Latching on to the last thing

I am not a politician. There’s lots of reasons for this, but one of them is that that I have a tendency to just believe the last thing that I heard^[1]This is apparently a common memory bias known as the “availability bias”. I’m more likely to flip flop on particular details rather than my core beliefs, so at least I’m showing more consistency than some politicians,but let’s face it, this isn’t helpful even as a citizen trying to be politically engaged. But the reason that I’m bringing this up here is that this awkward mental tendency gets in the way of my creative endeavours too.

Basically, all I want to do is the last thing that I’ve seen, regardless of what I’m doing at that time. I’ll get inspired by something when I’m nowhere near pen and paper or a computer keyboard to actually do anything about it, and end up feeling like I wasted that burst of creative energy. This happened a while ago when I was shopping (when that was a thing), looking at graphic novels. This made me think, “Oh, there are so many excellent things here,  wouldn’t it be great if I actually got around to writing the idea for a comic that I’ve had, so that either I or someone else could actually draw the thing into existence?” But of course, standing in the store I couldn’t do anything about that thought and by the time that I’d actually gotten home this feeling had evaporated. Later on that same day I jumped to wondering whether I should work on the board game idea I had, that I’d similarly never gotten around to spending time on. And then, by the point where I had some spare time to work on something, I’d flipped again and decided to write some blog posts like this one – which, as you can see, I did actually manage to get somewhere with!

Although bouncing around lots of ideas is fun, I’d like to get more things finished. I think I need to pick a project to make it my default, so that I can spend time working on that rather than relying on what I “feel like” at a particular time ^[2]Building habits like this supposedly works. Source: too many places. It seems likely that a lot of the time that will be my comedy – having gigs acting as deadlines is a wonderful thing!^[3]Douglas Adams would famously disagree – but then again he also basically had to be locked into a hotel room to get a book finished. The rest of the time it may be this blog – I’m not short of ideas for blog posts, and as this blog is purely personal I say what goes here^[4]I’m aware this isn’t necessarily the best way to get an audience, but to be honest that’s secondary to the writing practice, which means that I can have quite a range of blog posts, from short thoughts to long essays, the odd bit of fiction…

Maybe I can try to post snippets of potential other works here to share, as a way of trying to work out what’s worth pursuing. That might work, but I’m aware I’ve now just given myself the same problem again.

What blog post do I want to be working on?!

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How do you decide what creative project to work on? How do you make yourself actually stick to it? Or have you got another method to make sure you actually get things done? Share your methods in the comments section.