This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 82: What Should I Write Next?

 

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write.

 

I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and surprisingly, well, this is surprising to me. One of the questions that I get asked the most is, “Sarah, which one of these 10 million projects floating around in my head should I work on next?” To me, this is a really interesting question because it’s not something that I necessarily have ever struggled with myself..

 

I want to say first and foremost, that there is no shortage of ideas. There are always ideas to be had. Ideas are infinite, but they come to us in different ways, and different forums, and different shapes. While one person may get 600 fully formed ideas for blockbuster movies complete with fun side characters and awesome endings with lots of explosions. Another person might get a lot of images or a lot of smaller ideas that are maybe a little bit less concept ready.

 

I fall into the latter of these two categories. Again, it’s not just two categories, everybody is different. Everybody gets a different plethora of ideas coming to them or they generate a different wildly varying number of ideas.

 

For me, I usually get ideas related to one project that I’m working on. I’ll have lots and lots of ideas, but they all go toward one theme or one project. I very rarely am carrying around more than one concept for a new novel, or a new audio drama podcast, or a new poem or anything in my head. I fixate. I think that’s the word, I fixate on just one concept at a time. All of the ideas I get around it are for imagery, or supporting characters, or plot twists, or what have you.

 

However, I am friends with a lot of the other kind of writer and again, there’s not just two types of writers. I want to say that. I know a lot of writers who do get seven, eight, nine, ten amazing ideas for novels, or new plays, movies, scripts, anything like that. These are the people who say, “Oh my gosh Sarah, I have 90 billion things. I want to work on. Which one should I choose?” That’s a really good question because what we create comes down ultimately to what we choose to create. That choice is a really important one.

 

I even get this from podcasters. I get people who say, “Sarah, I want to start like three podcasts and I don’t know which one to choose, which one is right?” This is where we get into, I don’t know, do I want to say metaphysical? I don’t know, I’m recording this early in the morning and I don’t know if I’m ready to drop the word metaphysical yet. I need a little bit more coffee before I do that, but it brings us to a complicated and compelling decision.

 

To work through this to help make this decision, as always, I advocate asking a lot of questions and make sure you’re asking the right types of questions that will help you discern what you need to discern to move forward. That’s what we’re going to talk about today, is how we choose the ideas that work best for us.

 

I want to back up just a little bit and explore the notion of, is it possible? Is it feasible? Is it wise? Is it a good idea to work on more than one project at a time or to focus your time and energy on just one project?

 

This comes down to a lot of the different reasons why we write and why we create in the first place. If what you love about writing is sitting down for yourself with an open window and a cup of coffee and just enjoying the ideas that pulsate through your head, just reveling all of those ideas and thoughts and images that flow through your mind and capturing them on paper or on your laptop screen. Then I see no reason why you shouldn’t just embrace that and write whatever comes to mind.

 

Write a short story one day, write a poem another day, write the first chapter of a novel that you don’t really need to finish. If you are doing this purely for the enjoyment of feeling those ideas flow through you, of the scratching feeling, that tactile feeling of a pencil or pen on paper. If that’s what you enjoy about the process and if that’s why you write, then go crazy.

 

Seriously, I am not kidding. Write as many things as you want to in as disparate amount of ways as you want to, but if the reason you’re writing is to complete a project, or to finish a novel, or to publish, or to make money publishing or to win an award for something you’ve published, then it may be is a good idea to select just one project or one idea and focus your time and energy on moving forward with that.

 

Neither one of these reasons is right or wrong. They’re just different ways of creating and different ways of finding personal fulfillment. There is not a right or wrong way to be fulfilled by what you create. It might even be a spectrum. You might not be on either the, I just love to feel the ideas pulsing through my head or I need to publish six books by the end of my career and win an award for all six of them. There’s a sliding scale there I think, but it’s still a crucial question to ask yourself regardless of whether you’re struggling on what to work on next.

 

It’s just a really good idea to understand what it is that compels you to create and what it is you love about your craft. There’s pros and cons. It can be easier and more fun to just kind of go crazy and create in a very undisciplined unstructured, and I don’t want to say pointless way because there’s a point and the point is that you’re creating, but you don’t necessarily have a goal that you’re trying to achieve other than enjoyment and personal fulfillment. Again, that’s amazing, but if you are trying to produce a finished product, a finished project, then it’s maybe a good idea to pick one idea at a time, move forward, finish it, move on to the next idea.

