Harvesting your writing projects

 

I like 'em a great deal.

Creativity means different things to different people. For writers, that can include doing one thing brilliantly, or doing lots of different things to varying degrees of success. I tend to fall into the latter category, unless there’s a deadline on the horizon. Thus it is that I have two novels in the early stages of development, a whole range (literally) of greetings cards hopefully under consideration, a daily visit to www.comedywire.com to top up my gag writing skills, a standalone completed novel on submission to a handful of agents and publishers, and the beginnings of an ebook anthology predominantly of short fiction that I gathered together from previous publications. It all looks great on paper – pardon the pun – but is this shotgun approach to creative writing a way of avoiding focus? Can less be more? And can my questions seem a little less like Carrie Bradshaw’s in Sex and the City?

We bought a water filter at home to improve the taste of eau de tap. For longer than a care to remember you had to have a knack to fill the kettle without rinsing the work surface and the back of the kettle at the same time. This week, for no reason at all, I finally realised you can pop the lid on the spout, reducing the field of flow and also making it more controllable. Who knew?! Of course, that epiphany lasted for a couple of days before I got lazy and thought I could wing it. Rinse it, more like.

Maybe it’s not laziness as such, just an expectation that we can get away with stuff if it doesn’t seem to matter. And yet, if Dr Lister took that approach he’d never have discovered Yakult. Did I mention that science isn’t one of my strong suits? Unlike the Kevlar one.

The one area of writing where I buck my own trend is in editing a novel once it’s complete. Standpoint, my debut spy thriller, went through seven complete edits. I knew the tone I wanted and kept going back to make minor adjustments. Actually, there came a point where I had to force myself to stand back from it. Fortunately, Joffe Books ‘got it’ and helped refine the text so that it kept the Raymond Chandler and Len Deighton inspirations, but also elevated my emerging voice. 

We sometimes confuse the rush of inspiration with actual creativity because it issuch a rush. When the Muse comes to call she usually brings a suitcase filled with presents, and it seems rude to ignore any in preference of any others. But, in the same way that our parents ‘made’ us play with a new Christmas present for a while before we opened the next one (my brother remembered it as an hour, but I’m not so sure), it is important to focus your time and attention so that you make real progress. Too much inspiration, in too many directions, is a distraction and the enemy of productivity.

In practice, I like to prioritise what needs to be done to meet the long-term objectives (e.g. I can realistically only write one novel at a time so something has to take second place) and balance that up with a few quick wins for when things seem so difficult that they grind to a halt. There is also a lot to be said for applying your bum to the seat and making yourself do something even if it runs the risk of becoming tomorrow’s chip paper.

For me, this all plays out as:

1.   Complete first draft of crime novel by the end of the year.

2.   Work on second batch of greeting card content. (This is more fun than work.)

3.   Collect plot ideas for separate Thomas Bladen novel.

4.   Identify half a dozen agents / publishers for Scars & Stripes.

5.   Work on Into the Void anthology.