Angela Booth had an interesting thought over at her writing blog today.
Many writers think that they procrastinate, when it turns out that they don’t leave room it in their writing lives for gestation . Every writing project needs time to “cook” so to speak. A gestation period is vitally necessary, and if you don’t leave time for your projects to gestate, you’ll find writing much more difficult than it should be.
How do you know when gestation is over?
Ideas for the project will suddenly stream into your mind.
I find this is true at the initial part of the ideation process. Half-thoughts and snippets of ideas drift in and out of my mind, and I generally paint in the details of a good idea over a period of time where I don’t specifically think about it.
I make sure to write these thoughts down as they come, sometimes over month long periods. Then, if I’m excited enough about the idea, I sit down and bring all my separate thoughts together to create a fleshed out idea.
At this point, I usually know if it’s worth working on further, or if I need to kill it.
There is a difference between procrastination and gestation - you have tangible results at the end of one of them. And I’m not talking about new high scores in Free Cell.
