you get excited about a core concept for a fantasy world, or maybe an insane plot twist for a mystery novel. But as you start working on a couple of details, you suddenly find yourself facing huge lists of new ideas, things that need doing, outlines for chapters, characters, regions, you name it. And just like that, you found yourself in a big project.
It's not uncommon for projects to grow out into something expansive, it's your imagination making this core idea more and more fun. But even though the idea for the final product might be something incredible, it is often the road towards it that feels like torture.

But why is it so hard to complete a big project? From what I've learned from my previous projects, it's mainly a matter of excitement and progress. Let's say you're starting a new project. You're already envisioning the project being done, all the great productive days you'll have working everything out, all to reach that end goal. At this point in time, your excitement is at the higher end of the spectrum (or not, but that'll just make it hopeless from the start). At the same time, your progress is at 0%. You didn't actually put in any work, you've only come up with the exciting idea.
Now, what happens when we skip ahead a couple of weeks. Maybe you've hit a stage where you managed to complete quite a lot of what you wanted, or maybe not at all. Maybe you wrote a few chapters, or only finished a singular task. In my experience, it honestly doesn't matter too much. At this point you've already put in some work, but you're nowhere near the final product yet. You know it took you some work to get to where you are now, but you also now realise how much more work it's gonna take to bring it home and go all the way to the top. And this is where your sense of progress might stagger a bit, because looking straight up a mountain of tasks and things that still need doing has never proven to be the most motivational perspective. Even if you've been very productive, it never feels like enough at this stage.
At the same time, we can see that excitement and energy for the project has probably worn down a bit. From what I've seen in my own experiences, this is something that will always happen. No matter how cool of an idea you've got, it's always going to drop just a bit after continuing working on it. This is because it's no longer new. It's no longer an exciting idea that just popped into your mind, it's real, it's grounded.

What I actually mean by all that is simple: starting a project is easy—finishing is where it gets real. I've seen this with myself and the people around me. Big projects aren't nothing, they are difficult, but they can definitely be a lot of fun too.
I'm someone to easily start new projects, and when the idea is just awesome, and I have so much inspiration for it, I'm always up for a challenge to make it into something proper. And that's because it's fun to have big projects. Not only is it fun to finish them, and to have that final result for which you can say: "I did that, I made that", but it can actually be fun to work on it and fun to make progress. This is especially something I experienced working on a bundle I made with short format fiction and poetry, where I only realised the emptiness of not having 'the bundle' to work on when I finally completed it.

But before going into how to keep projects fun and alive, I wanna just give a quick disclaimer about everything I'm going to share. It all comes down to the fact that I'm just a guy who likes to write. I have no academic knowledge on any of this stuff whatsoever and what I'm sharing here all stems from my personal experience with (big) projects I've done in the past. All the processes or methods might be the golden tip for you, or they might not spark anything at all. So I'd say, take everything with a grain of salt. Try it out (or not), and if it works for you, that's awesome, but it might very well not.
In other words, explore and experiment, but it's up to you to find what works best.

Everything needs a Beginning

And just like stories, everything needs a beginning. All your projects need to start somehow, so, how do you do this? Again, I feel like this is such a personal question, though I'll just go over what works best for me. In practice, I feel like starting a project can be tough, though with the right idea and the right mindset, it's far easier to start a project, than it is to finish one.

The most important thing I noticed in my own projects is the factor of excitement. If you're embarking on a personal project, that means that you basically have the choice between spending your free time working on that project or binging the new season of Stranger Things. The easiest solution here is obviously choosing the latter, why work when you can sit down and relax?
In order to create yourself a project that is worth choosing over some show or game, you really need excitement. You should be excited about the idea, about the future of the project. You should want to work on it. I found that the core idea is the most important aspect here. If you come up with a half-baked narrative, in a setting you're not per se the most thrilled about, it'll be hard to keep motivation. So my advice here is work on something that really excites and inspires you.
As a result, I personally like to dive deep into new ideas when they surface. I don't immediately start working on something, but rather explore what's involved in the idea, what it might end up as, but also how I could go about working on it and how I could expand it. If the whole package is still exciting then, if it still gets me inspired to work on it at that point, I might have just hit my new big project.

This method also yields me a whole graveyard of ideas that never made it or ideas that were never exciting enough to start working on. And even though I feel like it's a shame those projects never came off the ground, I think it would have been very difficult to keep myself engaged in the process of making them into something more than an idea, because they would have likely ended up as something unfinished regardless.
What I'm trying to say is that the start is actually the perfect place to stop. If a project just doesn't click with you, if it doesn't spark your imagination or tingles your creative brain, it might be best to discover something else.

The Catalogue of me: What my Previous Projects taught me

Now that you've got an idea that sticks for the long term, the next challenge is to actually complete it for the long term. In all the years of my creative endeavours, I've had so many ideas and projects. Many of those turned out to nothing, but my most valuable lessons were learned from the projects that made it into something more. I have learnt the most mainly through experimentation of how to approach various types of projects.
So I thought it could be fun to go over the key methods I like to use for tackling big projects and how they helped me undertake my personal projects. It'll give you a good insight, and me a perfect excuse to talk about myself.

