How To Manage Your Creative Output

You have two great ideas at the same time – which one do you work on first?

Chances are you’re like me, and you have a lot of things going on inside that magnificent brain of yours at the same time. And chances are that you’re also like me in that you wish you could work on all of them simultaneously. If you’ve been following my blog earlier this year, you know this is my year of a thousand projects, my ever-lasting spring-cleaning, my attempt at getting through a lot of things that have been lying around for too long, and I wish I could just do it all at once.

It’s been going really well. I’ve polished a few drafts, queried a couple novels, and a little over a month ago I started my biggest project yet. I have a finished draft for a novel, but it’s a mess. It needs a complete overhaul, I need to revise all of it, go through the character gallery, re-plot the whole damn thing — and I haven’t even finished reading through it yet.

Then came my predicament – there was a call for submissions.

A popular online magazine and publisher wanted short story. The genre was right up my alley. I loved the theme. I had nothing else to do, right? Why not write a short story?

Except I did have other things to do! A loooot of things. A whole list of things.

Writing already takes a back seat to a lot of other things I do. The day job, for one. Chores around the house. Hanging out with my wife. Hanging out with other people. Playing in a couple of bands. (I try not to let music get in the way of writing, but it’s difficult when the bands affect six other people).

I already have a pretty decent schedule. All my writing happens in the mornings before work. I have no other commitments then, so that way, there’s nothing else that gets in the way. Anything I don’t get done in the morning has to wait for tomorrow.

So, when it comes to my list of writing things to get through, there wasn’t really room for starting anything new. I was in the middle of getting my head around this beautiful, weird mess of a novel, it would be silly to push all that away to write short stories, right?

Of course it’s not. Of course I wrote the short story. My big novel project had no hard deadline, so I wrote, revised, rewrote three times, edited it, sent it to my betas, and submitted it two days ago. There was never a question about whether I was doing it or not. The question was always about how to justify it. How do I carve out the time and make sure I don’t lose momentum when coming back to what I’m supposed to do?

The question was always about how to justify it.

I didn’t really end up doing anything special. I just stopped dead in my tracks with the other project, focused solely on the short story for a couple of weeks, and now I’m ready to jump back in to my novel. It was the fact that I didn’t have a good plan for returning to my other project that prompted this whole blog post. I realized I should have had a plan.

Here’s two things I wish I did:

Should have written down my thoughts on the project before I stopped. I was very focused on just this one project up until I stopped working on it, and I had a lot of thoughts and ideas about it. Now when I’m returning to it, I feel like I have to start all over again.Should have laid out a clear plan for where to pick it back up. Was I still in the middle of reading through the first draft and taking notes? Great, jot that down. Did I need to work out an idea about two characters? Okay, which ones?

One good thing I realized I ended up doing, without even planning to, was that I left in the middle of everything. I hadn’t even finished the page I was reading, I just marked the spot, closed the document and left to do something else. This has helped me pick it back up, because the part I was working on wasn’t finished. I use the exact same trick when I’m drafting a new story and I have to call it a day. I’ll leave the story in the middle of a sentence, maybe even a word, instead of finishing up at a logical place. This forces me to retrace my steps and get back to the same headspace.

So now that I’ve jumped back into the novel, I’m slowly getting to grips with it again. The lesson here is that of course you should work on multiple projects at a time if you want to, be that the same month, week, day or even during a singular writing session. If that’s how you work, roll with it.

But make a plan. Leave little notes for yourself, and make sure you know where and how to pick a project back up. There’s nothing worse than thinking you’ll remember something, only to realize you’re not in that same headspace when you come back around.

How do you juggle your creative interests? Are you hyper-focused on one project at a time, or do you end up doing a little bit of everything, like me? Let me know in the comments!

As always, I would absolutely love it if you checked out my books. I write crime thrillers and psychological horror novels, and I write science-fiction and fantasy short stories. As an indie author I appreciate every single one of my readers, and I love it when people enjoy my work.

My books can all be found here

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