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Posts Tagged ‘writing two things at once’

New Plan, Same as Old Plan

Well, mostly the same as the old plan.  I’ve noticed that one of my issues with writing is that I have too many ideas.  I don’t get the traditional form of writer’s block (ie not knowing/having anything to write about), but I get the reverse of that.  And it does slow me down and sometimes stop me entirely.

What I’ve noticed the last couple months is that I write in shifts.  I’ll write for an hour or two and then take a break (breaks often lasting a couple of hours) and then go work again.  Starting today, I’ve decided to try to use that to my advantage.  I have so many stories in my head right now that I feel like I’ll never get them all out.  I have a novel almost done and one started that literally needs to be done by Feb 1st in order to make a workshop deadline.  If I write in shifts, I should be able to finish both.  So for the rest of this month, I’m going to try that method out.  Work on one in the morning and one in the afternoon/late at night or whenever the second “shift” happens.  I know I can keep the stories straight in my head because my head is juggling about 20 different novels and short stories at the moment including these two.  Hopefully doing things this way will prevent the “but I want to work on this instead” block, because I’ll just go work on that instead.

And hey, if this works, then I’m going to keep assigning shifts to projects and see how writing multiple things concurrently pans out.  I’m still adapting my process and finding ways that work for me.  I fully intend to try different ways of outlining novels as well at some point this year (that Snowflake method looks interesting, for example).

So that’s the new plan, which is pretty much the same as always.  I’ve got a lot of writing to get done (about 90k words) in a short amount of time.  But if I finish it or even get close, I’ll have finally gotten my 100k words in a single month.  Which is pretty cool (I’ve written about 30k this month already).