No finishing, only starting
The other day I mentioned archiving some of my family history online. I opened up Obsidian... and was hit with an older project I've not worked on for a few weeks and started nearly a year ago. Whoops.
At my writing group I was talking about a new story I've started. "What about [other story]?" someone asked. Oh, well, you know. Old news. Moved on to shinier pastures.
In May 2025 I wrote No starting, only finishing. The situation has not improved. The number of wips has only increased, with none moving to the complete column.
For a few weeks I wrote a very short story, from scratch to completion, in a week. This was enormously good fun until I had a busy week away from home and allowed the story I was thinking of to get too big and need too much plot-thinking. I should resurrect this new habit before it gets too cold. It's still starting new stuff but at least it is to completion. Exercising my finishing muscle.
There's an intoxicating excitement and urgency of new ideas. If I was strictly finishing things before moving onto new things I'd have a decade-long backlog right now. Even if I had always been a finisher there's still potentially months between a start and a finish where I wouldn't be 'allowed' to start anything new. I don't think I have the constitution to quash a fun new idea for months.
Another factor is that the more stuff I do, the more ideas I have. Creativity makes me creative.
The other month I squinted at one of my projects and thought, "Sure, that's a first draft by some definition." And I haven't touched it since. The yawning chasm from first draft to second is the worst. I hate it.
It's just one of those things I feel like I ought to do. I ought to finish what I start. I ought to be more disciplined. And so on. But what I want to do is mess around with thirty-nine incomplete stories, let alone all my other projects. Zero pressure, zero expectation.
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