The Importance of Shifting Focus

It was all a dream! And it wasn’t the beginning of a Biggie song, it was the beginning of a script I wrote. I’ve had quite a few dreams, whether a nightmare or not, where I’ve woken up thinking, “That would make a great story.” This was one of those times.

I try to stay focused on my projects as best I can but I am also gifted/cursed with not being able to turn off the portion of my brain that generates new ideas. I’m not even trying to come up with new ideas half the time, it just happens. But the ideas will be too appealing to me to forget about them. I have to jot down some notes about the idea at the very least and then do my best to get back to it later. I do love it, I am always generating new ideas for short stories, novels, scripts… but there’s a part of it that I dislike. There’s only one of me. I can only work on one thing at a time… more or less. After jotting down notes, I know that I can’t get back to this story for a little while. Admittedly, I will bounce between projects a bit. Usually, as I work on my larger project, I may take a break for a week to work on something shorter, or allow myself to work on the smaller project for two days of the week while the rest of the days are devoted to the larger project. Something along those lines. But I rarely have more than a couple projects going on at once. Because I don’t want to leave anything pending for too long and lose the momentum or the tone. (I’ve been known to leave projects in the past. I’ve not only left a script midway through, I once left a script, for months, mid-scene… mid-line… mid-word. Yes, I returned to the script to see a character’s line read something along the lines of… I wasn’t going to te … so, that was horrible. I’m not sure what emergency arose that I left the script in that state. This was not a good strategy for me.)

So, back to… there’s only one of me. And I’m usually only working on one large project and one small project at a time. But my brain keeps generating new ideas. I jot down the ideas and add them to the list of projects waiting to be worked on. It can be a bummer, I may have a new project idea that intrigues me, but I have several other project ideas that also intrigue me so it goes to the back of the line. I currently have a dozen or so novel ideas, short story ideas, and script ideas… a dozen or so each. So, I know I won’t be getting to some of them for a while. Because it’s important for me to focus on the project at hand… focus is a sibling to productivity.

But is focus also a half-brother to… staleness?

Now, I want to focus on my projects and see them through. Set a goal, and reach it. It’s an incredible feeling to finish a story or script, even if only a rough draft. Outlining a project, creating characters, planning, beginning the writing, and going all the way to the end. It’s great. But sometimes, while working on a project, it can become stale. Maybe it isn’t the story being stale itself, maybe it’s my attitude towards it. Especially if I have been thinking about it for a long time, I may just need a break from it. This doesn’t happen to me too often. But what does happen is a new idea comes about in my brain, and I have to jot down the idea. I will be excited about my new idea, but I know I should get back to my current project. But every once in a while I come up with a new idea and I can’t fathom the idea of not working on it right in that moment. I can’t stand the idea of not starting work on this new project and seeing it through.

I do my best to avoid switching projects midway through nowadays, but when I feel so strongly about a project, I allow myself to do it. I have always felt badly about this too… abandoning that current project. It makes me feel like I am lacking the focus that I need to be a great writer. It makes me feel undisciplined. But I’ve noticed a few things when I do this.

The first thing I have noticed is when I have done this, and then returned to my original project, I often feel refreshed with the subject material. If it were feeling stale, or even if it weren’t, it feels fresher now. I bounced over to a new world for a little while, finished a project, and came back to this world. The locals and the dominant animal species and plant life that I had been seeing every single day now seemed foreign and exotic to me. I would be eager to get back to this project. So, it sometimes helped my current projects.

This is the other thing I noticed. These things that I couldn’t stand not working on, these new ideas that I just had to jump into, they usually wind up being some of my best work! Maybe it’s because I am so passionate about them in the moment that I put maximum effort into them. But this has happened a couple times to me as of late. Recently, I had a project I was working on. In fact, I had a large project and a small project. But I came up with an idea while showering, it happens. I wasn’t trying to, but when I am doing an activity that I do every day, it requires minimal brain power, and my mind wanders. I come up with new ideas. I came up with an entire story in my head… a short story. The idea struck me as being so incredible, that was the very first thing I worked on that day. I saw it through to completion. I had halted everything else. That story that took immediate priority over all others, it is going to be published in a publication soon. I had written about this already… I had just received word from them a month ago or so, I am just awaiting the day it will be published.

Another instance of this… the dream. It was a nightmare but it was so intriguing. I woke up and I had to write down the ideas. After writing down the ideas I was still so intrigued by the idea, so I didn’t continue working on my current project, I took this one on, and I saw it through to completion. This one was several years ago and I didn’t do anything with the project until a few months ago. I entered it into The Script Lab Free Screenplay Contest. Just the other day they announced the scripts that would move on to the Quarterfinalist round. From 15,000 submissions down to the top 1,000… and my script made it!

I am, of course, so excited for both of these things. Eagerly awaiting my story to get published and excited to see what may happen in upcoming rounds of this contest. But it also made me think, these were both projects in which the ideas were flung into my brain without my control. (Is that how brains work? Probably not.) The ideas were so intriguing that I actually halted with what I was working on in order to work on them. They took on the utmost importance because I was so excited about them. And they turned out to be, dare I say, excellent.

I know I need to continue to stay focused. I know I need to set goals for myself with my projects and commit to them, see them through, not allow myself to wander… too much… and remain disciplined. But I am starting to realize that there are times when new ideas show up and they are too tantalizing to push to the back of the line. They rear their beautiful heads and won’t fade into the background. I can’t keep my eyes off them. And it isn’t because I lack discipline, it is because they are trying to tell me, “Yo, dude, work on me.” It’s a balancing act, for sure. I need to recognize that this won’t be the case for every new idea. But it will be the case occasionally. And the thing I am most passionate about in the moment should get heavy consideration for being the project of the moment. It is going to turn out extremely well if I am feeling that passionate about it. And when I return to my other project, I will be refreshed, I will have new eyes seeing the same old project as something enthralling.

While variety is the spice of life, you don’t make a meal of only spices. Then again, you don’t leave your food unseasoned. No one wants a bland dinner.