This should be obvious...

There are writers who have long been generous with practical advice for other writers. Neil Gaiman is one of them. As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, he has a talent for breaking his experience into the accessible and the universal, in a way that is consistently encouraging.

This is one of my favorite pieces of Neil Gaiman advice:

You have to finish things. That’s what you learn from … you learn from finishing things.

Yes, but. Almost since the day I started working on my current work-in-progress, I’ve been keeping notebooks of other ideas. One notebook for each potential book idea. When I think of a character feature, or a plot point, or a setting for any of them, I scribble notes down on available surfaces, and then transfer the notes to the appropriate notebooks. If it isn’t an exact match yet, I put the notes in yet another notebook labeled ‘General’.

I am VERY excited about these notebooks and these ideas. They are fresh and unsullied by the daily despair of trying to mold them into a coherent narrative. They have not been tested, have not yet been destroyed by the laws of logic. They are, above all, a fun distraction from the work at hand, a dream of limitless potential.

The good news is that sometime over the last two months, I got past an invisible block, and began to see the true finish of this current work, and I took a break from reading through all my waiting notes and new ideas. For a little while, I haven’t needed the distraction. The idea of finishing this work took over, and I could truly see it for the first time, the glimmer of an ending. And those notebooks will still be there when I can finally write, THE END.