At my job we are always working on our development, both personal and professional, and a common theme seems to appear in mine. I procrastinate, I am a terrible planner, and extremely disorganized. My words, no one else's. However that is not the theme to which I am referring. There is a prevailing roadblock that prevents me from writing to what I believe is my potential. This roadblock is “What Does Finished Look Like?” Damned if I cannot answer that question.
This made me come face to face with a strength and a weakness all rolled into one.
The strength – I have a story in my head.
The weakness – it is floating around in fragments of no particular order, with no real end in sight and I cannot seem to tell it.
Yes, I think I could write it if I could see the end. Right now it is a jumbled mess that I know will take a lot of work, focus, and dedication to tell it. I have never been good at working backwards. I sat in on a project meeting at work where we were laying out a road map and knowing what finished looked like made all the previous pieces fall into place like dominoes – but in reverse. I know it will work if I apply this same process to writing. Am I simply too lazy to do the work? Do I have what it takes? Not to mention finding the quiet time (because yes, I now need quiet in order to really focus) when time is at a premium for me.
I always thought I was a linear writer because I could not move on to part B until part A was perfect, and I mean perfect. I struggle with plucking written scenes from a cloud and making it work. Even if I think of it as a puzzle with all the pieces on the board that I just need to assemble, it is still very very hard. Some excellent advice I received from a blog mate was to just write it as it comes. Editing can come later. Since I get stuck trying to perfect where I am instead of moving forward this was a critical piece of advice. And it worked. Lately I have found that assembling from the pieces I have floating in the cloud is working.
How do you make it happen? How do you turn those abstract ideas in a concrete foundation for a story/novel? I am certainly trying.
