I started going through a series of journal prompts recently, as an exercise in frustrating myself whilst I muddle my way through writer’s block. I’ve been neglecting my blog writing and essay writing over the last few months because I have been focusing on other projects and when I focus on a project all of my energy goes toward that. I say no to all of my other projects.
The problem is, THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS I WANT TO WORK ON!
There are. I am a fountain of genius literary ideas, just none of them are blog posts. I want to work on everything!
But if you work on everything, you never finish anything. Finishing a large project means committing to that project. It means saying no to other projects. That’s the truth of life in general. If you don’t say no to some things, you don’t get the opportunity to say yes to other things. So, in order to sate my need to pursue all of my brilliant ideas, I keep a lot of journals full of outlines. That way I can say no to a project with the possibility of saying yes later.
I have a friend who is also a fountain of great ideas and she does not say no to any of them. It bugs me. She has great ideas and none of them have reached completion in the time that I have known her. It makes me crazy to sit and listen to someone talk about an exciting project and then listen to them ten minutes later talk about a different exciting project, knowing that neither of them are going to be completed if she does not sit down and focus on one.
Call it a pet peeve. There’s no reason for other people’s choices to upset me.
Choice is such a strange thing. Making a choice means that you cannot go back. Some physicists say that every choice splits us off into a different universe that gets farther away from our universe based on the consequences of that choice. We cannot confirm that theory, but even if we assume it is true, we still get stuck in the universe where we made that particular choice. Most of the time we do not see what we are saying no to when we make a choice. We are saying no to something.
When I choose to work on my novel series, I am saying no to working on any other writing project. Who knows what the universe in which I did not take the evening to write this blog looks like?