CreativePact month ended several days ago, and I've had some time to mull over my experience this year. How one approaches the Pact is central to my thinking.

It's telling that for all the enthusiasm I have for the CreativePact just before it starts, the only Pact I feel I have done justice to is my first one in 2010 – I managed to keep going through the whole month sticking predominantly to one theme (although, even then I switched focus very early on).

CreativePacts since have been a mess of indecision, lack of continued interest and unavoidable other life situations. This year's Pact was scuppered largely by number 2 on that list: upon encountering a seemingly unfixable technical issue with FCPX (detailed in my last post), I lost the drive to continue on what I felt to be an artistically insignificant project.

The problem in 2013 may have been that the Pact I chose had no outright artistic outcome – I didn't set myself the task of making a 5-minute film, for example. However, when I have set myself a goal with an artistic outcome (i.e. 2012's Sampling EP) I haven't fared well either – that year I flip-flopped between sampling and writing lyrics (though, at least some of that effort did get through to the 2013 release of Lost Zoyd's Threshold EP).

What may be required, then, is a Pact that serves as the starting point for a larger, post-Pact project with a defined tangible outcome. The Pact would effectively be this project's idea generation phase: the daily Pact outcome would be one creative seed, one self-standing starting point, based on chosen themes or/and restrictions; following the Pact without fail would result in a set of 30 artistic nuggets which could then be developed into a cohesive body of work (say a portfolio or album).

The importance in having a larger goal beyond the pact is paramount – it is the "wall", the thing that keeps one's mind on the Pact later on in the month. Each day of the Pact constitutes the creation of a "brick" of that wall, a creation that should scale well to a day. But the Pact's outcome shouldn't be the finished wall.

This is the approach I will take for next year's pact, so let's see how it works out.