Whenever I come across an interesting idea, I hear my mind’s chatter, “This would be a great book.” I can envision the book cover with a big, bold, title. The feeling is captivating, almost euphoric; I call it a creative fever. 

A few moments, or perhaps days, later, I realize that I’m not going to have the time and energy to write it at this moment; maybe I never will. My hands are full, and life is too short. That fever turns into grief.

This process takes place in a similar spirit to how Visakan Veerasamy describes his unfinished drafts as having “grandiose shapes.” He explains, “They’re conceptualized from the beginning in ways that require a lot of time and energy to finish, and would also require quite a lot from my readers.”

Several years ago, I realized that focusing on agility as a writer can be useful. A couple of years after that, I started writing every day at this blog. 

This practice is training my brain to take big ideas and, instead of putting them into a grandiose shape that I don’t have bandwidth to work on, find a more modest one for them that I’m actually capable of. It’s much scruffier. It’s imperfect because it meets the real world. The game doesn’t end when an idea is in the form of a book; the whole point of the game is to keep writing.