Remember the first time you were able to drive on your own without your nagging parent telling you to turn with a half-second to spare? That was super exciting, right? Do you honestly get that excited about the prospect of driving to work now? Probably not. I think that the same thing can happen with books –we get really excited when we get the idea but as we work on them, our excitement wanes.
I’ve found that my excitement about a book invariably does lessen periodically whilst I’m writing it. It’s discouraging and often causes me to lose momentum. I’ve tried various things to try to keep myself going steadily, but sometimes I end up getting so bored that I simply scrap an idea.
Scrapping a novel all together is terrible, and I really should be excommunicated from writing land because of it, but setting a novel aside for long periods of time is almost just as bad. As Donald Trump, of whom I’m a big fan, (keep reading and comment about his hair and big mouth later) says, “Keep your momentum. Without momentum, a lot of great ideas go nowhere.” You want your idea to go somewhere, right? However, we all need breaks. Keeping those two in mind, I’ve come up with an idea that I believe will help both you and I keep our momentum going while not killing ourselves working our respective books.
So how can you take a break and keep your momentum going? I believe that you can do that simply by working on two books at one time or by working on a book and a short story or poem at one time. Work on the first for two or three days then work on the second for the same. Doing so will keep your mind engaged in the task of writing but you’ll still get your break, which won’t be long enough for you to completely forget where you’re at in your book and what comes next. The gap will also give you time to come up with new ideas!
I’ve been working on Sealed for a while now, and after deciding that a rewrite was needed, I’ve kind of been slowing down. Okay, not kind of. I’ve been going really slowly. I need to take a break, but I don’t want to get out of the habit of writing consistently. I came up with the idea for The Beatific Vision about a week ago and am now planning on working on the two books simultaneously so that I can stay excited about both and not get so fixated on one that I start to get burned out.
I think that doing so will greatly increase my chances of success with both books as I will be able to keep myself writing and thinking about the books whilst not overdoing it. While I’m kind of intense in a lot of ways, moderation has its place, and I think this is one such case. What do you think? Drop a comment below and let me know what you’re working on! (Now’s also the time to go on a rant about The Donald.)
It was kind of funny because I got a mention from Donald Trump the day we were editing this post. Kind of an odd coincidence. 🙂