If you continually stop and start writing projects without finishing them, what do you think are the sources of your inclination to stop? Become your own expert on stoppage, so you can be your greatest cheerleader for starting again.
Most of us, at some point, have shelved a writing project or thrown it in the back of a desk drawer or into a box in the closet. When you stopped working on that project, did you allow yourself to take a focused, objective view of the true reasons you stopped?
The deliberate breaks that we take at logical points in a manuscript are not what we are talking about here. This is not about the break you schedule after your first draft is complete so you can return to your next round of revision with fresh eyes (you do that, don’t you?). This is about the shelving, unshelving, reshelving, and the bringing down again of a project (or projects) that still never gets finished. Or the short story begun but never completed. Or the author’s habit of beginning writing projects with enthusiasm but then tossing them aside with feeble excuses about time or boredom.
If any of these describe your starting/stopping pains, ask yourself some hard questions and notice any patterns: Do you give up on a certain type of work? Do you stall at certain points in the process? Do you quit writing at certain times of the year?
Based on the answers you get, ask another round of questions at an even deeper level: Do you need to gather a new set of skills or improve on others? What are those specific skills and how can you acquire them? Does a recurring life event or a memory hinder or prohibit you from writing? If so, how can you prepare to keep writing when it comes round again? Or do you need to give yourself permission to stop during that time, but devise a tactic to restart once the time has passed?
Keep digging deeper with questions until you determine what you need to start once again every single time a stoppage happens.
This creativity tip is loosely based on and inspired by The 97 Best Creativity Tips Ever! by Dr. Eric Maisel (2011). The tip is modified for writers and is used with his permission.
Gina Edwards is a retreat leader, a certified creativity coach, and a book editor. She is also a writer, so she’s intimately familiar with the challenges and elation that come with being one.
She supports all writers—published and aspiring—who want to write as an act of courageous and necessary self-expression.
Walking the writer’s path hand-in-hand with her clients and students, she helps them establish a writing practice and define a creative life on their own terms.