Persisting to Persist

Persistence is something I struggle with.

I'm awesome at starting things; sometimes it seems like I'm starting half a dozen new things every day. Two days ago it was a fic rec list for one of my friends, yesterday it was the book What Color Is Your Parachute?, and today it's a resolution to earn some passive income before the close of the year. This is on top of this blog (already two weeks neglected), two to four fics I would be overjoyed to finish rough drafts of, the world's most half-hearted job hunt, and some home improvement projects I started in January.

So yeah, I am aces at starting stuff. Sticking with it is a whole 'nother story.

The things I have the least trouble finishing are the ones I can see a clear and looming ending for. One-shots used to be great for this. In my early fanfic career I finished gobs of one-shots. As I've grown as a writer and started wanting to write pieces with more substance, I've found this more and more difficult. A thousand word fluffy one-shot is pretty easy to bang out in a day or two. Seven thousand words of fluffy, angsty, developing friendship fic is way harder. And stuff that's ten or twenty thousand? More? It's so rough and flawed that I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle. A lot of times I look at my documents and despair. Some days, like today, I close out of the documents and give up.

I never consider it a true surrender though, because I know from experience that I'll go into my word processor someday, maybe tomorrow, maybe in six months, and I'll hit open and see things I haven't worked on in awhile and I'll think to myself I wonder if I've got it in me to work on that now.

Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't.

Ideally, I would poke at all of these things a little every day. Everything I've mentioned above, not just the writing, and I would make slow, but inevitable progress. But that's the type of persistence I struggle with.

Right now I'm wondering why I even started this blog because ugh work and ugh I have to keep doing it. Doing things over and over is hard.

But hey, I'm working on it. This post is just one more step in developing my ability to persist.