Choosing a new project

[sarillia]

How do you go about deciding what to work on next? Does one just call out to you or do you have a process for choosing one?

Normally I can just pick one and work on it until it's done--though occasionally I end up deciding that I'm not ready to start the one I chose after all and it works better if I get back to it later--but lately I my mind has been all over the place and I can't decide.

Sometimes what I do is I make a list of my top choices and then I go through that list and make a new one out of my top choices from that list and keep doing that until I only have one left. But I can't seem to narrow it down this time.

Part of it, I think, is that issue of audience appeal I talked about before. Instead of basing it entirely on my enthusiasm, I can't help thinking about what might be most salable too.

Comments

[inevitableentresol]

Yes, most of my 50 or so stories are on indefinite hiatus. I've worked on three the last two weeks. There are about another ten I have concrete plans to come back to.

When the multiple WIPs started happening to me I felt like a failure. It's hard to describe how much it affected me without sounding like wah-wah-wah. But I've learned to live with it. I've even started finishing stories again, although it required re-learning how to work.

I think one of the reasons it happened is my standards just got higher. Roadblocks appeared in my stories because I saw they needed work, whereas before I wouldn't have noticed. That's when my unrelated ideas have the danger of popping up.

Tricks I use:

- I get chapters out to another person, it doesn't matter who, it doesn't matter in what condition. Just to keep a forward momentum (instead of sideways onto something else)

- the 'future plot ideas' folders as above.

- I try to write in large chunks of time. I find if I write 16 hours in a row, then nothing for 3 days while re-charging, I'm much more likely to stay on the same path than if I write 4 hours a day for 4 days.

- These days, I never plot my endings. I find if I plot too closely, I've no reason to write it. I just decide what emotional notes I want to hit, then leave the details as a reward for myself for actually writing the thing.

So you organise your writing into active/active and WIP/finished folders? I've never thought of that. I file both WIPs and finished stories by genre.

Actually, I like the finished ones mixing with the WIPs. If I just looked at a wall of WIPs every time I opened Word I'd get depressed.

[sarillia]

Whoa, I prefer to write in large chunks too and I don't plot my endings either. I have never come across another person, outside of some special circles of NaNo, who will write for at least 10 hours straight like I do sometimes.

I definitely like having my WIPs and finished stories separate though. It's a reward in itself to be able to move a story from the WIP folder to the finished folder. And there wouldn't be much of a point for me in organizing by genre since I write high fantasy almost exclusively. I could try to break it down into subgenres but I don't like to get too nitpicky about that.

[inevitableentresol]

It's a reward in itself to be able to move a story from the WIP folder to the finished folder.

I never thought of that. I need all the tricks of encouragement I can muster.

I might put a big COMPLETED next to my finished stories by renaming them. That might do the same thing. Or I'll try moving completed stories to a separate folder and see how that does.

Perhaps I could copy them instead of moving and get the best of both worlds.

I couldn't do NaNo because I need breaks inbetween my writing chunks for reasons of basic bodily health - mostly sleep. I write badly on little sleep. I tend to not only write gibberish, I don't realise that I'm writing gibberish, and I tend to edit over the good stuff I already wrote and not save a copy before I do it.

I've got to the point where I don't even bother opening Word if I haven't had 8 hours the previous night. I've spent so much effort in the past, writing my little socks off on not enough sleep, to only get to a point worse off than when I started.

If I've had a good night's sleep, on the other hand, I can pull over 24 hours of solid writing on occasion. I think I did 27 hours during one stretch last month.

Not editing though. I do that in smaller, more sensible chunks.

I write mostly sci-fi (or speculative fiction, as they like to call it these days since sci-fi is so uncool) and ancient historical AUs. So it's a little easier for me to break my writing down by genres.