Use Balance to Keep a Second Writing Project Going

I agree with Boice that having multiple projects going at the same time can be strangely relaxing. This is true for a number of reasons. First, it allows you to take a break from a project while still working on something. This is clever--working while taking breaks. But seriously, it is all too easy to get burned out from a topic, and to have a need to step back to get focus. Having a second or third project going allows you to do this without wasting any precious time.

But there is an even better reason for working on multiple things at once: it greatly increases your creativity. I have found that this is true both in creative writing and in scholarly work (yes, I do both). It is really interesting how blending two different things together can create interesting new ways of looking at things.

As an example, I was once working on a scholarly paper concerning 18th century editing practices of Shakespeare's work. At the same time I was doing research into Asser's biography of Alfred the Great. With the Shakespeare project, I was concerned how editing practices of the 18th century helped to maintain certain untrue myths about Shakespeare due to the way scholarship works (scholars quote older scholars who quote older scholars, and so on). The realizations I had come to concerning Shakespeare drifted over into my Alfred work, eventually leading to some interesting thoughts concerning 19th century medievalisms.

Sorry if all that is a bit wordy. The point is, I think it is very good and helpful if we can allow our different work to bleed into each other as much as possible. Being a very cross-disciplinary medievalist, I find this to create all sorts of opportunities if I mix what scholars in other fields are doing with our own scholarly traditions.