1. Consistency is Key

I'm sure you've heard it before: "Consistency is key". It sounds a bit cheesy, sure, but this is probably the method that helps me most with any project. Staying engaged keeps you familiar with your project and your goals, but it more importantly helps building consistent progress. Even if you might not feel the most motivated or creatively inspired, what counts is that you put pen to paper and actually go and do something.
In my personal experience, it quickly comes down to daily challenges or goals. I found that this is a format that works wonders for me, while also being extremely enjoyable and fun. I wanna use my very first music album as an example that fits this method (yes I make music, and no it's not that great).

For my first album, I was mainly still experimenting with my audio workspace. I didn't know a lot of the features and what it had to offer, so I set myself a challenge: "Make a song every day". This sounds like a big challenge, but when you're not too worried about post-production, adding effects, or recording physical instruments, a song can go quicker than expected.
At the time of making this album, I had Covid. Now I was not very sick, but I was quarantined for 10 days—bound to my room. I decided to take on this challenge at the start, and after just 10 days, I had now gotten myself a whole catalogue of songs that I made in this new environment. And not only did this consistency help me understand my workspace, it also made me something awesome. Because at the end of this period of time, I had a full album.

You might think 10 days is not that big of a project, but I've noticed that this type of consistency is great for making progress on pretty much anything, at any scale. Especially for my writing bundle "Fragments of Fiction" (I'll get into it in more detail later), I found that at times when motivation was quite low, a period of daily writing and daily progress helped in boosting my excitement for the project again as I saw it grow in front of my own eyes.
Most notable of an example though is the challenge I set for myself in October 2024. At this time, I had way too much time on my hands and I set myself a daily challenge for both expanding my fantasy world with a character a day, as well as a challenge to write something every day. Especially the latter helped me grow in ways I never expected. It gave me a lot of opportunities to experiment and explore, but staying consistent also greatly improved my skills as a writer.
So I think it's safe to say, in any project, consistency is your biggest tool. Staying consistent starts being about the project or craft, and ends up about not breaking the streak—anything just to keep going at it, to keep watching yourself make progress, ever closer to the final destination.

2. Reinforcing Consistency with Deadlines

This section might feel a bit like school again, like an assignment due every day of the week. But if those assignments taught me anything, it's that deadlines actually made me sit down and do the work. It was going to be graded, so either work on it or fail the class.
Now obviously your personal projects are nothing like this. You've got total freedom over your own time and when stuff should be done. But even though this might feel relaxed, it loses the advantages you get for projects at school or work. You don't get assigned tasks that need doing. You don't get asked about your progress on said tasks. And you certainly don't get anyone to set you due dates or deadlines. In other words, you have to hold yourself accountable.

This might not make sense right now, why do I need to set myself deadlines if I can just work on it whenever I want to? The answer is simple, you probably won't. Allow me to explain this through the example of my first ever fantasy novel by the name of Lavendia. This is a novel I wrote about 4 or 5 years ago, when I was still in school. At the time, we all had to do a personal research, project, or experiment that would partially contribute to your final grade—it was quite important you could say. I was just starting to explore writing and figured I might as well write a novel for this project.
I picked out a setting and a story, and during the writing process, I found that I lost more and more motivation to sit down and work on it. But it was clear that I needed to do so for a better grade. And even though I didn't always feel like it at times, the fact that I had to sit down a set amount of hours every week made me a lot of progress, and allowed me to finally push it through, all the way to the end.

What I described here also closely ties into what I mentioned earlier about consistency, but the most important aspect here was actually the deadlines. The fact that I had to finish this whole novel by a certain date and the fact that there would be consequences if I didn't do so. Of course, it's a bit harder to set consequences for not writing when you're working on a personal project (though you can always check out sites like "the most dangerous writing app"), but often simply having these deadlines helps you at least work towards something and set clear goals.

Another example is right here. At some point in the last month I decided to write a blogpost every monday, and here we are. Even though the consequences are minimal, I have to keep up my reputation and post in time. Or with the Boundless Saga at the moment. I decided to post an episode every other week, meaning I'm going to have to start working on that one soon in order to post it on Friday. It's not necessarily about the consequences, it is mostly about setting the goals.

3. A Step at a Time with Achievable Goals

Once you're putting in the work, the next step is staying organised. I found that one of the best ways to keep myself organised is by mapping out my goals and plans. Setting goals will allow you to both break up what feels like an enormous project into achievable missions, while completing them comes with some neat psychological motivators.

