Multiple projects at once
I always have at least two things that I’m writing. One is the primary thing, the thing I set out to work on every morning. The other one (or two or three) is a backup.
This morning was a good example of why I like working this way. Sometimes I wake up and my brain doesn’t want to edit. It can’t edit. To rewrite something (where I’m at now with my primary script), I need to be able to focus and think critically. No way that was happening this morning. I went off caffeine completely about 4 days ago and my brain is not happy about it. My brain is foggy. My brain wants to binge-watch Seinfeld and it does not want to think critically about anything.
This hazy state is bad for rewriting but it’s fine for brainstorming. It’s actually better I think. It’s less critical and more open to new ideas. So I opened up a secondary project, which is for a script that I haven’t started in earnest yet. It’s just a few pages of notes that I’ve collected as ideas come into my head. And I found that I was able to come to a completely awesome realization that I was going the wrong way with the script and I found a completely awesome and new way to go with it, which I sort of vomited out ideas for for about an hour, long enough to make me feel OK about my writing for the day.