 

Again, I feel like these are all very intangible, theoretical concepts, but generally, if you want to finish something, you need to focus your time and energy into finishing it and focusing on it and dedicating time and energy toward it.

 

A lot of us say, “Oh, yes, I can multitask,” but really our brains can focus on one thing at a time. I know a lot of writers who write with the TV on, or write with music with loud lyrics and they can do that because they’re not focusing on the TV show or the lyrics. They may hear them every once in a while and they may enjoy having that as sort of a back channel for thought, but really we can focus on one thing at a time and we need to choose what it is, we have to decide what it is that we want to focus on.

 

Now, this is not to say that you can’t have side projects. I want to spend some time here talking about side projects because this is important. I usually have one core project going and that’s what gets my time and energy and focus and thought, that’s what I go to sleep thinking about. That’s what I wake up thinking about. It’s what I give my mind to chew on while I’m sleeping, but as you probably have experienced for yourself, often a creative project can get frustrating. You can get stuck, you can get just angry at it. You can have a problem that you are focusing on and you just can’t solve it.

 

For me, that’s what I use my secondary or side project for. It’s not something that I have told myself I’m taking seriously. It’s just a little backdoor for my ideas when I am in a place of anger or frustration with my current project. Right now, my main project that I’m working on, my main creative project, is Girl in Space Season Two, but it can be a frustrating project. There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of moving pieces. I’m facing a lot of challenges with it.

 

For me, it has been very useful to just have a little place where I can escape to, a little vacation project if you will. I use the Write Now Podcast for that. The Write Now Podcast, which you’re listening to right now, gives me a place to process my ideas and just to get away from the pressure of having to create just one project for a little while.

 

I also have an idea notebook for another fiction project that I’m working on. Again, I take a little brief vacation. I write down a few ideas for that, I clear my head and then I go back to my core project. For me, it’s helpful to work on more than one project at a time, but I still just have one focal project. Again, this is going to be different for everyone and again, it all comes down to why you write.

 

I’m focusing on Girl in Space because I want to move forward with it and I need to publish that season, but I keep these other side projects around because they’re fun and it’s a great place for me to channel any extra ideas that don’t fit into the show I’m currently making.

 

This can also be healthy. It can help alleviate the pressure that you’re feeling towards your main project and it can also just give me an escape. It can help me not to obsessively focus on just one project. It’s a little release valve for me in a way.

 

Okay, that’s my spiel about side projects and secondary projects, but let’s go back to this question of what should I focus on next? What should my next big project be?

 

There’s a simple question that you should ask at the outset and that is, are there stakes of any kind associated with any of these projects? Do any of these projects carry a deadline? Do they carry some kind of financial weight? Will one of them significantly affect the success of another one? Is there a certain order that they need to be done in? What’s at stake? Are all of your projects equally pressing?

 

This is a very simple example, but if you have an idea for a seven book series, you might want to start with book one. Similarly, if you’ve been contracted to write a book and you also have some ideas for other projects and you have a deadline for the book you’ve been contracted to on, I would suggest that you move forward with your contracted book. You finish it by the deadline and then you can work on some of your other stuff. You can even have some of your other projects as side projects for escape for whenever you’re not 100% focused on that main contracted project.

 

Now, if all of the project ideas are equal and you’re sitting here looking at, oh gosh, you want to create maybe a short story about werewolves, but you also want to write a novel set in 18th century France. You also have a really cool idea for a video game that you want to write. Then you have six other novels that you also want to write and they’re all sort of on equal footing. There’s no deadlines for any of them. There’s no payment involved, there’s no contract. How do you make that decision?

 

You’ve decided you want to move forward with a project and you want to finish it. That takes a lot of time and focus and energy. I think when faced with a lot of different perspective projects, each of which takes a lot of time and energy, we want to be very careful about which one we choose because I think a lot of us are afraid of wasting our time or of spending a significant amount of time and energy going down the wrong path.

 

Now, sometimes I hate to say this, but it’s true. Sometimes we need to go down the wrong path just to understand that it is the wrong path. I have done this many times. You start writing a story, you start writing a novel, you start something and you follow it a little bit down the road. As much as you don’t want to come to this realization, you kind of eventually come to the realization that, oh, this isn’t really the project that I wanted it to be.

