Writing – should you put all your eggs in one basket?
Writing is an unpredictable business. There is often no telling where the next big success is going to come from. There’s often no telling whether that great book you’ve just self-published will sell any copies at all, let alone bring the success you’d love.
This leads us to weigh up our options in order to find the best chance of making a success of our writing. There are, broadly speaking, two main paths to choose between. One is to put all of your literary eggs in one basket and focus on a single project. The other is to have, as it were, many baskets, all with a single egg in, in the hope that one of them will find purchase.
So which should it be? There are obvious benefits to both options. A big plus of focusing on one thing at a time and taking your time over it is that it should have a beneficial impact on the quality of your finished work. You’ll also be heavily invested in the finished outcome and so will be keen to do whatever you can to make a success of it once it’s published.
That said, what if it isn’t a success? Of course, you’ll still have learnt a lot from the experience and hopefully will have found it rewarding, but if you’re hoping to make a living from your writing, that’ll only get you so far. This is where the multiple-projects-on-the-go approach can be useful.
As well as giving you lots of different chances for success, trying lots of different things can also lead to you trying things with your writing that you never would have thought of. It can lead you down exciting avenues and, if all goes well, you could end up with multiple successful ventures. You have to be careful, however, to weigh up issues such as quality, the amount of time you can afford to spend on each thing, and whether you have enough ideas to sustain this approach over a long period of time.
It seems, then, that this issue is like so many others in writing. What works for some won’t work for others, and it’s all about finding the balance that works for you. Above all, it’s about being passionate about what you do and giving your writing the best possible chance to shine.
What do you think?
