Multiple projects and productivity
Guest on Sep 26 2006 | Filed under: CRAFT
I’ve always heard about writers working on multiple projects at one time and never really understood how they managed it.
On the other hand, as much as I enjoy writing I’m one of those people who can only ever write in hour long bursts. It probably has something to do with the way I plan my writing sessions. Whenever I finish working on a project for the day, I’ll usually spend some of the time between then and the next session thinking about what I’m going to do next. For whatever reason that planning only ever gives me enough to be working on for about an hour.
Recently I decided to try a different approach. I’ve got a couple of projects on the go, so I figured why not try working on them all at the same time. Now I’m still only able to write in hour long bursts on any one project, but the surprising thing I’ve found is I can work on more than one project a day. So I’ll get an hour with a short story I’m writing, an hour on the novel, and another hour touching up the ‘finished’ novel.
I’m envious of people with longer attention spans, but … no it’s gone.
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Since my novel is part of an interconnected trilogy I’m often doing work on more than one of the novels at a time, although my primary focus is on one of them.
With NaNoWriMo coming up, I need to start furiously outlining the 2nd novel as that’s what I’m going to draft for the contest.
Yeah, I’m absolutely crazy.
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Lately I haven’t been working on more than one thing – I’ve just been trying to get the novel done. But I want to start writing a few short stories again and some more history articles.
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I think anyone who blogs should get points for being able to successfully do more than one thing at a time. ;)
I don’t know if NaNoWriMo would work for me, but I need to look into it, Eric. Good luck with that outlining.
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I focus on one project at a time. I’ve tried to work on more than one and usually end up not accomplishing much. I put off writing my next book until I finished editing the last one. It’s kind of my “carrot in front of the donkey”, the donkey being me. That has worked well.
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I’ve tried to do this too. But it never works. I can be thinking about a new project, but that’s about as far as I can get. For me, I’ve gotta be consumed by the current project to get anything at all accomplished. Sad, no?
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i’m always interested in reading about successful authors’ writing habits and the more prolific ones really do seem to be able to work on more than one project at a time. other ideas are to work on projects that require your highest level of creativity when you are not tired. and fill in with your business of writing work, proofreading, etc. in between. but the answer is and always will be: discipline.
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Thanks for tips guys. I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one whose writing habits are a work in progress.
I posted recently about wanting to try NaNoWriMo, but not having enough time, however It looks like I might have more time than i thought so maybe I will give it a go after all.
Thea I like the idea of managing your energy to coincide with various writing tasks.
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I probably wouldn’t be able to work on several projects if they were unrelated… but since my 3 stories take place in the same world and some of the events overlap, it works out nicely that ideas I have for one story usually affect the others in interesting ways, so I get a nice ping-pong creative effect that keeps me plugging along.
The more I think about it, without that bouncing of ideas between stories I don’t think I could do multiple projects at once.
In a way, since they’re all so related it’s like working on one big project instead of three.
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