Returning to an old manuscript
and juggling multiple projects at once
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Dear Kate,
When I finish a draft of a big project and gotten it back from beta readers, I’ve often not looked at it for a while in a deliberate attempt to get some distance. But how can I get back into the mindset of the book, especially since I’ve spent my “distance” engrossing myself in new material? I guess a related question is how do you best draft a thing, plot a different thing, and edit yet another different thing at the same time? Are there best practices for balancing it all?
— I’m back… Now What?
Dear I’m Back… Now What,
I’m so glad you’re back, and ready to dive back into your work! I’m going to take your question in two chunks, because I think there are two interrelated but still kind of different things going on here: 1. How to return to a project after time away, and 2. How to juggle multiple projects at once.
Returning to a Project
You’ve written a draft. Revised it. Worked your heart out. Sent it off to other readers. You knew—because you read this Substack!—that there are important benefits to taking a step back from your work, giving it time to marinate, and seeing what happens when you return to the page with fresh eyes.
But maybe you got some feedback that felt tricky to digest, and you weren’t sure what to do with it. Maybe you panicked a little??? Maybe it got hard to sit back down with all those notes and think through What Comes Next. Maybe life things happened, as life is wont to do, and more time passed—a little more time than you’d meant—and then more time, and then…
You get the idea.
The good thing about your work is that it’s always there for you to come back to. Your project isn’t one of those tenuous friendships, where if you start to drift away then it becomes too awkward to reach out again. Your manuscript is always happy to hear from you!! No matter how long it’s been, it’s never too late to dust it off and see what it has to say.
I think the key to returning to a project is to remove the pressure from your first meeting. You aren’t marrying your manuscript. You aren’t even on a date. This is a thirty-minute coffee. It’s an information session, designed for you to get reaquainted with your project without any judgement attached. Do you here that? NO JUDGMENT!
Put your editor’s pen away. Tell your inner critic to can it. The first step is to sit down and reread your work, somewhat quickly, and just see what’s going on. No notes! You’ll have plenty of time to edit later, but you can’t start editing something if you haven’t read it start to finish and reminded yourself of the basic shape of the piece and what you want it to do. Will you have things you want to change? Probably! Will you find passages you’d forgotten about, that are way better than you’d thought?? I guarangoddamntee it.
Immerse yourself in rereading your manuscript without looking to make any changes. Let it sit for a few days, maybe a week—but not too much more than that, okay? And then read it again. This time, you can start taking some notes and getting a sense of what you might want to change. I’ve written elsewhere about how to revise, and that might be useful as you get deeper into your edits. (See How to Revise and The Revision Checklist and maybe even Rewrite Your Book.) But don’t jump straight into editing mode before giving yourself a chance to read everything through. Sometimes the hardest step is just opening the document and getting started, but you can’t get anywhere without doing that first.
As you return to your work after a long haitus, it’s important to keep up enough momentum that you don’t keep losing touch with your project and having to re-start the process from the beginning. Of course if that happens, you can go right back into re-reading and re-getting to know your work. Like I said, it’s not going anywhere! But it will be more meaningful and productive to devote even 10 minutes a day to your book, say, rather than think “I’ll wait until I have more time” and every day passes without having looked at your manuscript at all. If you work in fits and spurts, then every time you finally sit down again, you have to figure out where you left off and get yourself back into the mindset. Whereas if you can maintain even just a little bit of regular contact with your manuscript at this stage, you’ll able to use your writing time to pick up where you left off and keep right on going.
How to Balance Multiple Projects
I think it can be great to spend time away from one project by becoming engrossed in something else. Writing will make you a better writer, no matter what the project is, so I bet there will be overlap where gains from one manuscript help you problem solve and make progress in a different manuscript. And the novelty of a new piece can help you have that fresh-eyed experience when returning to something that started to get too familiar and stale.
But if you’re trying to make active progress on multiple projects (rather than using one project as a break from the another), then the advice is the same for getting back into a project after a long time away. You want to maintain enough contact with each project that you aren’t having to start from scratch or reinvent the wheel every time you sit down to work on something.
Can you develop a schedule to keep track of what you’re working on when? It could be that one day is for X and one day is for Y or Z, and you continue to cycle through, making progress on each. Or it could be that a week or a month is for X and then you’ll switch to Y. I’ve found that for me, personally, I do better chunkng my time into larger segments, so I’ll try to get to a satisfactory stopping place in one project, and then work on something else while I’m letting that first piece rest, and then I’ll come back to that piece once I’ve hit a satisfactory stopping place on that second project. You may like to have more projects going on at once, which is fine! It also depends on the size of the projects we’re talking about (I can work on a novel and a short story simultaneously, for example, but I can’t write two novels at once or my head would explode). The point is to make ***intentional choices*** about where your time is going, versus getting pulled away from one piece because there’s something shiny and new, and then feeling guilty or losing touch with the old piece and letting it fall away when you also kinda wish you were still working on it.
Anything with a deadline comes first. Anything you’re getting paid for has to be prioritized, too. Beyond that, if you feel a tug in your gut that wants to work on something, work on it! But if you’re using other projects to avoid the hard parts of edits (see: getting back into a manuscript after receiving feedback from beta readers), it might be time to put the other projects aside for a bit, sit down with your old manuscript, give it a reread, and re-commit to doing the work.
As far as practical suggestions for balancing multiple projects:
a schedule for what you work on when
maintain separate notebooks and separate documents, so the projects don’t get jumbled
triage the projects based on their priority
devote your sharper times of day to the harder and/or more important projects. If you’re a morning person, start your day with a chunk of writing, instead of checking emails first thing! If you get a boost at night, do the smaller projects first and save your best writing time for then.
be realistic. I know, easier said than done. But there’s only so much I, personally, can work on at once without feeling like I’m not giving my best work anywhere, and I’ve learned to have to scale back. I can do one project a day, and I can juggle two things, max—adding a third big project to my plate just doesn’t work. You may be different! But if something isn’t working, there isn’t always a productivity hack or a piece of advice that will get you out of it. Sometimes, there’s only so much we can do at once!
work on different parts of different projects. Writing brain is different from research brain is different from developmental editing brain is different from fine-tuning brain. See if working on different stages of different projects helps you keep them compartmenatlized and gives you more mental space to devote to each piece.
Sometimes, you just have to try a bunch of different things to see what works best for you. You don’t have to find The Answer — you just have to start somewhere. Read over your old project, congratulate yourself for writing it, and get excited to see what new discoveries you might make.
Keep going!
Kate