Directions

Directions

You know what I’m pretty good at?  Giving directions as passenger on long road trips.  You know what I’m not good at?  Actually driving.  Because, you know, I keep on failing my test.  How does this relate to the whole writing thing?  I’m pretty good with coming up with the myriad of stories that’re stuck inside my head.  I’m pretty bad at sticking to the stories and finishing them.

And that’s not against my own personal skills as a writer.  I can finish a piece of work.  I can finish a story.  I can do that.  I have folders upon folders of finished stories locked away on my laptop, or scribbled in notebooks.  No one will ever read them, ‘cause they are bad to the nth degree.  However, this comes back to what I wrote earlier.  I got all of these stories in my head, and with them I love each and every one of them.  They are my own personal passion projects.  They are like my kids.  I get too see them grow up, essentially.  I get to see them become something far more beautiful than the simple ideas inside my head.  I get to see them become tangible and real.

Those few moments at the end of a finished story, those are the moments I live for.  It’s an experience of pride and love and exhilaration.  It’s…indescribable?

But how does that relate to the whole writing thing?

This blog as witness, I have all these different stories and ideas on here.  At least 2 One-Shots, 2 different stories, and countless musings.  That doesn’t include the other sites I post upon, or my own personal writing, or the tidbits I put on Facebook, or the “professional” writing that I want to get one day published, or the stories still inside my head.  That’s a lot of different stories, and all of them I wish to see grow up.  And of course, that can’t happen overnight.

I have to spend the necessary time with each story, to craft it and let it flourish to become something more than I want it to be.  To let that story become something unique, with its own flair to it, I need to write and write and write and write and write and write and… you get the idea?

Spending that time to create something like that is costly.  And when I have so many different stories to write, choosing which one to do is impossible for me.  I can come up with the directions to write the story, but I am unable to get the drive mustered to finish the story.  That’s because like my pal Doug, I am constantly distracted by the other stories I could be writing, or could be creating, or could be doing.

So I’m jumping around, inefficiently, trying to make sense of the too many directions.

I should choose one and stick to it, but then I feel like I’m letting my other kids down.  There is, undoubtedly, a story which always comes to the forefront of my mind when I want to write.  Perhaps I should write that instead.  But, my other stories…

I should cut down on my little passions, but of course, that would be the exact opposite of whom I am.  I shall continue this struggle for now, until I finally decide to buckle down and write something down.

If I could only decide which child to invest into.