Want to Be a Productive Writer? Three Clues
By Julianna Baggott | March 11, 2019 |
Heads up, WU’ers: Longtime WU contributor Julianna Baggott has created a new audio series for writers: Efficient Creativity: The Six-Week Audio Series. You can listen to the first episode for free, on SoundCloud.
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A friend and fellow writer recently asked me how I keep multiple projects going at the same time. The answer didn’t come to me right away. In fact, I was stumped. But a few days later, I had three possible answers. For better or for worse, here they are.
1. Use frustration and burn-out to your advantage.
Over the last few years, I’ve become obsessed with creative process. At the height of that obsession, I ran a survey of over a hundred writers – self-identifying as high and low producers. One thing that the survey showed is that high producers – not stoned, by the way, just very productive producers – worked on multiple projects at once.
By this point, I’d already started working on multiple projects for a number of reasons. One of which, oddly enough, is that I realized I couldn’t push a project that wasn’t working; I had to have patience. Now patience doesn’t seem like the right answer in this case, but it was. Or another way to think of it: My frustration fueled other work. I wanted to leave the project alone – give it space – and I wanted to keep writing. So, I’d start something else.
At certain times in my career – not often – I’ve had whole days to write. When I do, I burn out after about two hours of work. But I learned that the burn-out was project-related. If I left it and went to something else, I could refuel.
Another hint – it helps if the projects are very different – different audiences, genres, tones… or, at least, that’s been the case for me.
I don’t know if frustration and project-related burn-out are why other high-producers work on more than one project at once or not, but I do know that working on multiple projects adds to their productivity.
2. Create physical manifestations of the projects.
One thing that novelists suffer is the lack of physical manifestations of their work-in-progress. Architects have blueprints – we have … spaces in our heads. People who map their projects ahead of time have an advantage here – their novel’s cartography is a kind of short hand.
But you don’t have to be a plotter to create physical manifestations of your work-in-progress. Create drawings, lists, maps of what you’ve done, not necessarily where you’re going. Try it. This will allow you to enter and exit your projects faster and help you move between projects more cleanly.
3. Rituals.
Each project of mine has different touchstone works that help me get into it. I keep novels that are helping my current work-in-progress on my desk. If working on more than one project, there are more stacks. I’ve used music too and movie compilations – a blur of things that help me fall into a project, the blurring is best – while erasing the previous project.
Call them palette cleansers or sorbets.
I always work in the same spot, but changing writing places for different works seems like it would be helpful too.
Rituals can slow down your process. They can become elaborate and overly prissy. But when they’re lean and hand-tailored to you and your projects, they can be incredibly efficient ways to cue different parts of your brain.
Overall, there are some other emotional benefits to the multiple projects model. But there are also downsides. A focuser should never, ever feel bad about not being a juggler. Likewise a juggler shouldn’t feel guilty for not being a focuser.
Know your process. Know what works for you. Experiment with your process, yes, absolutely. But mainly know how to work with your process, not against it.
Are you a productive writer? Do you work on multiple projects at the same time? What works for you?
Julianna Baggott is the author of over 20 books, including two New York Times Notable Books of the Year, PURE and HARRIET WOLF’S SEVENTH BOOK OF WONDERS. She runs a film and television production company, Mildred’s Moving Picture Show,. Her latest book I’D REALLY PREFER NOT TO BE HERE WITH YOU is a collection of stories, many of which are in development at places like Netflix, Paramount, and Amblin. The feature film WHICH BRINGS ME TO YOU, based on the novel she co-wrote with Steve Almond, is currently streaming. www.juliannabaggott.com
Julianna, I’m writing a series, so when I hit the wall on the book I’m working on, I often read thru my notes and timelines for the other books. I also draw maps and pix of the characters, where they live, how they dress. To ‘clear the mechanism’, I paint. My recent project is painting goddess faces on river stones. All of this feeds into the machine. I love that you quantified your curiosity on productivity with a survey. It’s fascinating!!
I don’t outline at the start. When I begin a book, I keep two journals, one with plot ideas, character notes and research. The other only contains scenes, dialogue and character inner life—writing that could end up on the page.
I give this journal a cover with an image that represents something about the concept or main character, with a working title.
Over time, I visualize covers and titles for the published book and put them on my desktop or pin on the wall. This makes the endpoint tangible for me. None of these make it all the way, but when the book is ready for its final cover, I know what the cover should be.
Great post, Julianna.
Last year I took my editing business to another level. Although this was exciting, I was worried that editing manuscripts all day would stifle my writing voice come evening. I thought the editorial process might drain my creative juices.
But it hasn’t. In fact, the more manuscripts I juggle, the more my creative juices flow. And now I find myself even more excited to “get at” my WIP come evening.
Funny how the mind works, huh?
Thanks for the wonderful post today!
Dee
Award-winning author of A Keeper’s Truth
This reminds me of the conclusions of a study about learning, which among other things showed that people learn most when the *almost* get something, then move on. When they come back to the first project, the effort to pull together their learning and move forward with it is the moment when they learn the most. Sticking with one thing until it’s done tends to be like cramming for a test, which has been shown to result in poor learning. I wrote a brief blog post about this on a music learning site, but it applies to writing as well, I believe. https://www.fiddle-online.com/blog/articles-about-learning-fiddle/turning-music-learning-on-its-head/
Yes, multiple projects but of varying lengths and intensity. It’s hard for my brain to work on one project for more than 4 hours at a time. So, I take a break and switch gears. For example, I might work on my children’s novel-in-progress then switch to an essay I’m going to enter in a competition. Love the idea about physical manifestations. I’ve heard of authors creating a mockup book cover. I like to make an image college for my novel.
Thanks, Julianna. You’ve given me hope that my style of Writing By Wandering Around just might be OK after all. I can stay alert for poems, work on the narrative NF book, and still cultivate some of the most insistent fiction projects so they will stop whining for attention.
I’m afraid that if I leave a project half-way through a draft, I might never come back to it, lured on by the sparkle of the Shiny New Thing.
But I am learning to swap around between drafts, so down-time for one project doesn’t have to be down-time for me.
I was quite the prolific writer until I became the sole payer of my mortgage and bills. It’s all on my lil ol shoulders now, so I have to work work work! That pulls me from my writing so prolifically.
I never liked to work on more than one novel at a time–if I do, that means I’m not engaged so I have to pick one – find the one that is the Right One.
Kat, I hear you on this. So hard. I’ve been the sole breadwinner for a family of six for about 18 years. I’ve created this way of writing which I call writing while not writing. It might be useful to you now that you’re working full-time. I talk about it here on this free sound cloud episode. I hope it helps! https://m.soundcloud.com/user-430267500/efficient-creativity-the-six-week-audio-series
Definitely agree multiple projects have their time and place.
Yay! Thanks for this, I’m juggler and have often felt bad about myself for not being able to focus and for jumping from project to project instead of just sitting down and finishing something. This is exactly what I needed today.