The Lure of the Shiny New Project

Beware its Siren Call

Hey friends,

Have you ever committed to a writing project and then instantly thought of a better idea that you absolutely must write, deadline be damned? You, my friend have fallen prey to the Shiny New Project.

It’s happened to the best of us.¹ Once we have made some kind of commitment to a project, whether that’s a book deal or a personal decision to a specific idea, it instantly dulls. It becomes obligation. Someone is waiting for your stuff! Someone is going to read it (even if that someone is you) and make you edit it and fix it and ask hard questions you might not know the answer to. That part of writing sucks! But it is necessary and mandatory and you can’t really get around it.

Except if you start something new! A new project is nothing but potential. No one’s even heard of it, most of the time, and it is nothing but possibility and hope and promise. This could be the idea that changes your life. This could be your magnum opus. Or at the very least it could be much more fun to write than that boring old musty idea you already said you were going to write.

The shiny new project is an exit ramp for anxiety. Committing to the hard work of a project is scary. You might have a contract to fulfill, or made a promise to yourself (which is sometimes scarier). Writing is hard work! Avoiding that hard work is a natural response. Listen, we’ve all done it. But if you find yourself in this situation, try to figure out whether there’s actually something better about the shiny new project (there isn’t) or if you’re just feeling natural human emotions (ugh, the worst).

A shiny new project can be helpful sometimes (but don’t use this as a convenient excuse, please). A distraction can be a nice release valve, a hobby, a lark. Maybe it actually will turn into something good/useful/artful down the road! For now, while you are spending the majority of your writing time working on The Big Project, it’s ok to have a little side thing that’s purely fun. Maybe it’s your fanfic. Maybe it’s some steamy erotica. Maybe it’s poetry. This is good! Anytime you’re having fun writing is a good thing. I give you permission to play around with this kind of shiny new project.

A shiny new project is harmful to your writing life when everything is a shiny new project and you never get to the finish line of anything. We all have a graveyard of incomplete projects. That’s normal. No one finishes everything they start. But if you’re only hopping from one shiny new thing to another, and skipping all the messy, hard, scary parts of writing—editing, doubt, hair-pulling, revising, sparks of genius, revising again—then, well, you’ll never finish anything. Maybe that’s not your goal! You can write the first halves of books for the rest of your life—that’s fine with me. But it might not be fine with you. I’m not your mother. I can’t tell you what to do.

If your goal is to finish or publish a book, you have to do the messy, hard, scary parts of writing. There’s no way around it. You can mitigate the pain of it with any of your own coping strategies, including writing something fun to blow off steam, but if you only do that, you’re only doing half the job of writing. Power through, my friends. It’s worth it.

XOXOXOXO,

Kate

1. If you’re my client and you think this is about you—it’s not. It’s about roughly a dozen of you, LOL. <3 U, clients.