One of the biggest traps for writers, especially writers of longer works, is working consistently toward completion of a project. The longer a work is, the harder it is to stay focused until completion.
That’s because the real creative part of writing comes in the early going. If it’s fiction, it’s the joy of plotting and creating believable, motivated characters.
For nonfiction pieces like my heavy-research oriented true crime work, the thrill is in the research itself, the analysis, the attempt to come up with a fresh insight into facts that often are decades old. In the case of Jack the Ripper, over a century old.
Once all that’s done, and the first draft is completed, the rest is just smoothing and revising and rewriting. That’s the real work of writing, and the longer the project is that you’re working on.
And it’s so much more appealing to let yourself get distracted by other things, other ideas, other projects, other activities entirely, than it is to stick with that one, single project until it’s REALLY done.
Heck, I’m not an auto geek but when I get a solid case of RWS - restless writer’s syndrome - even writing about truck accessories can sound momentarily more interesting than finishing a long project.
But one must find a way to overcome RWS and work consistently toward completion, because the only other option is to never finish anything - and that’s a true waste of time, not to mention that you never actually get published that way.
