What am I doing wrong?

You are always going to have a ton of ideas. That's the glory and bane of creative people. You'll have ideas for a hundred different projects, and you will probably start quite a few things that never end up finished.

If it helps, try this: write one thing, and keep on writing it. Take that third draft you're working on, for example. Yes, all these other ideas and projects are still there. But take a full week of writing and completely devote it to this third draft, then see how you feel. If you're still rolling on this third draft, keep going. Do that long enough and your draft is going to be done.

Then, after you've crossed something off of your list, the other projects will still be there. The ones that are truly worth your time will still be appealing, so take on one of those!

Now, if you get halfway through that draft and completely stall, that's when you set that aside for a few days and hammer something else out. Whatever you do, focus on that one single thing at a time. Don't make it feel like juggling, just focus on one thing at a time and you'll find that you're getting more done.

I hope that helps!

Ah, I used to be like that - never finished anything! Then about ten years ago I realised I'd never achieve my ambition of getting published if I didn't sort myself out

I recommend setting yourself a deadline on one of the projects. Tell yourself you have to finish this revision before you can go back to the first draft, or the other projects. Maybe it still won't be perfect, but you owe it to the book - and to your learning process - to give it your best shot.

Also, if you're struggling with the revision, seek out resources that can help you rather than giving up.

If you can spare $50 a month for five months, I strongly recommend Holly Lisle's course "How to Revise Your Novel", which got me over this exact same hump.

If you don't fancy spending any money, I have a blog post summarising how I implement what I learned on the course:

http://www.annelyle.com/blog/writing/revising-your-novel-in-10-easy-steps/

When a "plan collapses within minutes of starting to rewrite" how exactly is it collapsing? And is it in a similar way each time?

SianaBlackwood said:

@paulcosca - I think what I'm afraid of is that if I don't give the other projects a little bit of my time they'll disappear and the bit of my brain that produces new ideas will give up producing them. I know I'd probably be more productive by not working on anything but the Major Project, but I don't know how to nudge the others into the background.

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Easy fix, in three steps.

1 - Open a new file (if you use a word processor) or a new notebook (if you write longhand.)

2 - Label this your Idea File. (or Holding Pen. Or Pandora's Box. Whatever works for you.)

3 - Use it to hold ideas you aren't currently working on, or which don't fit in your current project. Now, you can stop worrying about forgetting things and get back to your project.

(Oh - there is a Step 4: When you finish your current project, or if you're stalled out on it, open up your Idea File and see if any fresh sparks fly.)

You could try giving yourself a daily goal for the main project (e.g. revise and edit 500 words or what have you) and then once that is done - and only then - move onto the new, shiny exciting stuff.

That way you can do both.

SianaBlackwood said:

(Also not-so-secretly hoping that the description of this board is right and by asking it I automatically make the question less stupid.)

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It does! Congratulations for making the leap into the pool!

Right now I'm working on refining the plans in preparation for writing a third draft of one project, hoping that this time it's going to turn into an actual book-shaped thing.

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So...You're planning to start planning soon? Actually, you've already gone beyond planning to actually DO something. You came here to get help. Great!

I'm sitting on two other projects that I'd really love to be preparing to rewrite. They're not 100% ignored - whenever I happen to think of a solution to something in one of those projects I'll spend a bit of time on that instead.

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Many writers work on multiple projects simultaneously. So far, so good.

I've also just started a new first draft.

When I look at it on paper, it seems like my project management makes sense. One major project, a first draft to play with and a framework for making sure I don't lose touch with the other things in the queue.

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I'm curious, and don't take this the wrong way, but it feels to me like the "process" of creation---how you go about juggling projects, rather than the writing itself is what's driving the car. Do you feel that if you ignore an idea you're a bad writer? 'Cause you're not.

In practice, what's going to happen is that the new draft will fall apart and I'll seek refuge in planning the major project.

