Why You Can’t Finish Your Writing

Are you the kind of writer that has tonnes of brilliant ideas? One who starts writing full of energy and bubbling with excitement about your story? One who gets a few chapters in and then starts to lose interest, and stops altogether?

If your writing portfolio is mostly made up of half-baked ideas and unfinished pieces of writing, then it’s time to work out why. Ideas that just seem to drizzle out after the first few pages seem doomed to fail, and it can be rather disheartening if this is what happens to you time and time again.

Of course, if your stories or articles remain unfinished that’s fine, right? I mean, it’s not harming anyone but you. But what if you send the first few chapters off to a publisher and they ask to see more? Or you pitch an article idea to a magazine, and it gets accepted?

Then what?

There are perhaps some reasons why this keeps on happening to you. If you address the issue, then you could find that instead of feeling doomed and miserable about your writing, you’ll find that you can write many great pieces, stories, even entire novels to the end. It’s all about making sure that idea is fully formed before you start. Here are some helpful tips.

Give your idea some space

You wake up in the middle of the night buzzing with excitement - you’ve come up with a genius idea for your next piece of writing. Yo hastily scribble a few notes down before going back to sleep. In the morning you take your sleepy scrawl, try to make sense of it, then begin.

The trouble with this is that you haven’t given your idea time to breathe. Just because you have had an idea, you don’t have to write about it straight away. Give yourself time to think about it, to develop it, to work out the finer details. Familiarising yourself with your own idea first will mean you are adequately prepped when you start writing and have a much clearer, well-rounded idea of how the whole piece will work.

Pitch your idea (whether you are pitching it or not)

Before you write a single word, write a pitch for your idea. This works for both fiction and article writing. How could you persuade someone they would want to read this, what makes it exciting and unique, what are the themes that bring it together or the argument you are trying to make? How do you want people to feel once they’ve read it?

Give yourself a deadline

Giving yourself structure as a writer is so important and can have a significant influence when it comes to completing those pieces of writing. A deadline means you can’t push an idea to the side or put it on the back burner, you have to write it, and even if it becomes a struggle, you must figure out how to overcome those obstacles and make it work.

Researching, investigating, plotting, planning, and fleshing out your ideas will help you make sure that you feel confident when it comes to actually writing it, and working to a deadline keeps a healthy amount of pressure on to ensure that you finish. Just think how happy you will be when you get to the end - that should be driven enough to keep you pushing through!

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