My partner always says ideas are the easy part. He has thousands of them. The harder part, he says, is figuring out which ideas to choose when they’re all tugging at him saying, “Me, me, pick me!”


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And it’s sometimes hard for him to follow through on the ideas he does choose, while ignoring the rest, which are still tugging at his sleeves.

I haven’t been as prolific or confident in my ability to generate ideas, but I do share his thoughts on the difficulty of following through. I have dozens of files of half-finished stories and essays–and probably hundreds of poems in various states of dishabille.

Recently, I took a nostalgia trip through one of these folders because I’d been sweating through two recent stories in progress that I didn’t have a clue how to end. I needed a distraction from my stuck place, so for a few days, I worked on a couple of old essays, cleaning up passive language and finding places to expand on detail in one, and trying to convert the other to a longer fiction piece. But the problem was I couldn’t access whatever had sparked me to write these pieces, which made the revision feel tedious. Once again, I was stuck. But more than stuck, I was bored, because I no longer cared what these pieces were saying.

There have certainly been times I’ve been able to resurrect an unfinished piece because I could feel the energy in the original idea, or morph it into something that was currently nattering at me. But I also know that there are many pieces I’m just not going to finish, and there’s no shame in abandoning things that no longer jazz me.

So after a few days, I stopped working on these two essay snippets and went back to one of the current stories, trying to be gentle with myself as I added shading to scenes, cut out unnecessary sentences, and tightened the pacing. Suddenly, I saw the path to where it could go. I’m still not sure about the end, but I feel like I’m on track again. I think the break helped, as well as sensing the difference between the drudgery of revising something I cared about from the drudgery of revising something I didn’t care about any more. Yes, it’s all drudgery, and it feels like moving boulders, but they’re less heavy when you’re in the zone.

And, even more amazingly, out of all this brain fog suddenly came a new idea for a novel–even though I’m not yet sure I want to follow through with it. I promised myself a few years ago that I was done with long fiction, after writing 11 novels, each of them taking 1-5 years. Two are published. The rest are in the “electronic drawer,” also in various states of dishabille. Short stories can also take a long time, but you’re only managing 10-20 pages, not 200-300.

Still, this idea keeps tugging at me.

So far, I’m just letting it percolate. Dare I re-enter the land of all that terrifying blank space? We’ll see if I follow through.