065: How Do I Prioritize Everything I Want to Write?

Hey everyone,

I didn’t have an On Rejection interview lined up this week, so I thought I’d go ahead and write an entry about what I’ve got going on with writing personally right now. I’m never sure if people are into peeks behind the scenes, but I’m dealing with a struggle around how to prioritize creative work, and I think that’s something a lot of creative people can relate to.

If you’re a writer or creative and would like to be interviewed for part of the On Rejection series, get in touch!

There is, simply put, too much in my brain right now. I’ve got this project, the Unruly Figures podcast, ongoing edits for the Unruly Figures book, my freelancing work, and Go Fund Bean all clamoring for my time every day. Those are my public-facing works. But in the background, I’ve got other projects on my mind: Fellowship applications and grant applications and a novel I’m trying to write, plus two non-fiction book proposals that would need some serious research and time dedicated to them before I can even think about taking them to a publisher. All of them feel Important-with-a-capital-I, in that they’re important to me and could be important to other people too.

Source.

There is not enough time in the day to work on all of these things. There just isn’t! Even if I didn’t have the tasks of upkeeping a house to do too, even if I could dedicate myself 100% to my work with no outside pulls on my time, there still wouldn’t be enough time to do all this.

(Do y’all remember Peak.Tobi from last summer?)

It’s made worse by the fact that I’ve been doing research on Hans Christian Andersen for the podcast, and he was notorious for getting halfway through a project before abandoning it to work on the next one. He finished some things, but his biographers point out that a lot of his writing projects would be really detailed in the beginning and end in sort of abrupt sketches. Sometimes, once he got an outline down, the project was more or less “finished” in his head and he’d just move on creatively. I keep seeing his example and thinking, “Well, maybe…”

Frankly, it’s causing me a lot of creative anxiety. I am constantly wondering if I’m spending my time on the right things, if what I do day-to-day is in line with what I want to be doing, if Future Valorie is going to be grateful I focused on these things or annoyed about them. If, if, if, if, if….

All of this has forced me to come up with a new reminder that I’ve been telling myself a hundred times per day: You can create everything you want to, but you can’t create it all at once.