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Ah! Now we're getting somewhere. You sound like a plotter to me. Do you need to have a scene in your head before you can write it down, so that if the scene "sticks" you can't move forward? if so, welcome to the club! There are actually a whole bunch of writers like you (myself included!)

Which brings me to---Are you allowing yourself sufficient time to "stare at the walls"? It's actually part of the creative process for a plotter, where you literally sit or lie down somewhere and do nothing but think. No writing, no planning projects. You're giving your mind time to finish running the script. My husband sometimes has to remind me to blink. But I'm not kidding.

I'll come up with a seemingly awesome plan for fixing the major project, which will collapse within minutes of actually starting to rewrite.

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Which is because the scene hasn't finished playing out in your head. Think of it like a YouTube video on a slow connection. The video starts to play before it's fully loaded and the action stops and sputters while it loads in bits. Speaking from experience, you need to let the video finish loading. Allow yourself at least half of whatever time you give to writing to visualize the scene. A "scene" can vary. It might be a paragraph, a chapter or a dozen chapters.

The other projects in the queue will start looking more attractive and I'll put in a bit of work on them, but ultimately I'll end up back here on AW trying to figure out how to frame all this in the form of a question.

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And you did a fine job.

So...

The best question I can think of is this. I'm doing something wrong, but what is it? How can I break out of this pattern?

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It's not that you're doing something wrong. It's just not something you've encountered before. You are absolutely ALLOWED to not write during the writing process. In fact, it's part of the process for a plotter. Include it in the process and let the video play fully out on a scene. Maybe try a different book a day for a few weeks to see how it feels. Or, write one all the way through in a flurry of scenes. But try to make part of your goal completing one. Just one. You'll be surprised how well it goes when you slip inside the skin of a character and stare at the walls until the real world slips away and you open your eyes in the character's world.

I also have a tendency to lose interest and skip around and gravitate to the Shiny New...

Actually, the entire reason I first wrote a whole novel was to prove to myself that I could finish something. I initially had no intention of trying to get published. I had just wanted to try writing a book for a long time--lots of fits and starts, but like everything else in my life, I never followed through. I got very fed up with myself. Very. And it became about Proving That I Was Not a Complete Waste of Space, etc., which was more important to me than the novel itself.

But by the end of it, well, I thought there was potential in it, and thus began, you know, This. Now, to my great shock, I've written a few short stories and two whole manuscripts--not that any of them are great or publishable, but I finished them, dammit. (Well, more or less; there are still a few edits here and there, and I could probably fiddle with them forever if I let myself... ) And I'm well into a third...

I think it's getting easier. Maybe.

Anyway, my point is that I deliberately forced myself to stick with one thing, for the purposes of sticking. Once I managed to do it the first time, it was easier the second. Granted, on the second one, I lost a bunch of words because of a computer crash and got very discouraged for a while and started a few new manuscripts, but: only one of those manuscripts stood out to me right away, and I a) committed to finishing the current WIP before getting too involved in THAT one, and b) committed to leaving behind the other ideas for the time being.

I have a document where I write down other ideas that come to me, to save for later.

However--you should do whatever works best for you. I'm not sure what that is, since I'm not You... But perhaps try sticking to one thing at a time? See how that goes? Unsure...

ETA: Okay I read Cathy's post and I wonder if I missed the point--lawlz. But I like the staring at the walls advice, too.

I don't know if anyone else has mentioned it but self-discipline often helps. I'm not saying that to be nasty. But there is no magic wand that you can wave to make it all come out right. I wish there was, trust me.

But unfortunately it just comes down to you deciding to finish something. It's as simple, and as difficult, as that.

Without reading all the other advice in this thread, which I know is gonna be good, I want to throw in my three cents.

Near the end of your op, where you say 'what's going to happen' just throws me for a loop. You already know what's going to happen, hence you're setting yourself up for defeat. You're doomed. This is how it's going to turn out...

But why must it be so?

