(This started out as a comment on a post by @harphony, but it got to be so long I thought it was better to make it a standalone post.)

How to create something substantial—a work of art, a game, a novel, a nonfiction book—if you’re easily bored or find yourself struggling to complete even small projects? My personal experience is probably not that relevant to anyone else, but . . . I have written two books thus far, both completely self-formatted and self-published. I don’t have (diagnosed) ADHD, but I do get easily distracted at times and find it hard to make grand plans, much less carry them through to completion. I think the secret for me, especially for my second book, was that I (unconsciously) divided the work into multiple phases, with different tasks and motivations for each phase.

In the first phase I was just writing relatively small posts, heavy on personal opinion and light on research, with each post relatively complete in and of itself. For my second book this took the form of farting about on Tumblr, with no thought of doing anything more than that. Each post didn’t take that long to write and didn’t take much mental energy to complete, but I got a small feeling of satisfaction at having finished each one. That motivated me to keep writing more of them.

After doing that for a while, I could no longer muster the energy to keep writing more posts. But . . . I had accumulated enough material that I thought to myself, “it might be fun to make a book out of this.” So I started looking for common themes or arguments that I thought would provide an overall framework for the book, and tried to figure out what I needed to know to support those themes/arguments. The interest and enjoyment for me then became that of puzzle-solving: “why did thing X happen, and how did it influence thing Y?” I spent a lot of time doing reading and research, and much less time writing.

At the same time I started the third phase, turning the material into an actual formatted book suitable for either electronic or print distribution. I did this as a mental break from doing research and further writing: now my interest was in learning how the publishing system worked that I had decided to use, and my satisfaction came in the form of seeing my writing nicely formatted and typeset.

Eventually I was close enough to having something book-like that I was motivated to finish the job. In reading over draft chapters, I thought of additional things I wanted to write about. When I got bored of writing, I occupied myself in some tasks I didn’t need to think a lot about, most notably creating a comprehensive index of the appearances of the characters in the manga I was writing about. (After doing said index, I thought, “gee, I now have everything I need to do an analysis of the social graph of the characters,” so I extended my existing R knowledge to do that as well.) I also had fun learning new things about publishing: how to obtain an ISBN, how to register a copyrighted work, and how to license artwork and create a book cover.

I have a tendency to perfectionism, and that carried me through the remaining work of getting the book ready for publication: checking all the references and creating a complete bibliography, proofreading the text and tweaking the formatting, getting the book cover to a point where I wasn’t embarrassed to have people look at it, and validating the PDF and EPUB3 output. Again, I switched frequently between tasks as I got bored with doing one of them.

The final factor was that from the very beginning I worked hard to convince myself that I would never see any external rewards or validation from publishing the book: that no one would buy it, no one would even download it for free, and even if someone happened to read it I’d never get any feedback from them about it, good or bad. That freed me mentally to focus solely on the enjoyment that I myself would get from creating the book, and not persist in doing something I disliked in the (vain) hope of someone compensating me for it, monetarily or otherwise.

All in all, it worked out pretty well: I have something I can put on my bookshelf next to books by other people and think “that’s not too shabby, all things considered.” I sold a few copies, had a few more downloaded, and had one person tell me that they enjoyed reading it. I even had a pleasant surprise, when by a fortuitous circumstance a person came forward to create a Japanese translation—which in turn led to more fun experiences, like learning how to typeset Japanese. (It also improved the English version by having another person find typos.)

So, these are my personal conclusions—which, again, may not be applicable to anyone else—on how to create a substantial work:

  • Start small, working in an opportunistic manner on things that interest you, can be done relatively quickly, and are self-contained enough to give you a sense of satisfaction that they exist once completed.
  • If you get to a point where at least some of the small things look like they could go together to create something larger and more significant, think about how they might fit together, and what additional pieces might be needed to make the whole work.
  • Stave off boredom by switching between different types of project work and trying things you haven’t done before but would like to learn.
  • Set your expectations for the work’s reception to be extremely low. Don’t push yourself to work on it if you yourself are not getting any enjoyment from the process.

This is very much not advice for someone who wants to make a full-time living from their work—but in reality very few people will make anything at all from their personal writing, art, or related activities. My advice is rather for those like myself who will never see any significant external rewards from the things they create, but feel compelled to create them nonetheless.