The Sticktoitiveness Maneuver
Say That Three Times Fast
Good morning and welcome to Shelf Life! Shelf Life is Shelf Life readers’ choice for the second best part of “drinking your morning coffee and reading Shelf Life.” Thank you to all who voted. I also voted for coffee. I’m just kidding, there was not a vote.
On Tuesday, we discussed Idea Guy, who has a lot of ideas, and Execution Guy, who has the expertise and the sticktoitiveness to get things done. The issue is that Execution Guy can come up with ideas, but Idea Guy doesn’t always have the stuff they need to execute their ideas.
The good news is that if you’re reading Shelf Life, you can read. If you can read, you can probably write. If you can write, you possess the expertise needed to write a story. All you need, then, is the sticktoitiveness, which (I’ll reiterate) means:
The ability to persevere in your work on a project, even when it is boring, hard, or frustrating, or when you are distracted by something else.
Let’s talk about “boring, hard, or frustrating,” and “distracted by something else.” These qualities don’t exist independently. The likelihood of being distracted from what you are doing is greater when you are bored or frustrated or when what you’re working on is hard. Your distractibility rises under those circumstances.
Therefore, I posit: If you control the inflow of new ideas that have the potential to distract you from what you are working on, then boring, hard, and frustrating lose their power to interrupt you.
That is, when something is boring, hard, or frustrating, that is when you are likely to be distracted by a new idea. If you can seize control of the new ideas coming in and manage them, then it won’t matter if you are bored or frustrated or if you’re at a challenging part of your manuscript—you’ll keep at it because you’ve dealt with the distraction that would have lured you to go work on something else.
I mean, you might stop working on it altogether if you’re bored or frustrated, or if it’s hard. Distraction isn’t the only thing that might interrupt your work. But distraction, at least, is something we can manage with a few key strategies.
Park New Ideas in the Satellite Lot
I was at a work strategy session last summer that was run really efficiently and well, and one of the things the organizer did was put up a couple pads of big paper (she loves big paper) on the wall in a far corner of the room and called it “Idea Parking.” We were there to strategize about some specific things but that type of meeting always ends up generating new ideas. People can’t help but brainstorm in that environment. The rule was that if someone came up with a new idea to explore, they had to go write it in the Idea Parking and then get back to the discussion at hand. No discussing new ideas that weren’t directly germane to the strategy session topic.
Satellite parking is the parking lot that is farthest away from the airport—the long-term parking. You probably have to take a shuttle to get to the terminal. You park your car there because, being so inconvenient, it’s the cheapest lot and you’re going to be gone a long time. It’s cost effective to park there.
If you’re trying to execute on an idea and you come up with a new one, have a designated satellite parking lot ready to park your new idea. For Shelf Life, my satellite parking is on a spreadsheet. For other kinds of writing, my satellite lot is an Evernote notebook.
Because I don’t keep these new ideas in a word processor document, I’m less tempted to abandon what I’m doing and work on those immediately. They live outside the writing environment. But, I have space to write down the idea so I don’t lose it and I have space to add notes about that idea while I’m working on something else.
For instance: (True story) While writing Tuesday’s Shelf Life I wrote a whole bit about clown cars and then I decided that was more appropriate for a different (but similar) topic I have in the pipeline so I clipped the clown car text out and saved it under the other topic and kept going. I didn’t switch, halfway through that essay, to work on the other essay. If I had, you would have had to read something else with your morning coffee on Tuesday.
When something’s in satellite, for me, it’s also on the back burner, which is the best possible place for something to simmer. The satellite lot of cheap enough for me to leave an idea there for a long time, inconvenient enough that I’m not tempted to go haring after the idea all the time, but also safe and accessible storage for my idea so it will be there when I’m ready to deal with it. Sometimes I scan through all the material in my satellite lot just to make sure that back burner is still a-burning, so my subconscious can keep working those ideas while I’m on something else.
Give New Ideas Their Head
If you haven’t heard this idiom (“to give a horse his head”) it means to lengthen the reins and let the horse run where it wants to and as fast as it wants to; let it have its own way because that’s easier than fighting it.
This is the opposite of parking something in the satellite lot! I know, I know: This is the opposite of what I just said you should do. Hear me out: Sometimes an idea has a choke hold and won’t let up. I have ADHD and sometimes become hyperfixated on things to where I cannot just move on to something else. This happens with ideas but also all kinds of stuff, and it’s annoying. Please do not call this my superpower.
When I’m hyperfixated on an idea for a story or something like that, there is just no putting it aside until the fixation runs its course. Now: I am more than forty years old and it has taken me most of my life to figure out how to recognize when I’m hyperfixating on something. I was not diagnosed till adulthood and I thought everyone’s brains worked just like this and that is was normal to be so caught up on something that you literally cannot think of anything else.
Anyway, not everyone who gets caught up in an idea has ADHD or is hyperfixating but the solution for someone who is caught up on an idea and the solution I use when I realize I’m doing this is the same: Deal with it, give it the attention it is demanding, and it get it out of my system as soon as possible so I can get back to whatever else I need to be doing.
When an idea comes to me, it probably doesn’t come all the way fully formed. It starts with a concept or a scene or a character and then as I become more fixated on it I keep thinking about it and developing the idea further and adding more details. The more I try to resist and not work on it, the more my brain insists on thinking about it and making the idea bigger and more robust.