Do not be so eager to set yourself up for self-defeat. You are not alone in having many ideas and many projects you want to work on. Many, many writers are like this. Few of us are so bound to one idea and only one and we must finish that one before we die... etc.

Take one project and finish it. Absolutely finish it from first word to last, and with outlines (if you need them) and the other aids, lists, pages of notes, whatever. You need a break from it? Have a drink or a walk or play a video game. Do not start something new, which will distract you from the main project.

Some writers can dart all over - work on this, work on that, come back to this. But it seems to me you need to focus, finish, fix, finish.

Otherwise you're stuck in the same old self-defeating habits that prompted you to write your original post.

buzhidao said:

... stick with one thing, for the purposes of sticking.

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ftw

I'm in the camp of pick one and finish it.
1) Finished, to the end, polished until you believe it is as polished as you can make it. 2) Work on the query and synopsis (Given what you've described as your pattern, I say work on these after you've polished so they don't become a procrastination tool) 3) When well into the query and synopsis, then pick the next project to work on.

When you see this through to completion, you're going to feel SO good, and it will make a difference in how you view yourself and your writing, regardless of what ultimately happens to that novel.

Good luck!

It's ironic- this is only my second post on this website, and it relates to my first which was made on another thread.

You've gotten the necessary support here that you need in order to grow- a best selling author has taken you by the hand with encouragement, another author has given you a reference to her blog (which I've bookmarked) and a couple of others have encouraged you to develop more self discipline.

Personally, I think that it's possible that you're feeling kind of overwhelmed. The flitting from project to project is why I'm saying this; I'm suspecting avoidance. But only you can know what the truth is, but as your thread title also shows, sometimes the truth about ourselves are hidden to us.

When I've looked around the web to pages put up by writers who earn their living at this game, I have seen that one skill they've had to develop is to work on more than one project at a time. Sure, as Cathy C said there are no set rules. Even so, general tendencies of human nature have appeared in my own reading.

I spend my day in three sections:
1. First thing- new WIP. Minimum 2K words a day. It's a pace I'm comfortable with, and has led to 3 80K first drafts in a year. Four to six hours.

2. Another 3-4 hours revising an already finished first draft.

3. This is the cool part of my day- as we're cooking supper, me and my Life Partner KD McLean discuss what's going on. We're both writers.

Now look- we do this full time. We haven't broken through yet, but we're working at it. My point is that my writing time is broken up into three parts. For me, at one point writing became a drudge when I was spending all my time revising a m/s. Now that I've broken it up, the surprising thing was that when my alarm goes off (and yes, I use one) and I have to switch projects, the next one on my plate is fresh to me!

My brain shifts gears so quickly it was surprising.

Oh, one more thing, I also spend 45 mins on the web over breakfast/coffee reading and commenting on places like here, and trying to learn one new thing a day about this craft.

Self discipline can really help. Just don't overwhelm yourself.

i do one at a time.....i can start something new when I'm done with the one, but I have 4 or 5 ideas right now too....and can't write all of them simultaneously and do it well.

SianaBlackwood said:

@paulcosca - I think what I'm afraid of is that if I don't give the other projects a little bit of my time they'll disappear and the bit of my brain that produces new ideas will give up producing them. I know I'd probably be more productive by not working on anything but the Major Project, but I don't know how to nudge the others into the background.

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I can definitely sympathize with that worry.

But by making that the skill you're afraid of losing, you're not allowing other absolutely essential skills to develop. In my experience, the part of your brain that comes up with those awesome ideas is almost never going to give you a finished product. It can't because that's not what it does, but moreover it won't because that's not always fun. It becomes work, it can be frustrating, it can be tedious.

but those other skills need love too. And I can only speak for myself, but the pride of having finished a solid, polished story is for me at least equal to the rush of putting down an idea for the first time, *and* it lasts longer

Now, as to how you can do it, it's going to be different for everyone I think. As mentioned in other replies, deadlines are a pretty common one - don't allow yourself to work on any other projects until you've worked for 45 min on your main, or edited and rewritten two pages, or put down 750 words - set something reasonable for you and gradually increase it.

