Sarah Kanning

One of my friends is working on a novel. That’s novel, singular. An editor asked her to contribute a short story for an upcoming anthology, so she excerpted and expanded a section of her novel, focusing on one of the supporting characters instead of the protagonist.

Another good friend of mine is primarily working on one novel, but then she has another novel which is her “cheating” project (the Other Novel instead of the Other Woman). When she gets bored with the main project, she switches over to her illicit affair with the Other Novel.

If we were to extend this metaphor any further, I think I would have a harem of active projects. Couple of screenplays. A novel. Two or three short stories. One radio play. That said, sanity dictates that only two or three of those are “hot” at any given day, but I could work on four or five different things in a week, easily.

Clearly, of the lot of us, I’m the juggler. My one-project friend is more of a bloodhound — single-minded with a single purpose. My two-project friend falls somewhere in the middle.

In the past, I’ve worried that I’m not ever going to finish anything if I have too many balls in the air at once, but it seems the minute I buckle down and make myself choose just one (or two), my sense of joy and inspiration dries up, and I wind up working on nothing. So I’m resigned to be a juggler, but the important thing is, I’ve identified my own individual working style (at least concerning my preferred number of concurrent projects).

Are you a bloodhound, tenaciously going after a single project? Or a juggler, needing to have lots of different projects to switch to in order to keep things interesting? What’s your preferred project mode?