What it means to shoot for the moon...
Or: Adjusting Your Writing Expectations
I'm long overdue for a writing update, but I hope this half-update half-lesson post will make up for my absence, because the truth is, I've been really busy lately. Good busy. Mostly. Alhamdulillah.
I'll keep the update short:
I've been working on an interactive fiction called The Black Hare, for which I hope to have a full prologue uploaded on itch.io soon. It got delayed by some personal issues, but I decided that since I was late anyway, I might as well be fashionably late and provide my readers with something really cool! So, that's in the works. The cool news is that I was able to write about 38k words for it in November alone!
I've also been working on a fantasy novel: The City of Light. It's not as complicated as The Black Hare, because it's just writing on a document - no need for coding or dropping down the rabbit hole researching how to do a very specific thing on Twine Sugarcube v2! No, this fantasy novel is very straightforward, and very fun. And more cool news: In November, I reached almost 48k words, which pretty much doubled the word count I started with.
So I've been doing stuff. I just haven't been active online. Sometimes, it's hard to balance those two aspects of writing life.
I've been working on a couple of writing courses, too, including a horror writing course and a worldbuilding course. Actually, these courses that I'm working on are taking up most of my time and focus at the moment, and as an instructional designer and teacher at heart, I'm so excited to be able to share one of them soon. Keep an eye out on this blog; the course might come out before you even expect it!
But that brings me to the main point of this article. I want to talk about adjusting expectations, without lowering them, because I've been dealing with that myself. When you're a perfectionist and idealist like me, you have big ideas and you want to make them happen. For example:
I want to make a cool video course with video lessons and audio lessons and an accompanying textbook/workbook and wouldn't it be awesome if I could have it vetted by a writing organization that could give it a stamp of approval and--
All of those are awesome ideas. Amazing. It certainly would be cool if I could get them done. But I only have so much energy, and I'm a one-woman show, and if I hold myself to those standards, I might as well never finish making any of my courses.
I held on to as many of those things as I could, regardless. For the past two years that I've been working on my horror writing course, I've been waiting for the right time to start filming/editing video lessons. I've been working little by little on a textbook/workbook. I've even reached out to writing organizations. I've tried to do as much of the above as I can. But after two years of that and not getting very far at all, I realized an important lesson:
Nothing that I make is going to be perfect.
It's not a personal slight against myself. It's a fact that every single human has to contend with. Nothing we will ever make will ever be perfect enough to meet the ideal standards in our heads. It's just the way we're built.
So, even though I want all of those amazing things, and tried my best to get to them, I had to come to the realization that I can't have it all and get that course out by the time I want to (I've watched TWO potential release dates pass me by - the pain!).
Or, to be more precise: I can't have it all... But I can have some of it.
So, I can't film and make videos for my course. So, I don't want to do the redundant work of creating a textbook when all of that information (and more) is available in the course content itself. That doesn't mean that I can't still create an awesome course that does the trick all the same, using text and images.
Later on, perhaps, I can go back and edit the course and add videos or audios or more resources. But the most important thing is to get the course out there. To finish the thing and publish it. What am I waiting for? Perfection? We've already established, that's not going to happen.
So, I did shoot for the moon. I did try all of those big, fancy ideas that I hoped were going to make my course amazing. But even though I couldn't get them, specifically, I did still land among the stars. I'm still making the course. I'm still going to be releasing it soon.
And every now and then I go back and I readjust the goals for the course. Maybe this one resource will take too long to make, so I'll remove it and replace it with something else, or maybe that one lesson doesn't really need its own section, so I'll get rid of it and fold it into another lesson, and so on.
My goal was to create and release a horror writing course. I'm going to do it. It's just more realistic now, and readjusting my goals has allowed me to make it happen.
But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't aim big. No - on the contrary. Shoot for the moon. Make those big goals. Dream it big. And then, when it comes down to the business of actually doing it - of writing the book or making the course or creating that interactive fiction - figure out your constraints and work within them, dropping everything unnecessary that you simply can't do for whatever reason.
The bells and whistles are nice, and the moon is an alluring target, but the important thing is getting the essentials done.
Because, in the end, we can't be postponing things forever, or working on them for a decade before we can release them. Time slips through our lives like sand in the hourglass. We don't have time to try for perfect. Try instead for good. Or good enough. Or - hell - even functional. But get it done.
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