Needing to break bad habits

[tinkerdan]

A lot depends on what you haven't been saying.
What I mean by that e.g.
Back in the late 70's I had a great idea. I spent a number of years using a smith corona typewriter[no personal computers back then]yielding 400pages of work double spaced probably near 200k words.
Then life got in the way.
I never stopped thinking about it so the story was being typed on virtual paper in my head and rewritten whenever I would think about it.
It wasn't until 2000 or there about that someone looked at the work I had done and asked why I hadn't finished it.
the answer was--life got in the way.

I turned it into about 700k words that later got split up- and condensed to two at ` 250k each.

The point is that if the idea is good enough and you have even a small amount of drive; it should be trying to write itself in your head.
It is up to you to get it out.

If it's not driving through your head like that then maybe you really don't want to write it.

Rest assured that if you wait too long then 90% of your great idea will be used by someone else somewhere even if you haven't told anyone. By the time you get to it you will have to rely on how you tell the story more than the idea, which isn't bad at all because most great ideas are not the total essence of a great story.

 

[Dave Carignan]

You just have to start writing it or like you said you’ll just continue to procrastinate. I did the same thing. I had an idea for about 3 years. Wrote 2 1/2 ugly chapters and just stopped working on it. But it was in the back of my mind all the time. In about April of this year I decided to stop thinking about it and actually start writing it again.

I read what I initially wrote and it was awful. The story was ok but my skills were terrible. I rewrote everything I originally made and by no means is it perfect I feel it’s light years away from what it first was.

You just have to do it or you’ll keep pushing it back. And hopefully you can get into some kind of routine and write as much as you can.