As I was reading Murakami’s book I realized that I’ve trained myself for a certain kind of writing: short, tiny things that are self-contained. They only take an hour or two to write as I’m so focused on the production of writing (getting a blog post or newsletter out into the world) that I tend to ignore what these things might be if I gave them a bit more time. Writing for me is a rushed, hurried thing; something to be done on a plane or at the back of a cafe. My writing is frantic, sporadic, infrequent.
This tends to be how I blog; longer pieces that need more than one writing session molder in my drafts folder. I have 40 unfinished posts there now.
I need a process for returning to them and finishing them. Because rushing to cross it off my mental list can mean I’m not giving ideas the time they need to process.