The Art of Writing More than One Thing at Once

Hi! Happy almost Thanksgiving. First, I’ll do another Office Hours post for paid subscribers. Send me your questions in the comments here, or DM me! This is your chance to ask anything that’s on your mind about writing. And today, a mini Office Hours: Last week, a reader wrote to ask how I handle working on multiple projects at once, and I’ve been thinking about the question because the slightly strange truth is that I almost always am—whether I like it or not. I think of this as keeping afloat in time’s onrush by playing around with it….

RIght now I’m writing long poems and a short memoir. And there are the essays and criticism I take on because they feel part of my public life (pieces for the Times, the Atlantic, various magazines), and then there are the books, the long-form explorations that require immersion, continuity, and an interior quiet I don’t always have in my day to day life or duing my semester teaching.

And now, of course, there are my children—at 7 and 9, they are another kind of project, though calling them that feels insufficient to the reality of two full people whose needs and imaginations shape the texture of my days. I spend so much time with them in ways no calendar captures. I don’t want to count or measure that time, and yet it inevitably rearranges the rest of my time, and can, at times, leave me feeling frustrated that I haven’t had access to the leisure of a deeper kind of writing. Which is why I completely changed my writing process and time management this fall…with good results.

Below the fold, a bit about how and why it can be good to take breaks on projects with other projects, and a prompt for working with your own divided attention.