You’re trying to complete a novel, have sufficient poems to create a collection, participate in #NaNoWriMo, where the aim is to have written 50000 words towards a novel during November, or #NaPoWriMo, where the aim is to have drafts towards 30 poems during April, but also keep discovering new ideas which show promise. How can you keep your focus on what you “should” be working on instead of being distracted by new ideas and never finishing anything?
Drop the “should”
The moment you are writing because you feel you should be writing is the moment it becomes a chore. Anything that’s a chore to write will be a chore for the readers to read. Writing is creative and needs to come from a creative mindset.
Finding time to write depends on how you approach projects. If you break a project down into smaller tasks and do a little every day, you’ll probably benefit from writing most days. Work out whether you write best in the morning, in the evening, around midday or in the pockets of time in between paid work and caring. Block off that time and write or think about writing. Writing will become a habit. If you prefer to think, daydream, plot, plan, research and then write your novel or story or poem as a deadline looms, give yourself reasonable deadlines, such as writing 50000 words during a month or finishing that short story this week.
Procrastination
- Are you putting off working on the larger project because the plot’s tied itself into a knot or you’ve written yourself into a dead end and don’t know how to get out? In which case, a break and a new project might be the thing you need while the plot knot unties itself or you unpick your last few scenes so you can figure out which route the story needed you to take to avoid the dead end.
- Are you putting off working on the larger project because it feels overwhelming while a short story or a single poem feels like a quick win? The problem is balance: occasional quick wins feel good but they shouldn’t come at a detriment to the larger project. Find a way of doing both.
- Do you feel a sense of stasis? You want to work on the larger project but also want to work on the new idea that you’re not sure whether it’s a flash in the pan or an absolute gem so are worried about dedicating to time to something that might not work. The answer may be to allocate time to both: say half an hour on the larger project and half an hour on the new project (a variation on the Pomodoro technique for devotees of time management strategies). That way you’re making progress on both so are less likely to feel guilty that you’re spending time on one but not on the other.
- Mix it up. Are you stuck because that novel is really a longer short story? Or that poem is really a sequence? Try your piece in a different format or even just change the font: making it look different might open a window to a solution.
- Extend your definition of writing. People tend to focus on work that can be measured and the easiest measurement of writing is word count or number of poems. However, numbers overlook the creative part of the process. Creativity is like a muscle: it needs a combination of work and rest. If you don’t rest, you can’t do the work to the standard you want to. If you do too much rest, the ability to work suffers. If you don’t factor in creativity into how you measure your creative writing process, you’re not being creative. Readers don’t care if you spent 20 minutes or 20 years writing that piece, they only care about it being a good read.
- Consider the craft you’re learning as you write and treat it as a practice piece. Some pressure is good but sometimes the pressure to produce a near-perfect, publishable piece takes the joy out of writing. Writing and publication are two different, albeit interlinked, activities. Producing creative writing with an inner critic constantly telling you it won’t get published or there’s no market for what you’re working on, won’t get the piece written. Leave the decision over whether to seek publication until you’ve got a finished piece that might need tweaking or repurposing to fit a market.
- Make your procrastination productive. Stuck on the novel, write a piece of flash fiction. That tricky second stanza not suggesting solutions, try a new poem. Not feeling creative, prepare a submission or two. You may not have done what you intended, but you have achieved something.
Trust Your Process
Creativity ebbs and flows and it can be difficult to keep going when it’s in its ebb phase. But if you have found a way of creating and guarding your writing time and method of writing, it will return when it’s ready.
It’s also natural to feel somewhere around half to two-thirds of the way through a project, a sense of ‘it is worth continuing or should I give up?’ and ways of overcoming that inertia will be individual to you. Published writers are the ones who kept going.
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