Organisation? A ‘Writing Projects’ List

Greetings fellow humans!

So I’m a little bit excited about this one, in part because I took a photo and I used glittery golden pen to jazz up my page. I actually didn’t do a great job (the gel pen wasn’t working properly so I’m blaming my tools), but I stuck it up on my wall in front of my desk because ‘look at my artistic skills’ *cough*. And James said it was nice, so there.

But anyway. This idea occurred to me while I was lying in bed in early January and realised my notebooks were jam-packed, my digital filing was all over the place, and my head was spinning with all the different projects I want to do and the random ideas and dreams that kept cropping up.

It was a mess. It kind of still is.

I didn’t help myself by pulling down a bunch of old notebooks from the shelf and deciding to flick through them. Though I produced a lot less back then (whenever ‘then’ was: high school maybe?), I still had at least one novel-length concept and a bunch of other random bits and pieces all over the place. If you’ve read my post ‘The Joy of (Re)Discovery’, you’ll know that I also discovered a galaxy I apparently created many years ago. Weird. So instead of solving any problems, I’d just added more words to the huge pile of my writing that I was trying to figure out. In part, that’s pretty exciting stuff, even if my writing was definitely a lot worse back then than it is now… But then I thought about all of things I want to do and how I had no idea which one to start. Or how to start whichever one I picked. Or do some of them link to some other ones? And if they do, how do they link and why?

As you can see, I was full of questions and didn’t really have much idea how to go about finding any answers.

So I decided to make myself a list: a list of my writing projects. I know that I have a lot of ideas (that e-card below is a little less funny when it seems true!) and I know that a great many of them are more germinal than anything else: they need a lot of development before they’re at any kind of useful stage. But I also found myself getting caught up in new thoughts rather than fleshing out and putting together the older ones.

So that’s where this ‘project list’ came into play. The plan is to have a list of written works that I want to complete, and go about doing them, either by prioritising according to a deadline (such as those pieces I’d like to enter into competitions or fun-sounding competitions that I want to put something together for) or by choosing one or two that I want to progressively work on over a period of time. Great plan: let’s just hope I manage to capably enact it. In the back of my mind remains the knowledge that my novel desperately needs my attention—I pinky-pinky promise that I will address that soon—and thus I’m not overly keen to take on any mammoth tasks. But I’m keen to put together some novellas, which I can only assume is what one does when one wants to tell a cool story but just doesn’t have the strength to write another damn novel. And theoretically at some stage, I’ll work on my grandfather’s biography (although at the moment it kind of sounds like he’s started writing it himself, so maybe I won’t have to do anything at all). I’m excited about trying my hand at a science-fiction novella, tentatively titled ‘An Android Named Aphrodite’ (I like alliteration), as well as a few other ideas. Good lord, there’s so much writing to do!

Probably better go and jot down some more ideas/plans/dreams/thoughts: what else do writers do? If anyone else has tried something similar, I’d love to hear about it!

–Ana.