A Writer's Notebook By Molly Schlemmer

Tag: writing

The Gunner's Daughter Articles.

A Mindset Shift and Yearly Themes

Status

I’ve just finished Rachel Aaron’s brilliant 2k to 10k, and while I’m struck by a number of pieces of advice in the book, one lesson in particular stands out:

I do not have to write every idea I have.

In fact, I probably shouldn’t.

I’ve been stuck in a rotating world of stories, adding bit by little bit to each one, as my enthusiasm waxes and wanes. But I don’t have to be stuck in this cycle; in fact, it’s time to break it completely.

I’ve decided that my yearly theme for 2025 is going to be “The Year of Finishing.” I have too many open-ended projects, and it’s time to finish them or let them go. It’s also a year of different life cycles ending (my marriage and my 30s, to name a couple), so the theme feels extremely fitting. Part of that finishing is going to be deciding which stories and art projects get attention and which ones need to fall by the wayside. It’s going to be hard to say goodbye (for now) to some of these things, as they’ve been living in my head for years, but it’s time.

You have to get the ideas out of your head to make way for new ideas. If you don’t, you get what Ze Frank once called “brain crack”: ideas so perfect in your head that you can never execute them.

I have a lot of brain crack right now, and it sucks. I’ve managed to have a new story idea this year (which will be worked on in 2025) but everything else has been trying to execute brain crack and I’m tired. I need new, exciting ideas, some of which will become stories and art, and some of which will be confined to my commonplace book for eternity.

Maybe some of these stories will eventually see the light of day, but I’m no longer holding myself to the impossible standard of working on every idea I have. It’s the Year of Finishing, after all, not the Year of Beginning. Maybe that will be 2026’s theme…

You see, at this restaurant, we do small plates…

Long-Form

There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.”

Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.

Thank you, Cory Doctorow, for summarizing why I hate blogging so much. The pressure to “build a platform” is enormous in the writing world; gotta be posting on X/Bsky/Threads, dancing for the TikToks, importing those TikToks as Reels on Instagram, and dumping all of your worldly writing knowledge into a blog on your website. Dance, monkey, and you too will see success.

What they don’t mention is that you might do all that and still not see success. You’ll shout into the void, and the void will not answer back. The futility is disheartening.

Blogging to create the perfect SEO that will bring readers to my website (and therefore buy my as-yet nonexistent books) always bothered me. I don’t feel like any sort of writing expert, and while you can argue that I’m an expert in my stories, I’m not entirely confident in that either. There’s loads I don’t know about my stories; if I did know it, I wouldn’t be as interested in exploring them. I may have learned how to outline, but I’m a pantser at heart: the journey is in the discovery.

So, why are we here? What is this website for, if not blogging? Well, I do intend to blog, just not in an SEO-friendly way. Like Doctorow describes in the above-quoted article on The Memex Method, this blog is more Commonplace Book than polished content. It’s a place for me to dump my online brain and give you glimpses into the stories circulating in my brain.

Doctorow continues:

This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience.

Maybe, just maybe, if you like what I post here you’ll be more likely to buy a book in the future.

Until then, I’ll chose how and when to shout into the void, thankyouverymuch.

© 2025 The Gunner's Daughter

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