Why You Have A Cupboard Full Of Unfinished Creative Writing Projects

One of the greatest things about being creative is that the more creative we become, the more new ideas seems to come. Once that creativity is switched on and flowing, it’s very difficult to turn it off again!
This is wonderful as long as we can channel it effectively. But if we don’t, we end up starting a new creative writing project every couple of days, forever riding on the fresh energy of our latest new idea, and discarding whatever it was we were working on before by the wayside.
Weeks or months later, the frustration starts to kick in as we realise that we’ve started around 37 new writing projects recently and finished about… well, none of them.
This “cupboard full” of unfinished projects starts to make us wonder if we’re ever going to be able to see a writing project through to a natural conclusion. It also makes us wonder why we continue to start new writing projects when we have so many begging to be finished.
The longer this goes on, the fuller the cupboard gets and the heavier the burden weighs upon our shoulders. If we’re not careful it can overwhelm us to the point of causing us to stop writing altogether, not through lack of new ideas, but because we don’t want to add even more to that daunting overflowing cupboard.
So what’s the alternative? How can we avoid this cupboard full of unfinished projects situation that eventually slows and then completely stops our creative writing output?
We simply need to practice finishing projects. And accept that “finishing” doesn’t always mean “keep tweaking until it’s perfect”.
Let’s explain this in a little more detail:
Every creative writing project has a natural point of stopping.
This doesn’t mean every project will be finished. There may be a significant proportion that simply don’t turn out to have as much potential as we thought. And that’s ok. Better to realise that and let them go, than to spend hours slogging away at a story or poem that’s never going to really go anywhere.
Most projects will reach a point where you know they can be let go and released into the world. Stop too soon and it gets added to that daunting cupboard of the unfinished. Don’t stop soon enough and you’ll be caught in the perfectionist trap, spending hours trying to add those last little tweaks that will make your work “perfect”.
The important fact in all of this is – you KNOW when a writing project is finished.
And you know when a project has run out of steam and is best to let go and move on. You just have to trust yourself, trust that you know when to finish each project.
The more you see your writing projects through to a conclusion – whatever conclusion that is for that specific project – the easier it becomes and the more easily you can finish future projects.
Before long, your cupboards will be bare, but in this situation, that’s a very good thing…