 

Then you’re faced with the decision of, do I start over or do I just start a different project or do I try to salvage this one? I feel like that’s a completely different topic for another day, is what to do when you write yourself into the ground a little bit.

 

Actually, if you go back into the Write Now Podcast archives, I have an episode on how to write yourself out of a corner. That might be helpful if this is something that you’re struggling with. Just a little note there, but you’re faced with six different novel ideas. You have two different podcasts that you want to start and you’re not sure which one you should work on.

 

A great question to ask yourself at this point is, and this is going to sound maybe a little silly, but I want you to ask it and I want you to answer it seriously. Which one of these sounds the most fun? You’re like, “Sarah, what are you talking about fun? I’m a serious writer and I have serious things to write. What are you talking about fun?”

 

When you’re having fun creating a project, when you are in love with a project, when you are passionate about a project, the audience can tell, and your momentum is different. I advise people to work on the thing that seems most fun to them because we’ve all been in the soggy middle of a project. Where you’re frustrated and you just want to give up and you just, oh, I hate this. I hate myself and you’re just not in a good place.

 

If you’re working on something that you didn’t really want to work on in the first place, it can be really easy to give up or to lose your momentum, but if you’re in that soggy middle of a project that you love, then you can close your notebook for that day, you can close your laptop, go to bed, wake up the next morning and remember why you’re in love with this project and move forward again. It’s so much easier to retain your momentum for a project that you love. For work that is fun. For work that makes you feel good.

 

I ask this question because we often have should projects and these are projects that we feel we should work on. Now, again, if you are being paid to do something, if you are under a contract or a deadline to finish something then you should do that project. That is a project that you should do because you are contractually obligated to do so, but I think that a lot of the time we might have six different ideas for a novel, but one of them is the one we really want to work on.

 

Then we second guess ourselves or our brains tell us, “Well vampire novels are selling really well right now and you should probably write a vampire novel if you want to sell this thing.” Or, “I know you really want to work on that novel about pirates, but you know what? You promised your sister, you would one day write her biography and you probably should do that instead.”

 

There’s a lot of different shoulds that come up when we’re writing and these should projects almost always come from a place outside of yourself. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to understand why you are writing because if you are a writer who writes to enjoy ideas and to enjoy the process, then working on something you don’t really want to be working on is anathema. You may be the kind of writer that I call a serial starter, and I am extremely guilty of being this.

 

Maybe it’s not guilty. Maybe this is just one way that people create, but I’m one of those people who I get an idea for a project, I start it and then I get another idea for a project, I abandon my current project and I start the new project because beginnings are fun, and fresh, and exciting. That goes back to why I write. I don’t necessarily write to finish things.

 

Even though, I want to publish a novel, it should probably be a finished novel, but if you’re one of those people, your friends are always telling you like, “Oh my gosh, why are you starting another new project? You have seven other projects going,” you might be a serial starter. It’s up to you whether or not you’re okay with that. If you can just openly and freely say, “Yeah, I just really love starting new projects and I do it for fun. So mind your own business,” you can do that. People will criticize you no matter what.

 

There’s the flip situation where there was one point in my life where I was working on the same novel for something like six or more years and I had people say critical things about that too. “Aren’t you done with that yet? Why don’t you move on to something else?” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What do you want? What fulfills you? Why are you writing? This is a question I cannot answer for you. This is a question that you might not have thought about before.

 

A lot of us just write because we’re compelled to write. We get ideas, we get excited, we write them down. We materialize them. We create them, but I would actually encourage you to sit down and maybe do a journal entry or just sit and think about what is it about writing that I love so much. Why am I doing this? What’s meaningful about this process to me?

 

If you love starting novels, and if you’re okay not finishing them, then I don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t just start a thousand novels. If that’s what is fun and fulfilling for you, then do it. There’s no rule that says, once you have an idea for a novel you must finish it. If that’s not fun for you and if fun is the reason that you’re writing, then don’t do it.

 

Now, you may have regrets later in life like, wow, I spent my whole life writing and I don’t have a published book to show for it, but it’s up to you whether or not that’s important to you. It’s up to you whether or not having a finished published work is a goal for you.

