A Change Is As Good As A Rest

One of my novel-writing friends was recently berated by one of her academic-writing friends because said novel-writer is working on more than one project at a time. Now, I always encourage my students to work on more than one project at once, as do most creative writing coaches I know. Is this because fiction writiers are less serious, have shorter attention spans, are in fact prone to Attention Deficit Disorder? I think not. What I do think is that academic writing is a different kind of duck. I've practrised both creative and academic writing pretty extensively (my legal academic writing alone would probably be the length of Stephen King's The Stand were I to dig it out and stack it up). And it's true that academic papers demand a certain single-mindedness. You can't be all over the map, it just isn't productive. Maybe that's why I fled the law and turned to the supposedly kinder and gentler art of fiction. Not that writing fiction doesn't require rigorous dedication. Tell that to a novelist enmeshed in the final draft of a book and you will probably get your arm ripped out of its socket. But the process is so different, with so many more steps than academic writing. It's not just that you do the research, then the writing, then the editing. You don't just discover stuff and write it down. You have to MAKE IT UP out of whole cloth. That involves, for me, lots of walks in the woods, lots of noodling with pen and paper, lots and lots of driving, lots of arguing with myself about what a character might do or not do, lots of cups of tea, lots of tossing and turning rather than sleeping, lots of process, both before and after I begin the actual writing. So no wonder I find it helpful to have more than one project going. Dwelling on one set of characters, over a period of years sometimes, gets as old as living with your great aunt Judith and her many cats might over the same period of time. It's fine to visit, even to stay for days or even weeks. But then you need a break. You need to go to the beach, or to the movies, or to visit Uncle Edwin and his collection of insects pinned to boards. Just for a change. So have two or three writing projects going at once, read three or four books at once. It enlivens your perspective, and makes a change.