How do I decide which writing project to focus on?
| by Pamela Koehne-Drube | Ask Novlr, Writing
"I'm in need of a bit of advice on how to handle multiple writing projects. For years now I've been collecting new ideas and storing them as works in progress on my computer, and right now I have two, maybe three, projects that I'm working on at once, but I don't know which to put my main focus on.
There's one I've been working on since high school that I want to turn into a webcomic one day, but I keep stopping because I can't find a good place to start. I have the characters and the world concept, but I'm still reworking the outline, because I have a goal for the middle and how it's going to end, I just don't know how to start.
There's another one that I started only a couple of years ago, around the pandemic, that's basically a modern-drama spin on a classic fairytale. I keep reworking the first book of a short trilogy over and over because I can never be satisfied with what I have.
And then there's a string of fanfiction that I can't seem to put down, because I'm at least publishing new chapters of those, even if they're not that good, and I feel stuck working on them because at least I have an audience.
Do you have any advice to help me organise my list? At the very least, help me figure out what I should be focusing my energy on. I just feel so scatterbrained right now."
The problem we all face as writers is that we don’t suddenly stop having creative ideas just because we’re working on a project already. And a new and shiny idea always seems more interesting than what we’re already working on.
I’m a ghostwriter professionally, so I’ve regularly got at least three projects on the go at once. I’ve got my own work open in one tab, a commission in another, and a folder of random ideas or a work of fanfiction open in another. It’s become such a normal part of my workflow that I take it for granted.
The thing I’ve learned over the last decade or so is that you need to know why you’re writing. You need to understand yourself, what you want to achieve, and where you want your writing to go. It’s the first step to knowing what to commit to.
Know your why
Before you put any other thought into what you want to prioritise as far as your writing projects go, you need to stop and ask yourself one simple question: why do you want to write?
Knowing what drives you to create, and what you want to achieve with your creations is precisely the kind of self-knowledge you need to have in order to prioritise your work and actually commit to the act of creation. Every part of your writing journey will hinge on the answer to that one simple question.
Your reason for writing will change the judgement you have on your work, and also the amount that you have to treat it like work at all. Are you writing just for the joy of it, with no plans to ever share? Then finishing a project doesn’t matter. Pick up and leave projects wherever and whenever you want, because fun is the ultimate goal. You can stop if it no longer serves that goal.
Are you writing with the ultimate goal of publishing? Then at some point you need to commit to finishing a project, even when it feels like work. And you’ll also need to start approaching those projects like a job. Because functionally, that’s what they are. You’re writing for strangers who owe you nothing, and won’t be kind out of loyalty. You need to make them invest their time and money in your work, and prove to them you’re worth that investment.
Are you writing for a small audience with no plans to monetise? Then you get to have the best of both worlds. You can write for fun, flit from project and to project, and choose whether your audience is one you wish to cultivate. There’s no metric for success or failure, so you can enjoy yourself while still getting external validation from readers.
Your why is the standard you need to hold yourself and your work to. It will feed into every decision you make about your writing and your process. And there’s no reason why you can’t have some projects that serve different purposes as well.
If we apply the why to my situation then, my ultimate goal as a writer is publication. But every concurrent manuscript I work on isn’t necessarily with that same goal in mind. I treat ghostwriting projects as my profession, for obvious reasons, but I also usually have a personal project on the go that I treat the same way. If I want to publish a manuscript, then I treat it like my job. But I also just have random short story ideas and fan works that I write for fun. I have no plans on turning those into anything publishable, and write them just for the joy of it. And these projects I will pick up and discard on a whim, because they’re ultimately just for me. So if they’re no longer fun, I feel no shame in abandoning them (sorry to all my Ao3 readers for all the abandoned fics!).
Know your why as a writer, but also know your why for the project. It’s the most important metric in determining where to spend your precious time.
Work out why a project is stuck
With that out of the way, what do you do if you’ve committed to a plan for your writing, but it’s the project that feels stuck and out of focus?
Two sit at opposite ends of the same axis. A structural stall is when you know the world and the ending, but can’t quite get from point A to B yet. A perfectionism stall is the mirror image of that: you know exactly where to start, you're not short on material, you're just stuck in a rewriting loop because you don’t feel like what you're producing is good enough.
The third kind is easy to miss, because it doesn't look like being stuck at all. I call this the reward-momentum stall and it’s what happens when a project keeps going on rails, but only because something outside the story is driving it. This could be anything from an audience, a habit, or a self-imposed publishing schedule, rather than the story's own need to get somewhere. This is a classic trap of serialised, reader-facing writing like fan fiction: as long as new instalments keep landing on schedule and getting a response from readers, nothing is forcing the story to resolve, so "in progress" can comfortably last for years, keeping you trapped in a project that is no longer fun, or serving your writing goals.
A structural stall usually needs some iteration, and allowing yourself to write badly. When I come up against this, I will go back to outlining and do several different versions where no idea is a bad one. No matter how silly something sounds, I’ll still write it down because it’s often a good way to get out of a slump, or to highlight hidden plot holes.
A perfectionism stall for me, needs a deadline or an outside reader. It needs to take the decision about "good enough" out of my hands, so I can just get moving again. A reward-momentum stall, on the other hand usually just needs me to ask myself if this project is still aligned with my goals. Am I having fun? Is it making me a better writer? Is it moving me towards my publishing goals?
A reward-momentum stall has two outcomes. Closure, or abandonment. If closure is easy, I’ll do that so that readers aren’t left disappointed. But if the project isn’t serving my goals and it would take too much time away from other projects for closure to be possible, then I will just abandon it to work on something else. Sorry readers.
Go through your own list of projects and be honest about which camp each project sits in. “Unfinished” isn’t a single category, so it’s up to you to decide what you want out of each of them, and determine why they feel stuck.
Focus your attention
Where you focus your attention will depend entirely on what your goals are with your writing. If you’re writing for fun, then just write what brings you joy. It’s a hobby, it should be fun. In this case, don’t be afraid to start and stop writing projects as the whim takes you.
But if you’ve got plans for publication, then you have some harsher decisions to make, and often joy becomes secondary to the goal. If publication is in your future, don't decide your priorities based on which idea excites you most today. Excitement mid-way through a project is the least reliable signal you have, because it can change day to day.
Everyone starts a project excited about it, but that excitement will wane as you dive into the weeds of the work it actually takes to create a viable manuscript. A more exciting idea will always come along, because it’s new. Writing is hard work, so you need to learn to find joy in that work, rather than just chasing the next new thing.
When you’ve invested in a project, you need to push through solvable blocks. Structural gaps, plot holes, perfectionism; all of these issues are solvable. You just have to commit to solving them. Build your writing as a habit, and put in the work of solving the inevitable problems that arise when telling any kind of story. And most importantly, commit.
You won’t always want to write. You won’t always have fun with what you're writing. But that doesn't mean you’ve made the wrong choice. Doubt is normal, and it’s easy to hate and love your writing projects at the same time. Successful writers are the ones who stick with a project through all the bits that were difficult and put in the work to problem solve, even if they don't feel like it.
Choosing a main focus doesn't mean the rest of your list of projects has to be discarded. It just means you’ve made a choice for where your time is currently most valuable. Save those projects for future inspiration, development, or just reference. No writing is ever wasted.
Ultimately, where you choose to focus comes down to what your goals are. What do you want out of your writing journey? Your goals? Your projects? Take some time to ask yourself the hard questions and then make your decisions based on your answers. You need to know what's important to you to know where to focus your time and effort.
