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Do you ever get your stories confused when you're writing multiple at once? Do your characters start to sound alike?
How do you split your time between your books?
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This is another good question. These are all good questions, really, but this is certainly another one I had to stop and think about!
For context if anyone's arriving at this chapter without reading previous ones, I write best when I have multiple works-in-progress (WIPs) at once. Two is my minimum, and 3-4 is ideal. I've juggled up to seven, arguably nine. And I've never had any problem keeping them distinct. I think there are a few things that make it work, and it's probably a combination of all of them, in no particular order? But the overall answer is this: All my WIPs end up so different from one another, they're not actually hard to differentiate.
Putting the caveats first, though, there is an impact here from how my brain works. I have a good memory for book details—be that my characters' eye colours, or that loose plot thread from chapter seven of WIP#5 that I need to remember to tie in just before the midpoint. There's also a minor impact from how I split my time. I'm not usually jumping back and forth between several WIPs same-day simultaneously. Usually. At least a 55% majority of the time. Instead, I write one thing for a few days or weeks before switching, which gives me more time to spend buried in one plot, writing style, and set of character voices before I get bored and jump ship. I also make a habit of re-reading a book start to finish if I've left it for a while, before continuing to write.
With that said, slow switching doesn't hold for the other 45% of my time, which I spend in... predictably, chaos. At the end of a long day of writing one thing, I sometimes reward (yes, reward) myself by switching WIPs. There was a month in early 2021 when I put words down on 1-3 different books a day, and switched books daily. That was a little extreme, but it was also wildly productive, and led me to discover a few more things about my writing process.
One of those things is the type of characters and character voices I gravitate towards. I love characters with highly distinct or "extreme" personalities, and I love strong voices. I find them fun, rewarding, and easy to roleplay mentally, which is how I tend to write character voice in general. It also makes them easier to keep distinct. Switching books becomes less an exercise in remembering what subtle quirks and vocal tics I marked down for MC1 vs. MC2, and more a matter of jettisoning one whole worldview, social system, and (pardon my French) shitstorm of flaws and issues in favor of another. At that point, character voice comes naturally as part of the package deal.
Speaking of worldview and social systems, genre and subgenre variety also helps. So does variety in target age, book tone, book length or complexity, setting, subject matter, POV, and written tense, all of which I fly freely between when I'm writing different books. POV-tense combinations are especially relevant. I've broken my brain over them enough times that they're now second nature, and they nail another hook to the wall in the grand project of supporting my multi-WIP endeavors. Just to put this in perspective, the seven WIPs I had in April 2021 included:
❖ A Middlegrade Fantasy novella (3rd person, past tense)
❖ A YA Cosmic Horror novella (1st person, past tense)
❖ An NA Fantasy / Adventure novella (3rd person, past tense)
❖ Book 1 of a YA/NA Dark Fantasy / Horror trilogy (1st person, present tense)
❖ Book 6 of an MG/YA Dark Fantasy epic series (3rd person multi, past tense)
❖ An Adult Sci-Fi / Romance standalone chonk (1st person multi, present tense)
Concepts for those included an urban ghost problem, getting trapped at bug size, scientific study of a sentient planet, and a war between deep-sea merfolk. Some settings were contemporary, others Fantastical, others hybridized. Writing styles ranged from straightforward to deliberately elaborate, with four different POV/tense combinations—six if I count multi-POV as the unique beast it is. In short, switching books wasn't just switching voices. It was like switching brains. I happen to be good at those kinds of transitions, but when every WIP was so different from the rest, it actually made things easier.
This is part of why I switch for fun. I have a book for every mood. Incidentally, I have one for every commitment level, too.
Whenever I have multiple WIPs, I like them to fall into different effort categories. The first is a "fluff" project, easy to write and subject to no particular quality expectations. The second is the opposite: a high-energy, high-intensity book usually requiring lots of research and much closer attention. The third (and fourth, and fifth) are somewhere in between. The seven-book list above contains two fluff projects, two low-commitment books, two books with tougher subject matter that I put more thought into as I wrote, and one high-intensity meat grinder.
All this means that different WIPs occupy different proportions of my mental energy, so it's not like I'm killing myself trying to do everything on all of them. Some have plot holes I ignore, pacing issues I couldn't care less about, and barely get a line edit before posting. Others get a hundred hours of research, a beta-read, and meticulous scrutiny as I'm writing them. It's just more efficient that way, and I suspect it helps me balance more books.
The last thing I can think of is an editing trick I developed spontaneously over the mad months of February-March-April 2021. I read my own writing back to myself out loud while line-editing, and sometimes even while writing. And I mean actually read it back to myself, not run it through a text-to-speech engine: I'm looking for voice, not typos, especially when it comes to characters. It has also come to serve a valuable function in improving my writing flow, though that's also a form of voice.
The funniest thing about this habit is how I picked it up. One of the novellas mentioned above had both a powerful (and hilarious) character voice and a POV/tense combo I hadn't practiced in a while. Those factors between them triggered my brain to start reading out loud without any conscious decision—a brain-glitch, and one I still laugh about to this day. But it was effective. And before I even registered I was doing it, it had spread to the rest of my books. I'm doing it right now as I write this paragraph. I don't think I realized how drastic the shift had become until I started finishing update days with a sore throat, the first casualty of the madness, and one that continues to plague me to this day whenever I post multiple books that have me line-editing as I go. #MultiDrafterProblems!
Anyway, I hope all of that at least semi-answered the question(s), and that if it didn't, that it was at least entertaining to read. And of course, I have more things I want to hear from any of you!
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Are you a one-book-at-a-time-please-and-thanks writer (or reader!), a ping-pong-ball-of-chaos writer (or reader), or something in between?
If you're a multi-drafter, what is your ideal WIP count, and why?
What's your top trick for keeping different / new books distinct from one another?
