Something I have been noticing about myself, recently, is that sitting down to a piece of writing the second time is the hardest thing about completing something for me. It's not that I can't concentrate — I can and have spent half a day on a post for this blog — but that if I can't finish a piece in one sitting, however long, it is likely to languish, possibly forever.
Certainly sitting down to a blank page is hard, but for the kind of semi-structured writing I do most frequently (blogging; hi guys!), I have a few standard things I can do when I'm feeling uninspired (reviews), I keep an IDEAS file which serves as a tickler, and I usually have more ideas clamoring to be written up than I have posts to make, so I don't usually find myself staring at an empty screen wondering what to write. In fact I find that I can often rely on being mugged by an idea and writing it up in a single streak at least once a week. Coming back to a post I have started and put aside, though — that's much harder (and sort of incentivizes getting mugged, which doesn't always do good things for my sleep schedule, since ideas for me seem to like to lurk in the shadows of 4 AM). True to form, I didn't set out to write this as a blog entry — it began its life as a one-sentence IM and escaped from there as it grew, I've been entirely focused on it since I started it, and I'm posting it at o'dark o'clock.
I'm not entirely sure why it's harder for me to come back to a piece of writing — picking up my train of thought is hard? After the initial excitement, caring is hard? The second time, it's work? I don't know. But it is definitely harder.
Do you notice this in your writing? How do you cope?