I have learned that if I’m beginning to do that and I catch it early, I can just write the short version of whatever it is and get it out of my system before it snowballs into something massive. I might be able to just write the scene that came to me and then dismiss it, without it turning into an entire three-novel series in the period of time I am resisting it.
This doesn’t mean I can’t come back to it later and develop it further. Plenty of novels have been developed from short stories. I can always revisit it when I’m not in the middle of something else and see if it really has legs to go further. And, if not, I got a short story, a flash fic, or at least a scene written that I can use for something.
If you can sense an idea really won’t let go, sometimes the best strategy is to move the elephant through the snake so you can get on with your life.
Implement a Triage System
Triage is a term I borrow from the practice of medicine that refers to sorting patients into the order in which they will receive acute care when there are not enough resources to treat everyone (or to treat everyone right away). I use triage (the term) all the time in nonmedical contexts, particularly at this time of year when my day job is very busy.
In medicine, triage sorts patients using a number of different criteria, some of them contradictory. For instance, it’s not correct to say that in a triage system to most critically ill or injured patient will receive care first: If that patient is highly unlikely to survive even with treatment, and the next most critically ill or injured patient is much more likely to survive if they receive treatment, then the most critically ill or injured patient may not be treated first. Competing factors include the urgency of the injury/illness, the time-sensitivity, the benefit the patient will receive from treatment, their remaining lifespan—and so on.
Anyway, this isn’t a Shelf Life about triage. This isn’t Health Life.
If you have ideas spilling out of your head at an alarming rate, that is an urgent condition that requires acute care. However, all those ideas are probably not created equal because (for instance):
Some ideas may not be commercially viable while others are;
Some concepts may be quicker and easier to write than others;
Some of the ideas that come to you might just be more interesting or exciting than the rest.
And surely a ton of other reasons. If you figure out a sorting system for your ideas based on your values, you can make like an ER Triage Nurse and put them in some kind of order to receive your attention and resources.
This can be something you do intuitively or something you do more methodologically. I imagine that everyone’s criteria will be different, but I will briefly walk you through how I do this prioritization.
First I have my idea bucket (I talk about creating one in Bearer of Bad Muse). Every time I get a new idea no matter how silly or dumb or underdeveloped, I put it in the bucket. That’s the ER waiting room. Everybody’s in there whether you have a skinned knee or ten bullet holes.
When an idea is developed enough that I think I’m actually going to write it and could begin that process, I move it to a spreadsheet where I keep details of my works in progress. (I have a different spreadsheet for shortform versus longform projects.) This sheet keeps track of some of the details that help me decide what I’m going to work on writing next. For instance, there are columns for anticipated length (eg, do I think this will be a 2000-word story or a 6000-word story?); the stage it’s at (drafting? Still developing the idea? Editing?); my current word count if I’ve started it (this allows me to calculate how close it is to completion based on anticipated length); the date I started working on it; and a ranking of my current “enthusiasm” level for the project (high, medium, low, none).
Then I drag the rows around to order the projects so the ones I intend to work on first are at the top, and they go in descending order from there. I might make this decision based on factors like:
Enthusiasm. I can do more and better work on something I’m excited about, so that’s a top priority.
Percent complete. If something’s almost done, I could get a boost from finishing the draft.
Anticipated length. I can knock out a 2,000-word short story in as quick as a few hours if I have the plot mapped out. Again, I’ll get a boost from finishing a draft.
Start date. Guilt might motivate me to give a story some attention if it’s been hanging out on the list forever.
I also consider a few other factors that aren’t recorded in the sheet, like:
Whether I think the idea has time-sensitive commercial viability. That is, would the finished story fit the parameters for an anthology’s call for stories or an upcoming contest to which I could submit?
How complex the story/narrative is. How much or how little will a story test my ability to write it? Sometimes I want a challenge and sometimes I prefer things to be easy.
From those factors I put my spreadsheet of writing projects into a working order—the order in which I intend to tackle them. However!
Another thing to remember about medical triage is you don’t “do triage” once and then it’s over forever. You have to reassess the patients regularly to see if anything has changed. Has a new patient joined the waiting room? Has the condition of any waiting patient changed for better or worse? Has additional staff come on shift?
Likewise, I reassess my list of projects and resort it all the time. Particularly, my enthusiasm for any particular project, my sense of time-sensitivity, and my desire to work on something harder or easier change all the time. I resort the list accordingly. All the time. Whenever I feel like it. Whenever my whims change.
Importantly, though, I’m sorting the triage list so the project I will work on next is at the top. I don’t stop work on my current manuscript because another manuscript suddenly hit the top of the list. The list is for managing what’s next not what’s now.
As an added bonus, sometimes my enthusiasm to get started on whatever’s at the top of my manuscript triage list is enough to get me over the final hump of whatever’s in progress and finish it up.
I hope these are helpful strategies for those of us who—like me—can suffer from a sticktoitiveness deficit because we just have too many good ideas welling up in our brains all the time. Too much of any thing, even any good thing, can be bad. Even too much sticktoitiveness can be bad (hyperfixation)! The goal is to achieve just enough sticktoitiveness to get the job done, while preserving as many of those juicy ideas as possible in satellite parking so you’ve always got another gem to cut and polish.
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