first comment woo! i also feel a bit odd commenting on a post that’s about 10 days old now, but it’s genuinely because your posts have been thought-provoking to me, and it made me self-reflect rather deeply before commenting on your posts lol! (also unfortunately or fortunately, i’m not the type of person who can easily share what i feel unedited, mainly because i take the ‘think before you speak’ advice very seriously, even in informal settings tbh). but yeah! before anything, i just wanna say that you really do write so beautifully, even when it’s unedited! it feels like reading a slice-of-life, literary novel/collection of essays, and it kinda is in a way lol! on a side note, i’m an INFJ-A! i always got either INFP or INFJ throughout different phases of my life, but for a long time now, it’s consistently been INFJ!
so the main thing that i found in your posts is how you struggle to finish your stories (or work, or things?), is that correct? and how your former writing partner often, lack of a better way to phrase this (sorry!), picked up your loose ideas and tied it together? i was wondering, why exactly, do you think, aren’t you able to finish things?
‘things’ can be a lot of the stuff that you’ve mentioned, so like firstly, story-wise, you wrote in your earlier posts that you’re a master of beginnings, but a jester at endings (beautifully written btw!), so do you struggle at writing different aspects of the narrative arc, like the ‘rising action’, ‘climax’, or ‘resolution’? or do you have a general idea of the whole story, but struggle with the details, vice versa? or do you get bored of an idea, or find it hard to commit to an idea, or lose confidence in it? or something else?
another aspect would be actually finishing it, maybe deadline-wise? do you struggle to be structured because your deadlines are self-imposed (meaning your deadlines are on your terms, and this allows you to be lenient on the deadlines thus unstructured, as opposed to if it were a deadline set by someone else)? and them being self-imposed could lead to not taking your own deadlines seriously, decrease in self-discipline, etc? or is it because you have a lot of work going on and it’s hard finding time to finish them?
idk, i guess i like getting to the root of things, and i’m sort of left with these questions (for now) when you talk about finding it difficult to finish things. a big part of my self-reflection that this topic pushed me to think about was how i haven’t been finishing the work that i’ve been meaning to complete as well. you know that i post my work online (don’t disclose what i do or who i am lol!), and i’ve been meaning to make more personal work and post them online again, but i’ve been struggling to do it for months now, and i found that it’s really because i’m consistently taking on client work, and doing personal work consists of the same amount of labour, so trying to do both at the same time would literally require me working day and night. i’ve done it before and i lost myself, and i don’t want to go back to how it was back then. so my solution for now is to take a break from client work and focus on personal work for a couple of months hopefully. but i /know/ that doing said personal work itself requires a lot of self-discipline, self-accountability, perseverance, etc, to ensure that it actually gets done, which is a whole other topic in itself tbh.
i would love to know what you think, if there’s anything that i mat have hit the mark with, or if i missed it completely lmao! wishing you happy holidays!
thank you for being my first comment! hopefully this inspires others to leave more in the future, although your insights are a tough comment to follow! i believe that my struggle with finishing projects do lie in two aspects - my getting bored of an idea and/or the revision process giving me anxiety and my refusal to do it. i don't think i struggle with structural aspects of the narrative arc (luckily, but also i may one day realize i was all wrong and the structure has been the culprit of my demise all along!). so now getting bored and struggling to revise do funnel into the other notes you mentioned - losing confidence in it. i think i do lose confidence in certain ideas, no longer find certain ideas interesting to me, start to find them stale or cliche... and that hurts. i think i'm an early adopter of big ideas and feel, at times, my ideas are ahead of its time. but because i get bored, it pains me to see others catch on and slowly the ideas that felt novel, become far more normal or irrelevant. so the answer is to commit finish and put the work out into the world... right?
i am currently on holiday, the industry is quiet, and so i've been writing a new project that has invigorated me. my hope is to finish a vomit draft before 2022's dying breath and then will be faced with revisions before i show my manager in february. hoping i can conquer goliath this time. wish me luck.
