Permission to daydream
Do you have a problem turning your dreams into reality? Are you spending more time dreaming than doing?
I’ve been dreaming about writing fiction a while. It’s about time I got out of analysis paralysis and into action.
For some of us analysis paralysis is a fact of daily life, for others it is a rare and shocking occurrence (those people make me so jealous).
In your day job it can be a career-limiting issue, but in a hobby it’s pretty much allowed, nay, encouraged. You are supposed to spend time thinking about your interests and there is no sense of urgency around delivering anything.
Writing is part hobby, part work
The challenge with a hybrid endeavour like writing for an audience, where part of the plan is to get something into people’s hands (even if they don’t necessarily pay for that something), well it makes things weird.
You are doing it for fun, but part of the fun requires you to be productive. There are a lot of people saying just the act of writing is meditative and beneficial, but I tried that before and I need people to read my stuff in order to motivate me.
That said, I have put off writing any stories for years, though I have dreams about it. Dreams are important for writing, it is after all a creative pursuit, but if anything tangible is going to be created then dreams need to become goals.
Is researching software (Scrivener), reading books about writing such as this and this other one, and signing up for blogs and podcasts … is that delaying the work or is it helpful research?
Keep in mind I intend to do this in my spare time. There is not a great abundance of that resource. I will need to be ruthlessly efficient (or give up).
We need some kind of litmus test to train us what is time wasting and what is moving us towards our desired outcome …
Solution for writers
The solution is to tell your audience, your accountability partner, and/or your friends what you are going to have done and by when. To achieve a deadline you need to treat your goal as a project. Prioritise your tasks, don’t spend too much time researching, and any daydreaming has to be focused on what you intend to deliver.
Prioritise based on “Essential”, “Non-Essential but significant value”, and “Nice to have”. The highest priorities are your “critical path” – they are the things that must be done. After your highest priority then you can try and achieve as many P2 and P3 items as possible.
With this in mind, I guess I need to set a deadline. My first short story will be delivered by Friday 13th June (nice omen for you there).
- Priority 1 goal – First draft manuscript delivered on the deadline.
- Priority 2 goal – Edited manuscript.
- Priority 3 goal – Packaged and formatted as an ebook.
Next I will need to break down these goals and find the P1, 2 and 3 tasks within. For a start, I have no idea how to properly outline or write fiction, and I need to brush up on how to export an ebook the right way for e-readers and apps.
Between now and the deadline I can daydream all I want, but it has to be a tactical kind of daydreaming. Daydreaming with a deliverable.
Feel free to nag me if it looks like I am slipping on my deadline.