Are Abandoned Projects a Sign of Creative Weakness?

The other day I was sitting on the patio watching a squirrel spring from one branch to another with a twig in its mouth. It paused to strip the twig of buds or other bits and nubs, then scrambled to a crook in a tree where three fat branches converged.

The squirrel seemed to measure the twig and the spot, set the twig in place, and scrambled off to break off another, longer twig. After eyeballing it for length, the squirrel snapped it in two with its mouth. I admired the critter’s planning and productivity—all while performing acrobatic leaps and adorable scampering—as it constructed a base for a nest.

Yesterday, though, I stepped out to check on progress. No nest. The squirrel seemed to have abandoned that location. I could still see those initial twigs sticking out, but no further developments.

Are Abandoned Writing Projects a Sign of Creative Weakness?

Writers I work with—and if I’m honest, I myself—launch multiple projects, enthusiastic about every idea. We open a document, give it a working title, tap out a few paragraphs with loads of energy. Like the squirrel, we scamper around the Internet or library doing research, gathering quotes and anecdotes to incorporate into this shiny new work-in-progress.

A few days or weeks later, we abandon it, our sentences as sparse as the squirrel’s twigs up in that tree. The raw materials of a project—research, paragraphs, quotations—sit on our hard drive. Will we return to it and continue building or abandon it for projects with more potential?

Often we do abandon the project and scamper off to start another one.

Weeks or months later, we might open our Finder window or Google Drive and scroll through our archives, astonished to see so much unfinished business: half-drafted projects, a concept of a book, or the start of a post. We can feel like we’ve wasted our time and resources.

Are we quitters? Are we creatively weak? Are we people who love to start things but get bogged down in the messy middle, throwing in the towel when we can’t find our way through?

Our inability to finish can leave us feeling embarrassed, ashamed, or frustrated.

But that’s unhelpful self-talk. Instead, reframe it.

Abandoned Projects Reflect Your Inquisitive Mind

Consider this: abandoned writing projects reflect your curious personality, your inquisitive mind, your commitment to lifelong learning. Writers are explorers, teachers, researchers.

Sometimes our ideas turn out to be bigger than we thought when we first started out with a compelling question and we can’t finish a piece in a couple of sittings. It expands, so we set it aside. Is that distraction? Maybe. But it’s a legitimate reason to press pause.

We’re not quitting; we’re simply waiting until we can give it our full attention and figure out how to piece it together, researching even more, expanding, reorganizing, trimming. Don’t see it as weakness to set aside a piece; see it as a gift to your future self.

What appears abandoned is just in-progress. When we have a lot of in-progress pieces, we’re creatively strong, not weak.

Distractibility, Fear, or Incubation?

Some might suggest abandoned projects are a sign of ADHD, and they might be right. It’s possible some writers start loads of projects and because of their distractibility, ADHD or otherwise, they leave them half done. You can explore that theory with a therapist, but even if that is an official diagnosis and explanation, I still don’t think it’s a sign of weakness or anything to be frustrated with.

And might be resisting the work due to fear, confusion, or overwhelm and that’s another thing you might want to talk through with a therapist. But you’re often creating, even when it appears you’ve abandoned the work, letting it incubate.

I’m known to let a project sit on my hard drive or the cloud as it forms and gathers steam in my head. I might not yet be sure what direction or stance to take with it when I begin, so I set it aside and return to it when my thoughts are clearer and my opinion begins to form.

Your Future Body of Work May Begin as an Abandoned Project

“Abandoned” projects could become your next published piece, expanding your body of work. Any one of those seemingly neglected projects holds potential.

They aren’t like precarious twigs at risk of blowing away in the wind; no, they’re tucked away and waiting for you if and when you need them.

Two years ago I needed a dress for a wedding and started to shop for something new. I tried on dress after dress and nothing worked. I was almost in tears because we were getting close to the big day and I still hadn’t found anything.

One afternoon, I moved things around in my closet. Hey, what’s this? I pulled out a lovely little dress I’d picked up at Goodwill and forgot all about—it was perfect for the wedding and was just waiting for the right time and purpose.

That “abandoned” idea or draft you find in your files is kind of like that sweater you forgot about in the bottom drawer or that skirt you hung in the very back of the closet, behind the dry-cleaned wool coat still covered in plastic: “Hey, what’s this? A fully outlined blog post just when I have a deadline!”

Projects in Your Writing Pipeline

Years ago I set up a folder system in Google Drive I called my Writing Pipeline. I could move my projects through the pipeline based on their status:

1. Idea
2. Research
3. Draft
4. Final Edits
5. Shipped/Submitted/Scheduled
6. Live/Archive

A project could be in any one of those folders based on its status.

