Ideas vs. Their Execution
Webcartoonist Brad Guigar says “There’s no such thing as a bad idea, just bad execution of ideas.” This is in reference to writer’s block, and the theory that the dreaded phrase is just paralysis caused by an embarrassment of ideas and a lack of self-confidence to just pick one and make it awesome.
But further, I’d add that coming up with ideas is easier, and executing on them is much harder. I have ideas all the time, but actually sitting down and turning them into stories is at war with my desire to play video games, finish watching Battlestar Galactica, clean my apartment, etc. And even when I do sit down, it can be tough to get what’s in the brain onto the page, and then figure out what happens next, and what happens after that…
Sometimes I can get in the zone, and every night I’m writing one or two thousand words (usually way less) and then the story’s finished, but other times I just sit here pecking at the keyboard, and those are the dangerous times, because it’s easy to not want to go back to that, so instead I crack open the emulator and play a few rounds of X-Com, and then it’s 2AM and I boldly, nobly stayed up late in order to write… but wasted time, instead.
Or, like tonight, I looked over each of the seven dozen ideas and partly-started stories I have on my hard drive, picked none of them, and now it’s midnight and I’m not further along than I was an hour ago. So I figured I’d pull a post from the Drafts folder on the blog, and finish it. It’s something, I guess?
Right now what I’m wondering is, would it increase productivity to make a sort of schedule beforehand, to say that I’ll work on Project X on Monday and Project Y on Tuesday, so I can sit down and get to work without wondering where my focus should be?
Along with that idea, of course, comes the gnawing fear that it’s just another neat little way to procrastinate. To paraphrase Merlin Mann: “One problem with creative people is that they can create problems for themselves. That’s probably why they’re more likely to procrastinate.”
That would tend to explain why everyone I know - for the most part, highly-creative folks - have always been terrible procrastinators. Anyrate, here’s a post of Merlin’s that’s much more useful than this one of mine. More-interesting title, too. I could learn a thing or two from Merlin, probably: Fake Rocks, Salami Commanders, and Just Enough to Start