I write best in my head…the problem is, it stays there.

Ever have a mind-blowing moment of creativity, a sudden burst of ideas that quite literally flood your mind, and you can’t wait to commence this genius or beautiful story, poem, blog, or whatever the piece is that came to you like some ethereal spark? Only to then put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and suddenly find it either near impossible to actually begin, or feel those vivid, wonderful details are trickling away through your fingers.

My next trick is to either just stare at the blankness, a vindictive mimicry of what seems to be going on in my mind, or fall into the utterly wasteful activity of browsing social media. Or begin another, completely unrelated task.

Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I get fragments down – a paragraph, a sentence, a note in one of the many notebooks I own. Other times, they sit there. Half-formed. Unfinished. Or worse – abandoned altogether. The idea that once felt electric becomes reduced to something I didn’t follow through on.

Another idea will come, and I will get going on this one, hopefully even complete it…and repeat. Seems to be an existential theme, right? It feels like a pattern, not just with writing but with everything. Why am I like this?

Take the novel I’ve been writing, a piece of which you can read in the Stories section of my website here. The idea came to me almost ten years ago. TEN. I had a good reason to pick it back up whilst studying for my master’s degree, using excerpts to submit for writing projects and receiving invaluable feedback. Then I finished the course, and it went on the back burner once again. More recently, I’d had this idea for an Irish historical fiction piece, and I set about researching and writing (inevitably, the researching went a bit off-grid and led me into all sorts of unnecessary areas, but did include a good old setting the world to rights with a good friend of mine from Belfast). I got about two thousand words in, and it’s since been sat minimised on my laptop like some discarded piece of clothing at the bottom of my wardrobe, which I’d worn to death only six months ago. The trouble is, I care deeply about these ideas, but I can’t seem to hold on long enough to finish them.

I find my brain drafts faster than I can save, and the ideas drift away when I’m trying to write them. And I can even be paralysed by my own perfectionism, writing nothing instead of writing badly. I believe with every fibre of my being in the opposite; if you want to be a writer, you have got to write. Write badly. Write something. But getting myself to actually do this is a tremendous task, and I often find myself going back over what I’ve already written and editing what’s there before continuing.

Even more absurdly, just having the idea itself can feel like progress. My brain confuses thinking with writing. I feel like I’m doing something by getting lost in my own thoughts about an idea, exploring the facets of setting, character, themes, and dialogue, but I have nothing to physically show for all that creativity.

Some people describe this as an ADHD-style pattern, where working memory struggles to hold on long enough to act. Those ideas are often vivid, arriving quickly and in great detail, but don’t stay long enough to be captured.