Secondary Projects

I trully believe one of the best cures for writer's block, without a loss of productivity, is having an established list of secondary projects. These projects should be completely seperate entities, from the project your trying to overcome. Thus, blogs, marketing, and other associated material will not help you overcome writing block on a project.

I recently wrote another nice Short Story, and mailed it today (with any luck I will be telling you who picked it up in a few weeks). But I've noticed that it has re-invigorated me towards working on my novel. Why does this happen? Why do our brains work like that?

I think one good thing, is when you write something else, or work on another project, you start to identify with that project, and maybe come up with good bits for it. And sometimes you might be able to apply those bits to another project. For instance, I found a really good chapter opener which I plan to modify and re-use in several other writing projects of mine. Thats just an example.

However working on another project should never take the place of exposing yourself to other media or works by other people. You need those alternate points of view, because frankly, you will never get them anywhere else. But projects do not reduce your productivity, because you can always use those for something. I find myself writing several short stories while working on the novel, and if only 25% of them get picked up, that might be close to a $1000 I wouldn't have otherwise. Plus, in the future, I still have the other shorts, and I can either self-publish them, or try to market them to other magazines.