You don't get a certain amount of ideas and that's it. There's no limit on how many ideas you're allowed.

I was struck by the same thing as Jaksen. It seems you have already decided how your writing will turn out before you get into it. With that kind of negative attitude, how can it turn out any different? That negativity carries over in the attitude that if you don't give attention to new ideas they will wither. Strong ideas persist, and they can wait in line for their turn without suffering. If they do suffer from waiting, they probably weren't strong enough ideas to go anywhere anyway.

You have completed a first and second draft of a story, which means you have defeated one of the main enemies of new writers--an inability to finish anything. So you are well ahead of many writers in this project, even if you are not happy with the current state of the manuscript. For some writers, editing is the hard work of writing. It certainly requires significant intellectual attention. Can you take that as a challenge instead of an impossible task? Can you take one scene and really think it through? Did that scene capture what you wanted to get across to the writer? Did it move the story along? Did it give the reader something to "feel" about the story, to understand about the story? How about the next scene? And the next? Work through the manuscript and make any changes, then give it a straight-through read to look for scene and chapter coherence (this can be done first as well). Then it may be time to get some or all of the manuscript critiqued (either through the SYW forum or through beta readers). That's when you get free help with your draft and a valuable learning experience.

You have succeeded in getting to a third draft of a story. So what if it takes another draft or several more drafts to get it into shape? Why would you sacrifice the productivity you already have to a negative attitude? If it is going to fail, let it fail by attempted improvement, not by rotting in its current state. It's going to improve with additional attention. This is important because writing is learning, and no learning occurs in a stagnant manuscript.

SianaBlackwood said:

... Right now I'm working on refining the plans in preparation for writing a third draft of one project, hoping that this time it's going to turn into an actual book-shaped thing.

... I'll come up with a seemingly awesome plan for fixing the major project, which will collapse within minutes of actually starting to rewrite.

... It's not so much that the plan falls apart as that i fall out of love with it. What looked good in the preparation phase looks horrible when I'm trying to write it and I either give up in the face of the horribleness or go on with writing a horrible draft, hoping at least it's going to be slightly less bad than the previous one.

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I've chopped out a lot of your verbiage to bring one thing into focus. Writing is a process, and this can be one of the biggest hurdles. We have an idea, we nurture it, we help it grow--and then it mutates. It's no longer that perfect shining tower on a hill, it's more like a chicken coop patched up with screen doors and nylon rope. The handsome prince develops warts.

What happened? It's the same idea, but somewhere between our brains and the page, the ideal turns into the actual. Between thought and language, we lose something in translation. Until we have a way to communicate brain to brain, we have to settle for words. They can be pretty words and apt words, but they'll never measure up to what inspired them.

Some people compare writing to giving birth. Separating your words from your ideas is like letting that child leave the nest and become her own person. You want her to be exactly like you, but she can't, and you'll drive each other crazy until you understand that.

To chop out my own verbiage, try to become objective about your work. Once that story is on paper, look at it as just a string of words, a product you can refine and sell. It's outside your head now.

Not a stupid question. I think the hardest part of becoming a writer is finding out what works for you. From your description, it sounds like working on multiple projects at once is not working for you. Alt-itis can end up being a delaying tactic for not finishing a project. After all, you don't have to worry if it's good if you never finish it.

You might want to try something more focused. Work on one project, start to finish. If you have ideas for something else, jot down a one sentence description, and leave it at that.

I work one project at a time. I will occasionally put a novel length story on hold while I write a short. Writing novel, stop to write short start to finish with a rewrite to polish, straight back to novel. That's as fancy as I get. Something like this might work for you.

Cathy C said:

You sound like a plotter to me. Do you need to have a scene in your head before you can write it down, so that if the scene "sticks" you can't move forward? if so, welcome to the club! There are actually a whole bunch of writers like you (myself included!)