 

Now, if you ask yourself the question of what’s most fun? And you just absolutely have no idea because every single idea seems equally fun. Then start down a few different paths. Give yourself a limited amount of time, so two weeks and say, “For the next two weeks, I’m going to just write as many of these project ideas. I’m going to start as many of these as I want to.” Then tell yourself, set a calendar reminder, “At the end of these two weeks, I’m going to pick the one that’s developing in the best way, or I’m going to use some kind of rubric to decide which one I’m going to move forward with” because sometimes we just need to start going down a path to realize whether or not it is the right path for us.

 

Maybe you’ll select one as your main project or your core project. You’ll select another one as your side project to kind of doodle around on when your main project gets really frustrating. All I know is that it is important for us to write. It is important for us to create. Nobody, but you gets to establish the reason why you’re doing this. Nobody gets to tell you, you’re taking too long on that novel, or you have too many projects going at once or anything in between there.

 

These come from very loving and well-meaning places. People want to see you accomplish what they want to see you accomplish. Somebody maybe has a vested interest in you publishing a novel, but that’s their interest. That’s not necessarily your reason. Other people’s expectations for us and other people’s desires for us, they may be rooted in goodness and love, but that doesn’t mean that we’re obligated to them.

 

As a people pleaser, this is a really hard thing for me too… It’s been a long journey for me to understand what other people’s expectations are for me and what my own expectations are for me and how they’re different and what I am allowed or permitted to follow. What do you want? This is simultaneously the easiest and one of the hardest questions we can ask ourselves. What do we want?

 

Hopefully today’s episode has given you a little bit of guidance as to how to start making that decision. Honestly, a lot of writing is experimentation. A lot of creativity is experimentation and we need to experiment with what works and what doesn’t, and that’s okay.

 

You don’t have to be one of those writers who from the outset seems like they get an idea and they understand that the universe has bestowed this idea upon them and they must go create it, and complete it and publish it to grand applause. It’s not like that for me, maybe it is for you. It’s not like that for me. I don’t just get up one day inspired to paint the Sistine Chapel and just go do it.

 

There’s a lot of false starts. There’s a lot of hemming and hawing. There’s a lot of moving forward with uncertainty. There’s a lot of outside pressure and expectation, but at the end of the day, if you can ask yourself, is this what I want to be doing? Is this fulfilling me in the way that I want to be creatively fulfilled? That answer will say a lot.

 

I want to give a very warm and grateful thank you to all of the people who support the work that I do here at the Write Now Podcast. Especially those who give financially to help me cover costs for the production of the show. These people give their money on Patreon, which is a secure third party donation platform. You can give $1 per episode, you can give $10 per episode, you can give as much as you want or as little as you want per episode. Every single dollar you give goes towards the production of the show and helps me create the Write Now Podcast and inspire writers all across the world in doing so.

 

I want to give special thanks today to Amanda King, Amanda Dixon, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Laurie, Leslie Manson, Michael Beckwith, Regina Calabrese, Sean Locke, Susan Geiger, Tiffany Joyner, Leslie Duncan, Maria Alejandro, Rebecca Werner, and Sarah Lauzon. Thank you all so much for your generous support of the Write Now Podcast.

 

If you are listening and you are not yet a patron on Patreon, this is something that’s very easy to do. You can go out to patreon.com. That’s patreon.com/sarahrheawerner, all one word. That’s S-A-R-A-H-R-H-E-A-W-E-R-N-E-R or you can simply visit the show notes for today’s episode and click help support this podcast.

 

Speaking of show notes for today’s episode, if you would like to read, or reference, or go back to any of the ideas I’ve shared here today, you can access both my show notes, which are a summary of today’s show, sort of like a blog post, or I am now offering full transcripts for every single episode. That is an actual transliteration, an actual transcript of every single word that I say here on the show no matter how silly it is. You can find all of those out on sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. You can navigate to the latest Write Now Podcast episode, and find the show notes there.

 

If you have thoughts about today’s episode, you can also underneath the show notes for each episode there’s a comment section. I love hearing your comments. I love hearing your feedback. I would love to hear about all the projects you are struggling to choose between right now. If you would like to share your thoughts with us, I absolutely love seeing those and I do see and respond to every single comment I receive out at sarahwerner.com.

 

Go check out the show notes for today’s episode. You can stream the episode there, you can read the full transcript. You can leave comments. You can, I don’t know. I don’t have anything else to say after that. So, yeah. Visit my website, check out the show notes and let me know your thoughts. Let me know what works for you when you’re choosing what project to work on next.

 

With that, this has been episode 82 of the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional and otherwise — to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to go work on something for fun.