So, "After the Blackout" has been driving me batshit, and not in the artistically acceptable way where I feel myself being stalked by shadows of the main characters, or unable to sleep, making me instead stay up all night at my desk, drinking gin by candlelight with shaking hands (a bad mix all around. In other news, I need new batteries for my smoke detector), and penning rambling letters to my sick wife in the sanitorium about how I long for the release of a squalid death. No, it has been driving me to hair-ripping, wall pounding, procrastinating, run-on sentence Hell.
I was in a coffee shop yesterday (I was waiting for someone! Don't judge me!), and I made a bunch of notes, so I think I know what is wrong, and what I have to do to correct it. The problem is, it means scrapping everything so far and starting again, which I'm not keen to do. I have other ideas I want to move on to.
Part of my reason for having this site is to keep myself disciplined. I have the attention span of a lobotomized gnat, I want an egg salad sandwich.
Sorry, sorry, really, I'm back, but see what I mean? I know lots of writers have trouble finishing projects they start...that's a pretty common problem for people in general. My way of combatting this is by making myself work on only one project at a time, and I don't let myself touch anything else until it's done. My reward for completing my work is more work. This website is also a disciplinary tool of sorts, for publicly shaming me into working so I actually have stuff to post.
Right now I'd love to throw "After the Blackout" across my apartment, or bury the notebook in the garden, and work on the next thing. I know if I do that though, I'll fall back into bad habits in a second, and not finish a piece for another two years. I have a few writer friends who seem to actually work steadily on multiple projects at once, and I look upon them as unicorns. Pink unicorns, with glittery manes, and ruby hooves, who speak fluent French.
I'm still a bipedal, non-imaginary anglophone, I'm afraid.
So, for the sake of any and all future works, back to the beginning I go.
(sorry Shayne)
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1 comment:
I do the exact same thing: that is, work on one only thing until it's finished. It's the only way I'm getting my novel done. With 30 other stories in slush-pile limbo, and notes for dozens of others, I could always find different projects to work on, but if I ever want to finish anything, I know I have to focus on one thing at a time.
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