In my early twenties I created ~30 new fiction project files per year. I felt bad about this. Ideas poured through me and I was helpless not to write them down, but only a small fraction of them went anywhere, and only a tiny fraction made it to completion and posting. I knew I should be ‘someone who finishes’, but I wasn’t.
In my late twenties, the well of ideas dried up. Half the text files started per year, and fewer words written – but not in proportion to the decrease of ideation. I went from ~120,000 words per year to ~80,000.
I reviewed my old ideas haphazardly, whenever I was so annoyed with everyone else’s taste that I wanted to retreat into my own. Each time I would be shocked and delighted at the vigor of my own unfinished projects, the precision with which the self-indulgence of each indulged my self.
In 2016 I wrote about 25,000 words of a novel. When I got stuck to the point of misery, I gave up, castigating myself. It was A Failure.
In 2024, I revisited it and got another 40,000 words in. When I got stuck to the point of misery, I gave up, bitterly disappointed – but I didn’t feel like I had failed. I now really believed in the core idea of the novel, or rather, I believed in the long-term hold the idea had over me. I was pretty sure I would be back, when I was fresh, when I had more experience. I’d gotten somewhat better at finishing in the past 8 years. I expected to be even better in another 8.
Like my past self, I’m still bottlenecked on finishing. But I no longer feel bad that she seeded her fiction directory so profligately with unfinished text files, because it turns out the ideation/followthrough ratio has been changing with age, and it was her comparative advantage to ideate, mine to finish.