GUEST POST: Writers Write – Sometimes more than one book at a time

Hey guys! So, due to vast amounts of crazy-making finals studying/essay writing going on over here in Kat's corner of the world, I've got two lovely guest posts for this Sunday and next Sunday. I'll still be here for the Wednesday Inspirational posts :)

-Kat

~~~

Aya Tsintziras is the 22-year-old author of PRETTY BONES (James Lorimer, September 2011). She lives and writes in Toronto. Feel free to find her on twitter @ayatsintziras or visit her website, www.ayatsintziras.com. 

 I’m a very organized person. Usually I chalk this up to the fact that I’m a Virgo, but at the same time I doubt that astrology can really explain every single thing about you. In university, I made both daily and weekly and monthly to-do lists, constantly crossing out and adding. The other day, I was cleaning my bedroom and found about a million of those lists. I can’t believe how much studying went into my undergrad degree! Now that I’m out of school for the moment and am focusing on writing, I’m still making those lists. Case in point, today’s list, a Monday morning near the end of November: write this blog post, finish typing up changes to my WIP, meet friend for coffee at 12:30pm, send out e-mails. 

    

 It strikes me that writing this blog post and working on my current story are legitimate things for a to-do list, but meeting a friend or e-mailing is honestly just part of everyday life or something you put on your calendar. But it’s like I’m addicted to making lists. It’s like I need to be doing more! After four years of an absolutely crazy hectic schedule, where I was always really involved in artsy extra-curriculars, I’m thrilled to have some real time to work on my writing but seem to find myself in organizational withdrawal.

       

Which brings me to the point of this post’s topic: I think I have writing A.D.D. Since my first book was published, I’ve finished writing one novel, and have not finished three different ones. It’s not that I’m stuck or don’t like working on them. It’s just that they are all completely different, in plot and tone, and I’ve had a hard time deciding which one to focus on. 

        

I wonder if this has happened to other writers. I’m sure it has –  while we all travel different paths on the way to publication, we definitely all go through the same ups and downs, the same crazy emotions. I’ve read about authors who can’t write one book at a time, and so they write two at the same time, going back and forth. That would be creatively fulfilling, for sure, but I wonder if you would lose the magical feeling of becoming totally immersed in the story you’re working on, of just wanting to wake up the next day and enter that world again.

I think that I’m now a writer-in-transition. I was so used to writing around my school schedule, I was so used to writing first drafts during summer break and fixing those drafts during the winter holidays, that now that I have more time than I’ve ever had before to write, I’m still getting used to how amazing that feels. Because, I keep reminding myself, all that I’ve done for the past four years is dream of having real time to sit down and write. And now that I have it, it’s an adjustment, like everything else. 

But I’ve turned a corner this past week, and have revised the first half of a story that I wrote a year ago. Now I’m ready to focus on it and finish writing the book. It’s easy to second-guess yourself, to wonder if the story you’re writing is really worth it, if anyone is going to like it. I think my working on three different stories in the past year is a kind of fear. Really committing to a project is definitely scary. But writers write, and you can’t get anywhere without doing the work.

So if you’ve ever had a hard time deciding which story you want to tell, I totally sympathize! People always say it’s hard to write your second novel because the first one came so easily and was such a magical experience and you will never feel that way about a subsequent book again. This is partly true, in my opinion. But maybe we don’t want every book to be like the first one. Because when we wrote our first novels, we did it for the love of the work, and we were dreamers. But now that we’re past that first one, now that we’re writing something new, we probably have a book deal or a published book or at least an agent. And that means we have a chance to make the dreams come true. And that’s so much better, isn’t it?