Indecisiveness

In these past two weeks, I’ve been reminded once again how indecisive I can be when it comes to what kind of stories I want to work on. I hope I’m not the only writer (or any other creative art person) out there who constantly feels torn on projects.

It all started when I decided to pull up the document of one of my unfinished manuscripts of 2016. (You know, the one I mentioned in my previous blog post.) Turns out, the manuscript contained fewer words than what I remembered – about 38k words. I grabbed a sheet of paper so I could jot down notes for all the editing errors I encountered while re-reading it.

Yeah…On every single page, there would be something that I’d need to fix. It could have been something as simple as syntax, to something as complex as I need to slow the pacing down or add more description. I got to page 40/146 before I decided to set it aside for a day or two. It was dawning on me that I’d have to start from scratch with the re-writing, if I was planning on making this my Spring Project.

I then began to brainstorm other stories I had either briefly wrote about or never made it past the idea phase. At the seventh idea, I found myself expanding on the concept. Taking this as a good sign, I even created a chart to draft how I wanted the story arc to go.

But at some point last week, I returned to read that unfinished manuscript again. I set my notes aside and just decided to do a read-through. Tried to turn the inner editor off in my head and not worry about all the mistakes I was coming across. Got to page 90 before I called it quits.

Then I turned my attention back to that New Story Idea I was working on. I’m still figuring out the plot (mainly, how I want the story to end). And none of the characters have names. In fact, all of them are assigned a letter of the alphabet to identify themselves. And I also need to do a rough sketch of a map.

It’s clear that I'm not ready to begin writing this story on March 1, like I was hoping to do. The pre-planning stage is still in progress. But perhaps I can get going on it by the middle of March?

For this Spring Project, I’m also not sure how many words I want to aim at writing on a daily basis. I’m also thinking about making this more of a 2-month project, rather than my typical 1-month span. Just to see if I have the endurance to write regularly for that long.

I guess we’ll see what I end up doing in the weeks to come. Because even I don’t know what direction I’m going with all these variables.