On monogamy and multitasking (and a small favor)
I am very excited to share that The Bullet Swallower was chosen to be part of Jimmy Fallon’s bracket challenge to choose the next book for his book club! 16 books are competing head to head and the winning author will get to be a guest on The Tonight Show 😱 😱
So I have a small favor to ask: Please vote for The Bullet Swallower. You can vote up to 10 times until Thursday night at 11:30pm EST. And thank you so much for your support!!
I want to talk about multitasking. It's a thing that most everyone claims to be able to do, and a thing that most employers claim to want. But I wanted to talk about how perilous I think multitasking can be in general, and for writers especially.
Taken in its most charitable light, multitasking describes an ability not just to do several things at once, but to shift focus when you’re interrupted, manage the interruption, and then easily go back to the primary task(s). I was a waitress for many years, and multitasking is crucial for that particular job. You need to simultaneously greet new guests, take orders, carry food, remind the busboy to clean up the spill at Table 14, remember the ketchup for Table 6, carry iced teas, brew more iced tea, remind the busboy again about the spill, manage the new girl who can’t remember which tables are hers, greet even newer guests, answer the phone, carry food, take orders, remember the side of salsa for Table 5…. you get the picture. For some professions, multitasking is necessary. An air traffic controller who can’t focus on several things at once would be a disaster.
But what about other types of jobs? Should we require that program managers and paralegals and welders and data analysts and carpenters juggle a bunch of different tasks while being constantly interrupted? Or should we rather encourage a work environment where people are able to say, Please let me finish what I’m working on and don’t bother me until I give you the thumbs up? Or, Please let me finish my current project before asking me to take on another? I know - a girl can dream.
But as I’m self employed and set my own schedule, I have the rare privilege of being able to decide if I work on one project at a time or several. And I often wonder if as a writer, I ought to be multitasking.
Is it better for us to be monogamous with our work, exclusive to one special project, or have several projects going at once, stringing along a bunch of potentials and enjoying the polyamory of skipping from one to another?
Alice Hoffman is an extraordinarily prolific writer who has published one book about every year or two since the late 1970s. When once asked how she can write so many books, she said her secret is that she’s always writing two books at once. When she gets stuck on one, she switches to the other and writes until she gets stuck. Et voila: A forty year career.
This seems insane to me. How can a writer do the work of creating a believable fictional world, populated with believable fictional people, drop herself in, get fully immersed in the project, and then pull stakes and drop down into an entirely different fictional world populated with entirely different fictional people? The whiplash of switching from one to the other sounds disastrous to me. Every time I toggled between projects I think I’d lose an entire day just trying to reorient myself: Ok, who are these people again? And why is Diane crying in the corner?
I can see the value, however, in working on a novel and short stories or essays at the same time. I can envision a world where I’m working on a novel where the main character is dealing with intense loneliness, say, and I have an idea for a way this loneliness could manifest, but I don’t think it would fit very well into the story I’m trying to tell. So maybe I write a short story and try it out over there.
But even still it feels a bit like cheating.
I liken multitasking when writing to cheating because I do find some strange parallels between writing and dating:
There’s a flirtation with a new idea (What if this crazy dude had it out for a whale?), a courtship (Do I really want to write a whole novel about hunting whales?), a honeymoon period (Omg, whales are the most fascinating subject on earth!), a realization of the imperfections inherent to your project (This idea was dumb. No one wants to read 500 pages of whale facts), a doubling down on your commitment because you realize you truly do believe in the project (Readership be damned, I love whales so effing much), consummation (Hooray - it’s a book!), and finally, the horrible/wonderful realization that the project is over, the relationship has run its course, and it’s now time to move onto a new idea (Whales were a bit too concrete. What if I wrote a novel about ambiguity?)
As I’ve been adapting The Bullet Swallower for the screen, I find that I’m growing tired of being in this story world, a place I’ve inhabited now for 9 years. It feels a bit like a stale relationship. You want to break up but your friends keep telling you you’re such a cute couple, and so you tell yourself you’ll stay together for the prom photos, graduation at the latest, and dump him the first day of summer vacation.
But I’m close to being done with the script and I’m getting ready to settle into a new project. But which one? I have 40 pages of a new novel started, middling first drafts of 4 or 5 short stories, solid ideas for 7 other novels or short story collections, and 4 or 5 ideas for screenplays or plays. My imagination cup runneth over.
Do I jump straight into a new long-term relationship with a new novel? Or do I play the field for a while with some short stories - low commitment hookups that could last a week or a month, depending? Or do I try multitasking, the open marriage of work styles? Could I juggle relationships with two projects at once? Is it folly to believe my heart and mind could be so divided? And by splitting myself between two major projects, would I be giving each one short shrift, foreclosing true intimacy, true connection with a new novel because I’d always have a foot planted in some other world?
This has been on my mind lately because someone recently suggested that I might crave the validation of finishing projects, that I can actually get addicted to the brief high of seeing a job completed.
This was mind-blowing to me, and seemed deadly accurate. In addition to writing I frequently have 5 or 6 knitting and crochet projects going at any given time. And I’m always halfway through reading several books. I load myself up with projects, as many as I can dream up. I have so much creativity, and so much desire to channel it, that it sometimes feels oppressive, like I’ll never live long enough to get everything done. That this could all be some scheme my brain cooked up in order to get a dopamine hit off of knitting another sweater or scratching another novel off my TBR list, makes a lot of sense. My brain is wily. And I need a lot of validation.
Despite my possible addiction to completing tasks, and despite the desire to get the quick fix of writing a brief little thing and knowing it’s done, I think in the end I’m just a long-term monogamy-type gal. I think it’s hard to find an idea that really gets your blood pumping, that makes you want to get out of bed and get back to work, so that when I find a good one, my inclination is to latch on and lock it down. Ride it through. Stick with it when things inevitably get rough. And oh, they will.
I may not ever publish as many books as Alice Hoffman, but I will love with my whole heart every book that I write. And that feels like enough.
xoxo,
Elizabeth
I've always been in awe of people who can write different WIPS at the same time, and be able to jump in without being confused, or accidentally mixing parts of them up. I'm nervous that if I try to do that, I'll end up hyper fixating on the new project and accidentally forget about the other. So I find it easier to simply write down the ideas and set them aside for later.