To expand on how setting goals helps with the workflow, I would like to mention my story bundle "Fragments of Fiction" as an example here. This is a bundle consisting of lots of short format stories and poetry, meaning it's basically built upon all these little stories—the perfect project for setting smaller goals.
This project was a big one, of the scope I had not really experienced before. So in order to keep myself organised and motivated, I started setting smaller goals. I divided "completing the bundle" up into "completing the foreword" and "completing chapter 1", which I then divided up into tasks of completing the individual stories within that chapter and so on. There are always smaller goals to be set, and these smaller goals give you a clearer path of what needs to be done.
Seeing what's done and what's still left gives a great overview of where you stand within the project. It tells you how far along you are based on manageable goals rather than an abstract destination like finishing the whole project.

It also feels more achievable to complete these small goals. Think about it. If you set a small goal for just completing a first draft of a single story, you're able to work on that task and complete it maybe even in a single sitting. It gives you a clearer destination to work towards.

This concept also comes with psychological benefits. At least for myself, I found that completing such a small goal really boosts morale. No matter how small the goal, you completed it, you did it. It makes you feel like you made good progress, which is an amazing motivator. It helps you stay excited and on top of progress as I have been talking about before. In the long run, these both make for a successful completion of your project.

4. Sharing is Caring

Onto a method that is something completely different, but something that I personally experienced as incredibly useful: Sharing your work, and sharing your progress. I found that sharing the stories I told helped significantly in boosting my personal motivation to keep going. This was mainly through positive feedback, hearing how others enjoyed what I was making, or at least found it cool in a way simply gave me that extra push to make it. Not only for me, but for the people around me as well.

The example I would like to present in this case is a little saga of stories I wrote in Minecraft of all places. This all happened during Covid times, when the SMP of me and my friends was absolutely booming. I had somehow stepped up to become the librarian, where I continued to release a main trilogy of books along with a rich set of prequels on a lot of the characters. I still remember how my friends used to patiently wait outside for me to finish the new book. And when it then finally came out, they would all get their copies and start reading. Not only did I love that my stories were being liked, I loved that my friends had a good time reading them.

But in addition to being rewarding and motivational, sharing the process can also be a way of keeping yourself accountable. If you post your work online somewhere, you feel a responsibility to keep posting and not give up on the project.
Not to forget that sharing can be an awesome tool for receiving feedback and improving your work. Because ultimately, everyone will have their unique perspective and takes on your work, which, to me, has definitely proven to be a valuable source of feedback.

In conclusion, there's just so many great things about sharing your work. I'm absolutely positive it will boost your project and bring it to new heights.

5. Mix it Up, Keep it Fun

Finally, I want to share with you a method which I feel like is more on the experimental side of the spectrum. But even though I never hear or read much about this type of method, I feel like especially for me, it has been extremely refreshing. I'm talking about variety here, switching it up and exploring something different every once in a while.

The core idea stems again from Minecraft (can't believe how much that game taught me). I like to play Hardcore, wandering around worlds completely to my own. In these worlds, I often found myself tackling a lot of big projects at the same time. And this could all be tied back to motivation.
The idea is simple, if I work on something for too long, it starts getting less and less exciting, until I don't feel like working on it any more. At that point, I will switch to another project, until the same thing repeats. But at some point, it's exciting again to jump back to the first project. You can probably see where this is going. By rotating my projects, I never got myself in a situation of boredom for working on the same thing for too long.

By applying this method, I was still making progress, but not all within the same project. This of course does not have to be applied only to multiple projects. Rather, I found that these different sections can very well be explored within a single project as well. Take this website for example. I could work on a couple of different writing projects, my layouts, the styling, or start implementing new features. There's often a lot of different things to work on even within a single project.

A great use case from my personal catalogue is my second music album. This is a project where I purposefully aimed for variation, making each track slightly different, stylistically and thematically.
As a result, it was rarely tiring to work on the album, as each new track brought me something new, something exciting.

Another great example is the story bundle. There were just so many things that needed doing, that there was always something fun to work on. Some examples are working on new stories, refining older ones, writing foreword/afterword, making a layout, polishing the formatting, you name it.

To summarise, I found that this method of switching up what you're working on, really helps in staying motivated and keeping it fun for yourself to put in the work. It keeps things fresh, and without even realising, you're suddenly making progress across the entire project.

Closing Thoughts

Wow, this one turned into a bit of a lengthy one, huh? I guess that makes for an excellent opportunity to test the waters a bit. Don't hesitate to let me know how you feel about these longer blogposts. I would be happy to hear from ya.
More on theme though, I have to say that the only reason I was able to drag this gigantic blogpost into what it has eventually become is through sheer passion. I think I've been reflecting on my methods, my process, and motivation throughout all of my bigger projects so far. And writing these down made for a great opportunity to actually reflect on them, but also on where I gained my insights and what I have learned from everything I've done so far.
I will definitely be writing more on the topic of motivation and processes in the future, but I think next week we might take it a bit more lightweight. I wanna thank you for getting this far and I hope I inspired you to finally go for it and take on that project, because no matter how big, I'm sure you can make it manageable already.

Now get started on it already, I've taken up too much of your time here.