I woke up this morning with the intention of rewriting the work I wrote about losing here. I spent fifteen minutes tinkering with it, and then flipped over to working on another half-finished short story, which I tinkered with as well.
The last couple of weeks my discipline writing every day – other than in my journal – has been weak. And the times I have found the discipline to write, I haven’t been able to sit down and take a half-finished story across the finish line. I have these spurts of inspiration and productivity and then nothing. It’s part of the reason why most of the fiction I’ve written and posted to this site is less than 2,000 words. That’s what I can write on one shot of inspiration.
I know that these problems are a fundamental part of the writing process, and a primary challenge to creating anything, but I have yet to deal with them in a systematic way. I just haphazardly tackle whatever I feel like in the moment.
One idea I found online is to sift through projects and rank them from most important to least, and to toss out the ones that don’t excite you. If I did that, my current projects would look like this:
- Weekly newsletter – key priority each week, somewhat time sensitive
- Noir short stories – two stories I have fully outlined but half-written
- Miscellaneous blog posts like this one
That’s not too many items. It means discarding a handful of stories I’m not excited about and don’t really care to finish, but that have still taken up time and energy as I bounce between them.
Steven Pressfield writes in The War of Art that a creator “knows if he caves in today, no matter how plausible the pretext, he’ll be twice as likely to cave in tomorrow.” That has been true for me. A week in which I don’t write on Monday or Tuesday quickly becomes a week in which I don’t write at all.
But part of that hesitation is absolutely the reality that I don’t have a clear plan for what I’m going to be working on each morning. I either start something new, or tinker with something old. I don’t sit there with the key objective of finishing the one piece of writing that I’ve set my sights on. And that indecision leaves an opening for bailing altogether.
So that is what I am going to try for in the coming months. I have one short story I’m working on, and only when I’ve finished that can I move on.
Pressfield also says this: “Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”
There are worse things than sitting around, tinkering. It’s better than doing nothing at all.