hi codax!
first comment woo! i also feel a bit odd commenting on a post that’s about 10 days old now, but it’s genuinely because your posts have been thought-provoking to me, and it made me self-reflect rather deeply before commenting on your posts lol! (also unfortunately or fortunately, i’m not the type of person who can easily share what i feel unedited, mainly because i take the ‘think before you speak’ advice very seriously, even in informal settings tbh). but yeah! before anything, i just wanna say that you really do write so beautifully, even when it’s unedited! it feels like reading a slice-of-life, literary novel/collection of essays, and it kinda is in a way lol! on a side note, i’m an INFJ-A! i always got either INFP or INFJ throughout different phases of my life, but for a long time now, it’s consistently been INFJ!
so the main thing that i found in your posts is how you struggle to finish your stories (or work, or things?), is that correct? and how your former writing partner often, lack of a better way to phrase this (sorry!), picked up your loose ideas and tied it together? i was wondering, why exactly, do you think, aren’t you able to finish things?
‘things’ can be a lot of the stuff that you’ve mentioned, so like firstly, story-wise, you wrote in your earlier posts that you’re a master of beginnings, but a jester at endings (beautifully written btw!), so do you struggle at writing different aspects of the narrative arc, like the ‘rising action’, ‘climax’, or ‘resolution’? or do you have a general idea of the whole story, but struggle with the details, vice versa? or do you get bored of an idea, or find it hard to commit to an idea, or lose confidence in it? or something else?
another aspect would be actually finishing it, maybe deadline-wise? do you struggle to be structured because your deadlines are self-imposed (meaning your deadlines are on your terms, and this allows you to be lenient on the deadlines thus unstructured, as opposed to if it were a deadline set by someone else)? and them being self-imposed could lead to not taking your own deadlines seriously, decrease in self-discipline, etc? or is it because you have a lot of work going on and it’s hard finding time to finish them?
idk, i guess i like getting to the root of things, and i’m sort of left with these questions (for now) when you talk about finding it difficult to finish things. a big part of my self-reflection that this topic pushed me to think about was how i haven’t been finishing the work that i’ve been meaning to complete as well. you know that i post my work online (don’t disclose what i do or who i am lol!), and i’ve been meaning to make more personal work and post them online again, but i’ve been struggling to do it for months now, and i found that it’s really because i’m consistently taking on client work, and doing personal work consists of the same amount of labour, so trying to do both at the same time would literally require me working day and night. i’ve done it before and i lost myself, and i don’t want to go back to how it was back then. so my solution for now is to take a break from client work and focus on personal work for a couple of months hopefully. but i /know/ that doing said personal work itself requires a lot of self-discipline, self-accountability, perseverance, etc, to ensure that it actually gets done, which is a whole other topic in itself tbh.
i would love to know what you think, if there’s anything that i mat have hit the mark with, or if i missed it completely lmao! wishing you happy holidays!
thank you for being my first comment! hopefully this inspires others to leave more in the future, although your insights are a tough comment to follow! i believe that my struggle with finishing projects do lie in two aspects - my getting bored of an idea and/or the revision process giving me anxiety and my refusal to do it. i don't think i struggle with structural aspects of the narrative arc (luckily, but also i may one day realize i was all wrong and the structure has been the culprit of my demise all along!). so now getting bored and struggling to revise do funnel into the other notes you mentioned - losing confidence in it. i think i do lose confidence in certain ideas, no longer find certain ideas interesting to me, start to find them stale or cliche... and that hurts. i think i'm an early adopter of big ideas and feel, at times, my ideas are ahead of its time. but because i get bored, it pains me to see others catch on and slowly the ideas that felt novel, become far more normal or irrelevant. so the answer is to commit finish and put the work out into the world... right?
i am currently on holiday, the industry is quiet, and so i've been writing a new project that has invigorated me. my hope is to finish a vomit draft before 2022's dying breath and then will be faced with revisions before i show my manager in february. hoping i can conquer goliath this time. wish me luck.