Which brings me to---Are you allowing yourself sufficient time to "stare at the walls"? It's actually part of the creative process for a plotter, where you literally sit or lie down somewhere and do nothing but think. No writing, no planning projects. You're giving your mind time to finish running the script. My husband sometimes has to remind me to blink. But I'm not kidding.

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Hey, that's me to a tee! I have to remind my sweetie that the staring at the walls part is still me working, and I am likely to snap if interrupted.

SianaBlackwood said:

When I look at it on paper, it seems like my project management makes sense. One major project, a first draft to play with and a framework for making sure I don't lose touch with the other things in the queue.

In practice, what's going to happen is that the new draft will fall apart and I'll seek refuge in planning the major project. I'll come up with a seemingly awesome plan for fixing the major project, which will collapse within minutes of actually starting to rewrite. The other projects in the queue will start looking more attractive and I'll put in a bit of work on them, but ultimately I'll end up back here on AW trying to figure out how to frame all this in the form of a question.

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If I'm understanding your question correctly, I think the problem is twofold.

1) You have the expectation--perhaps unconsciously, but it's there--that the plan = the thing itself. Like the battle plan that doesn't survive first contact with the enemy, our writing plans (today I'm going to write the chapter where Jack meets the Giant) often become useless tools in our hands when we're faced with actually doing what we planned to do. Writing is very hard work. You can plan all day how you want a vase to look after you throw a lump of clay on the wheel, but actually getting in there and working with it and allowing it to find its own proper shape (which may be not at all what you envisioned) takes time and dedication.

It's far easier to just leave it sitting and go work on (or plan to work on!) something else. Which is why...

2) You are allowing yourself to be distracted by thinking that the other project, any other project, will be easier and more cooperative. Which is not true, as you discover the moment you try to tackle it.

So--stop letting yourself be distracted and tempted away. The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence, but it's really the same grass.

It's fine to have more than one project going at a time, but I'd suggest setting goals that must be accomplished with one before you're allowed to work on a different one.

Brightdreamer said:

Easy fix, in three steps.

1 - Open a new file (if you use a word processor) or a new notebook (if you write longhand.)

2 - Label this your Idea File. (or Holding Pen. Or Pandora's Box. Whatever works for you.)

3 - Use it to hold ideas you aren't currently working on, or which don't fit in your current project. Now, you can stop worrying about forgetting things and get back to your project.

(Oh - there is a Step 4: When you finish your current project, or if you're stalled out on it, open up your Idea File and see if any fresh sparks fly.)

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Ditto, ditto, ditto.

BTW - when I'm feeling sluggish about tackling a rewrite, or stuck on where my story goes next, I find myself spending a lot of time here - lol

The important thing: Don't give up on yourself.

There are no stupid questions. There are occassionally stupid responses (but not to this post so far!)

Cathy C said:

Ah! Now we're getting somewhere. You sound like a plotter to me. Do you need to have a scene in your head before you can write it down, so that if the scene "sticks" you can't move forward? if so, welcome to the club! There are actually a whole bunch of writers like you (myself included!)

Which brings me to---Are you allowing yourself sufficient time to "stare at the walls"? It's actually part of the creative process for a plotter, where you literally sit or lie down somewhere and do nothing but think. No writing, no planning projects. You're giving your mind time to finish running the script. My husband sometimes has to remind me to blink. But I'm not kidding.

Which is because the scene hasn't finished playing out in your head. Think of it like a YouTube video on a slow connection. The video starts to play before it's fully loaded and the action stops and sputters while it loads in bits. Speaking from experience, you need to let the video finish loading. Allow yourself at least half of whatever time you give to writing to visualize the scene. A "scene" can vary. It might be a paragraph, a chapter or a dozen chapters.

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YAY! I'm so glad you described this so well. I suffer from this all the time, and I get to the point where I feel so frustrated and guilty for not getting anything down that I start taking it out on the people around me. But I have to remind myself that it's OK to let the ideas simmer for a while. I call it ''percolating''.