Hi writers & readers,
On last week's episode of Yak Babies, my pals and I talked about our experiences with reading multiple books at once. I'm incapable of reading two novels at the same time without losing my way, but I can read a novel
along with a nonfiction book.
This got me to thinking if I take a similar approach to writing, and here's what I discovered: unlike with reading, I can't write fiction and nonfiction at the same time, at least not in-depth and/or lengthy projects.
For example, for about six months in 2017 I worked on a memoir. During that time, I didn't write a single word of fiction.
Another thing I realized: although I'm working on both a novel and a story collection, I can't do both at once. I'll work on the story collection for a few weeks straight, totally ignoring the novel; then something will make me return to the novel, and I'll stick with that for a few weeks and not touch any of the stories. And so on.
But I can work on whichever fiction project while also writing shorter nonfiction, such as reviews and essays.
In it, I want to learn about your experiences with multiple projects, both as a reader and as a writer. Can you read more than one book at a time? Can you work on more than one writing project at a time?
If you do work on multiple writing projects at once, how do you prevent them from bleeding into each other?
If you don't work on multiple projects at once, is it because of some negative past experiences that you're willing to talk about?
(Don't be afraid to engage in multiple comment threads at once!)
