Gone With The Wind?

If you’re anything like me, then structure and order are your best friends when working. Once I start on a project, I always feel the need to see things through to the end before moving onto the next one. This mindset doesn’t always bode well when it comes to writing though.

Inspiration cannot be forced. You can’t stop your mind from drifting from one idea to another. There are times when my focus is on finishing a particular project, yet my mind drifts to a completely different project. I am usually inclined to try to refocus on the task at hand and catalog the new idea for later use when I am ready for my next project. The problem with this is that lately my mind is all over the place and if I don’t focus on an idea when it strikes, I am likely to forget it and it’s gone with the wind. The harder I try to remember it, the more hopeless it seems. Even if I jot it down in my idea book, I don’t always know where the idea was originally taking me and it falls flat.

Going against my nature, I have started going where inspiration takes me; blowing in the wind, so to speak. I currently have three projects that are more than halfway complete. Normally, this would bother me because I would worry that I would lose the train of thought I was on so the story wouldn’t make sense once I picked it back up again.

But this hasn’t been the case at all. Instead, going with the flow has gotten me further than I would have been had I ignored an “errant” thought. At this stage, I might have had one of the three projects completed, but I would only be partially done with the second project. And I most definitely would not have even started the third project, potentially missing out on some very fruitful ideas.

The next time you are trying to focus all of your energy into one project, be it a novel, a short story, a song, whatever your outlet of choice, and you get inspired to work on something completely different, don’t fight it. Go where the winds of inspiration blow you and you might be pleasantly surprised by how much more you can get accomplished.