[Free Video] How to Focus on Writing When You Have Too Many Ideas

What a single writing breakthrough taught me about creativity, clarity, and the strangely sacred act of choosing.

There’s a peculiar moment in every creative life when you suddenly realize… you’ve become your own bottleneck.

Not for lack of ideas, mind you. Quite the opposite. You’ve got too many. Your laptop tabs are breeding in the night. Your Notes app is a landfill of genius. Your projects are alive—but maybe a little too alive, Frankenstein-style, all clamouring for attention at once.

Sound familiar?

This isn’t a crisis. But it can feel like one.

Recently, I sat with a writer whose creative orbit was so wide it made my head spin—in the best way. 

They were deep into performance, poetry, design, speculative voice work, even font-making. And to be clear, this wasn’t dabbling. This was the kind of work you build cathedrals from. Visionary stuff!

But they were stuck, out of writing focus. 

Not for lack of talent or effort, but because all these brilliant projects were standing in the doorway at the same time. And no one could get through.

So we did what overwhelmed creatives rarely allow ourselves to do: we chose one.

Just one.

Not forever. Not because it was “more important.” But because it was ready.

And something wild happened.

Cultivating your ‘choosing’ muscle for writing focus

Choosing doesn’t always feel creative or even fun. 

In fact, it can feel like grief. Like walking past a room of beloved children and saying, Not you today. 

We worry we’ll betray our own vision. That if we focus too narrowly, the rest of the work will vanish.

But here’s the twist: it doesn’t.

When you choose one project to nurture deeply, everything else gets better. 

Your voice sharpens. Your confidence grows. Your other ideas get space to breathe instead of jostling for scraps.

This is not about becoming a specialist or abandoning your weird, wonderful mind. It’s about flow. About seeing one project through so that you can become the artist who finishes.

That, in turn, changes everything.

Choosing devotion over chaos

Somewhere in the middle of a recent coaching session with this incredible artist, I tossed out a sideways suggestion: 

What if you wrote for beauty? Not productivity, not perfection. Not your résumé. But for the sheer pleasure of it.

And suddenly, we weren’t talking about strategy anymore—we were in the realm of the sacred.

What if writing didn’t have to be a grind?

What if you wrote like you were leaving an offering?

What if you fed your chosen Muse instead of trying to wrangle them?

That shift—in posture, in energy—can be the difference between avoidance and devotion. Between self-doubt and self-trust. You’re not proving something. You’re courting something.

And yes, it’s allowed to feel that fricken good!

It’s okay to write the wrong thing

Let’s get honest for a sec: a lot of us carry shame about “wasting” time on the wrong project. Like if we don’t choose correctly, we’ve failed.

(Believe me, I know from experience!)

But what if there’s no such thing as the wrong project—only the wrong timing?

The truth is, you can’t write them all at once. But you can finish one, and let that momentum carry you forward.

(Also, finishing something? Pretty sexy. Just saying.)

A writing exercise you might like: 

Here’s a weird but useful question: 

If you were holding your finished project in your hands right now—book, show, exhibit, whatever—what would the back cover say?

Not the summary. The why you wrote it.

The soul of it. The part that would make someone pick it up and say, Oh. I need this.

I'm asking because, when you know that? 

Everything else gets easier.

A gentle push to choose your path

If this is all hitting a little close to home, take it as a nudge. Not a command. Not a productivity hack. Just a whisper:

You don’t have to do everything at once.

You can choose beauty. You can choose devotion. You can choose one project, and pour yourself into it like a warm bath.

And if you need someone to sit with you while you sort it all out, well... I do that too!