Changing Style & Setting in Your Writing is Important
I think that what has been keeping me so productive over the last year or so is diversity. In the past there have been times when I wrote a lot of things that were very similar, and all that loomed on the horizon was more of the same. That’s a killing blow for creativity. I’ve written before about how difficult it is for series authors to maintain the level of intensity and tension they begin with over the span of many books.
In the last year, I’ve written the memoir of the first portion of a young medical student’s life, a sci-fi style thriller involving Neanderthals and big oil, a novella about a guy named Cletus J. Diggs who lives near the Great Dismal Swamp…begun a novelette set in the south seas, and another about a very different sort of serial killer. The diversity allows me to drop one thing and move on to the next and regain my enthusiasm as I shift gears. If all I had were a couple of similar projects, going from one to the other would just feel like more of the same, and wouldn’t help.
So I guess today’s thought is - diversity rocks. Maybe not TOO Much diversity. Soon Trish and I will be working on our Stargate Atlantis novel…tentatively titled “Brimstone & Salt,” and we’ll have one more place to turn away from it all and disappear into.
For now…back to novel revisions.
-DNW
