Delacroix on self-doubt...

Stealing another article, this one written by Maria Popova and posted in Brain Pickings.

Here's one of the best parts --

How stupid to get into the habit of reserving what one imagines to be the finest subjects for a future occasion!
[…]
The absurd mania I have for doing things in which I am not vitally interested, and therefore doing them badly; the more I do such things, the more I find to do. I’m always having excellent ideas, but instead of working on them while they are still fresh in my imagination, I keep telling myself that I will do them later on — but when? Then I forget about them, or worse still, can no longer see anything interesting in ideas that seemed certain to inspire me. The trouble is, that with a roving and impressionable mind like mine, one idea drives another out of my head quicker than the changing wind alters the direction of a windmill’s sails. And when I have a number of different ideas for subjects in mind at once, what am I to do? Am I to keep them in stock, so to speak, quietly waiting their turn? If I do that, no sudden inspiration will quicken them with the touch of Prometheus’s breath. Must I take them out of a drawer when I want to paint a picture? That would mean the death of genius.

I know what he's talking about. Some of my ideas should have been done when I first had them -- like updating Aristophanes' The Birds to a cyberpunk world. I did some of it, got a pissy first draft done and then set it aside. Twenty years ago, when I was heavy into Gibson and Neuromancer. Back then, it would have been forward thinking; now it would just come across as derivative.

Another script of mine -- Dair's Window, about the need for gay marriage -- was timely when I first wrote it but by not pushing it to get done, it's become outdated. I can still rework it, but I have to have another reason for it to exist, and I haven't found one, yet.

Of course, I could just be putting off making the decision to make them both work.