I should’ve been working on a writers’ residency application last week. I can’t do this, really, I thought to myself, filling out an application, again, writing up all the reasons, again. I have been doing this for so long that I am wretchedly exhausted by the sound of my voice, by my reasons, by my earnestness, by the memory of all the rejections over the years. But that’s not a good enough reason.

One of the reasons is that I can’t seem to pick an idea out of the two drafts that currently exist on Scrivener, the notebook full of ideas (cringe, I wrote next to one, and crossed it out with the vehemence of a person hoping it won’t be found when she dies). I have 20,000-odd words in one draft, a few thousand in another, and I am sort of... suspended? I want a sign? Some sort of creative instinct that tells me this is the right one?

But that obviously isn’t realistic. It doesn’t help that I am coming off an intense period of working on a project I love so much that I think about it with the kind of fondness I am sure people reserve for the happiest moments of their life. I love you, (previously) untitled novel #2.

The thing about writing, at least for me, is that I have to love the idea enough to carry it through for a long time. (So much so that when I had to rename a draft with this year I had to look up that it really was 2026 because the folder it lived in was titled 2024-2025). Karachi, You're Killing Me! was like that -- I talked about it for years (thanks to the film adaptation, which single-handedly remains the coolest thing that has ever happened to me) even if now I’ve forgotten large chunks of it altogether. Society Girl was from a story I’d mentally filed away years ago. You get the point.

So it’s hard for me, at least right now, to go about in some sort of mildly interested manner with any of these ideas. I have to be fully immersed, obsessing over the characters and what they do and the kind of things they say on the screen, and yet in the drafts I’m still looking for that quality that will send me into spiralling fits of despair and hope and make me write scenes in the Notes app because if I write it in a notebook I will immediately forget to type it out.

There’s not going to be a sign, I know. I just have to figure it out. Somehow. Until then, there’s enough books to read and television shows to binge, and enough cringeworthy ideas to cross out.