Break it down!

I seem to have trouble breaking certain large projects into smaller steps. It's not this way with everything, obviously; I can pick up and put down craft projects, working on them a bit at a time until they're done. I can keep at the laundry (it's my raison d'être, after all) and the dishes and so forth. I can also impulsively scribble away at the blog on a regular basis without falling apart at the seams. No, it seems like my big crisis issue involves writing whole "projects," whether it's a short story or a young adult novel or (just at the moment) a screenplay.

There's a part of my brain that feels incredibly stupid for doing this -- for being so terrified of the big picture, so keyed up about screwing up and fumbling, that I find some sort of distraction, any sort of distraction, to avoid writing. "Come on," that part says, "this is what you do best. Why are you not doing it?" But there's another part of the same brain that seems to do nothing but make sure I'm consumed with worry about the quality of my writing, to the point that I start many, many stories, but finish very few of them.

To put it bluntly, I'm annoyed with the ebb-tide level of my current written output. Meh. I picked up a book about screenwriting which I hope will teach, or at least encourage, my little monkey brain to break the process down into smaller steps and work on each step at a time.