Have you ever started writing, got halfway through, or almost finished a piece of writing, but for whatever reason never saw it through to the end? Have you then, days, weeks, months, or even years later, tried to pick it back up again to see if you can finish it off?
That’s what I’ve been trying to do the last few days. I have no less than three ‘old’ projects that I’m trying to get back on track, with the time off being from a couple of weeks to almost a couple of years. And you know what? It’s really really hard. Ridiculously hard.
What I’ve been trying to do is rekindle the passion I once had with these projects, to recapture the flame inside me that made me want to write all day, work on it all night, think about it as I’m drifting off to sleep and getting right back into it the moment I wake up. I’ve had those moments with all three projects, but whenever I stop (due to a plethora of reasons, including laziness, procrastination, holidays, other work and unforeseen circumstances outside of my control) I find it difficult to regather that momentum again.
I ask myself why that is the case. Do I still want to finish them off? Of course, more than ever — in fact, now is the best time because I actually have the time to work on them. Do I still think they are good ideas? Yes. Perhaps not as brilliant as I originally envisioned, but good enough. So why, dammit? Why?
I guess part of it might be because I fear that I’ll pick up the old project, have a look at it, and be stunned into depression over how crap it is and how much work I’ll need to do just to fix it up. That almost always happens when I look back at my old work. But surely I’m not alone in that, and others have gone on to put in whatever work was necessary to finish it off.
Having a zillion distractions around you certainly doesn’t help. That’s why I am so enamoured of full-time writers who work from home, people who can just sit down at the table X number of hours a day and work on their shit rain, hail or shine and no matter how much they don’t want to do it — like a real job. I remember Stephen King said something like that in On Writing, that you have to take your writing seriously or else no one will.
That’s it. I’m going to give it a try and see what happens. Work on my shit like a 9-5 job on the days where I can. I’ll report back with the results in a couple of weeks.
