>>58901891so i'm the guy that makes the tower of tattle fanfic, which i only mention because it's high word count, and since i'm pretty adhd when i first started writing i struggled hard with this. i mean it wasn't even really exclusive to writing, and the problem hasn't gone away in my general life even now. but i pretty much dont have this problem with writing nowadays, because i spent the number of years writing a novel that was pretty much my full focus and my constant bane, and therefore i had to figure out how to stuff my neuroatypical bullshit in a closet and tell it to fuck off or else i realized i'd live forever listening to smug assholes in my life go HUHUHU HOW'S THAT BOOK COMING.
so here's my take. depending on what your intentions and seriousness with writing, like aiming to eventually to make some kind of career with it, which i think is a fine goal, you do eventually have to learn to just force yourself to stick with your project long long long after it's fun. my friend made this graph and i like to post it a lot because if you're any type of creator you will run into basically this at some point. when you're first starting out, you'll do a sort of truncated version with shorter pieces. you kinda have to learn to beat the curve at every length of project. once you beat it with little short vignettes, you can write your first short short story. you'll experience the curve there. beat that, and you can do those on the regular, and with a bit under your belt you can challenge your first long short story, and so on, to novella, to novel, and to i'd assume long term series.
so, dont make the mistake of thinking i'm saying you have to follow some preordained word count leveling system just because i told you so. i hate that kind of prescriptive shit and it's usually just gatekeeping. i'm saying this is the sort of optimal, most comfortable, and most reliable way of doing it. some people genuinely just decide to start writing and make their first novel and even have crazy success with it. there's no reason to believe you're incapable of that, but that scenario obviously requires a lot of fortune smiling on you, not to mention some strong conviction.
my general advice is that it's good practice to work through the boring and sometimes painful parts of making a story. if you know you can get it done, and you're not seeing any scope creep, and you're not experiencing such heavy writers block you just stop writing altogether, then i'd usually say go for it. that said, there are plenty of times you'll start a story and have scope creep of some kind, like intensive research you didn't expect, or some kind of narrative logic error you didn't realize you had at first that requires heavy reworking, yadda yadda yadda.
and, truthfully, sometimes you just want to write what you want to write.
it's not an awful thing to put a story on the shelf. i've put plenty there over the years, finished some, definitely didn't finish a lot of them. it's a between you and yourself type of thing. if it's eminently doable, then just eat your veggies. unless, you know, the carrots are making you throw up.