I’ve recreated the system as a Notion database making it easy to skim and search. Those half-finished projects are showing up under “Idea,” “Research,” or “Draft” and those are not abandoned for good. I have not wasted my time and resources. In fact, those are a gift for the days when I don’t know what to write next—the dress for the wedding, as it were.

The Idea folder is a place to drop any new thought you have. Anything that has creative potential. Pay attention. Write things down. Add them to the folder. Storing ideas in that digital folder isn’t abandoning them. Not at all. It’s the opposite: you’re preserving them until the time is right.

And your Idea folder can extend beyond the digital list and notes you’ve taken. You might have a supplemental overflow into analog storage like a journal, notebook, or box. Twyla Tharp describes the literal box, a cardboard banker’s box, she uses to collect ideas for a dance. From The Creative Habit, she says:

I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me. [Tharp, Twyla. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life…A Practical Guide, Kindle ed., Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, p. 80 of 248.]

One of my clients loves having a box and a physical notebook to store ideas in addition to her digital drafts and notes. While I don’t want her—or you—to get too scattered, feel free to include a physical, analog location to gather and store ideas in a state of development.

At some point, open the box or the file or the folder or the journal and look inside. You might realize you have everything you need for your next project.

Never Start from Scratch

Having loads of ideas in these containers means we never start from scratch. We don’t lose potential ideas that hit us. Continually drop ideas in those storage places, when you’re ready to write something new, simply open them and skim.

Last fall the squirrels dug holes throughout a large mulched area around a tree in our back yard and buried at least a dozen nuts. Now it’s spring and I’m finding walnut shells scattered around because the squirrels are racing around the yard, digging in the mulch to unearth the nuts they “abandoned” last fall.

They didn’t abandon them. They squirreled them away to enjoy today.

We can dig around in our files, to see what kind of nutty goodness we squirreled away in the past. What fun to find an older, half-written draft ready to be rejuvenated and revised! Add new insights and research—that idea or draft might be even more relevant and useful a year or two after we originally conceived of the idea.

“Abandoned” Files Won’t Write Themselves

But the files won’t write themselves.

About her idea boxes, Tharp continues, “The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn’t compose or write a poem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index or your preparation. It is the repository of your creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.” [Ibid, 88]

The box is the pile of sticks collected in the crook of the tree. We go back to see if these sticks will fit and form the foundation of something that will hold together.

The box is the half-written paragraphs, bullet points, book excerpts, quotations, and analogies that we’ve dropped into some space, whether coherently or jumbled together, digital or analog. We look to see if we have the right sticks and enough of them to build the nest. We sort through what we have to see what we can create.

And then we do the work: we compose the essay, blog post, or article. We write the poem. We finish the newsletter to send out.

Reuse or Recycle

Some projects you’ve seemingly abandoned may not work on their own but contain useful components you can repurpose.

Feel free to pluck from existing projects and integrate the raw materials into another one. Grab the story, the quote, the statistic. Add it to another work in progress to illustrate a claim. Reuse and recycle the good stuff you’ve collected over the years.

Not Everything Needs to Be Completed

After all this, I will say that not all of those ideas and drafts will become part of your body of work. That’s okay. Half-written projects don’t have to be written.

Some will truly be abandoned because they didn’t interest you after all or became irrelevant or obsolete. You are not obligated to write every idea that comes to you.

But don’t sit on all the ideas that come to you, either. If you left a project half done because you were scared or overwhelmed, open it and reconsider. Do you need to journal about it before digging in? Do you need to talk it through with a friend or therapist?

After you work through the reasons you might have abandoned an important piece, find a way to return to it…and finish it. Resist the urge to leave undone the stories that need to be told.

No matter what you’re working on, you don’t have to write it alone. A writing buddy, writing group, or writing coach could provide you with support to see it through to The End.

There’s nothing creatively weak about sitting on a dozen, a hundred, or even more ideas.

Open the folder of your so-called “abandoned” projects today and flip through what you have. The one with potential will catch your eye. Trust the spark when you sense it. That’s the one.

Don’t overthink it. Climb back up into the crook of the tree and drop in another twig, arranging them into a completed project. It might take time, but stick with it (yeah, pun intended). You’ll get it done.

Resources:

• Make the Most of Your Time with a Writing Pipeline
• Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears
• Writing Fears and How to Overcome Them: Feeling Not Good Enough
• Never, Never, Never Sit on a Story

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