Hello to my new subscribers, and welcome to the free Friday writing prompts! Let’s get right down to business.
Greetings, writers—
Are you the sort of person who works on multiple writing projects at the same time, or are you a creative monogamist?
I’ve written two books at once under deadlines1, but when left to my own devices—i.e., when no one’s waiting for whatever it is I’m writing—I struggle with working seriously on more than one book/screenplay/story in any given period. I’ll write the book with the due date while merely making little notes about all the other projects and fantasizing how fun it’ll be to work on them whenever I get a chance (we define “fun” loosely around here).
But plenty of people can and do engage in several projects simultaneously and swear by it. A friend of mine used to talk about how great it was to have the book she was supposed to be writing and then another, secret book-in-progress that she could use to cheat on the first book (her phrase, not mine).
“Have more than one idea on the go at any one time,” says Geoff Dyer, author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Out of Sheer Rage, and numerous other books. “If it’s a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It’s only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I’m bunking off from something.”
“Go to where the heat is,” Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies; Arcadia, etc.) urges. Meaning, keep a bunch of books or stories or poems swirling around at once, and write the one that seems to want you most.
Mega-bestselling author James Patterson always has over a dozen different projects going (when I’m lucky, one of these is with me), and there’s no way that Joyce Carol Oates2 writes only one book at a time; there are simply too many of hers out there. Obviously their different projects feed and enrich each other, or else they wouldn’t be doing things that way.
Meanwhile I’m plodding along, shifting slowly and reluctantly from one book to another like a draft horse switching from plowing a bean field to pulling a hay wagon. If anyone has any strategies for meaningfully working on more than one thing at once, I’m all ears. I think it’d be fun (that word again) to be an Arabian or a Thoroughbred rather than a Clydesdale.
(Writing this Substack is an exception—it’s easy to write this on a Friday morning and switch to fiction in the afternoon. But then again, maybe that’s because there’s a deadline.)
So today, here are four different writing prompts that come from the same quote. I encourage you to try at least two in a single writing session, moving back and forth between them. Does this spark any new kind of creativity—or does it just make you nuts? LMK.
In a 1888 letter to publisher Aleksey Suvorin, Anton Chekhov wrote the following:
One has to write what one sees, what one feels, truthfully, sincerely. I am often asked what it was that I was wanting to say in this or that story. To these questions I never have any answer. There is nothing I want to say. My concern is to write, not to teach! And I can write about anything you like. [...] Tell me to write about this bottle, and I will give you a story entitled “The Bottle.” Living truthful images generate thought, but thought cannot create an image.
Write a story, poem, or free- write called “The Bottle.” (It’s a noun with a lot of associations, isn’t it?) If you’re already at work on a larger project, see if you can incorporate a scene with a bottle into it.
Write 200 words that begin with the phrase “There is nothing I want to say.”
Write what you see right now.
Consider, in writing, whether or not you agree with Mr. Chekhov. Can thought create an image? Does one have to write what one feels truthfully, sincerely?
I tried to alternate weeks—book A for one week, book B for the next. Failing that, I tried to at least keep them to separate days.
“In the midst of writing a novel, Oates sometimes felt so powerful—as if singled out—that she was startled when she passed store windows and saw her small, ordinary reflection. She made use of any stretch of free time, plotting the end of a novel while she was getting a cavity filled, or writing in the car on the way to book events. If her writing was going well, she didn’t want to stop (‘one image, pursued, exhausted, then begets another’), and if it was going badly she also didn’t want to stop, because she needed to ‘get through the blockade, or around it, over it under it, any direction!—any direction, in order to live.’” (From the New Yorker)
Oh wow, this is fascinating! I'm a nonfiction writer, and I do not have the imaginative capacity to hold multiple fictional stories in my head. Instead, I like to switch mediums and pick up my camera when I feel like sneaking away from my main thing. I actually feel like my main nonfiction writing squeeze needs some time away from ME sometimes; it feels more fresh and exciting when I've gone off and shot footage or made a bunch of photographs. I "see" the writing project in a new way. (I wish I understood why.) But then when I'm on a very tight deadline, it's one thing only until it's done.