WIPs (Work in Progress) progress faster if you mainly focus on one at a time. Of course, sometimes it’s not possible. Maybe you’re really stuck and need to get your head out of it for a while. Maybe (like me) you get so engrossed you absolutely need to switch gears for a little while to let your mind recover. It happens to all of us to varying degrees, and I’m hardly any different.
In those cases, I try to switch to something else. Obviously, I write short stories, and that’s proven to be a wonderful distraction to get my brain to reset. I’ve found with longer works, though, I can only switch gears if I fully commit to a new project. Earlier this year I wrote about 60% of one novel, but I desperately needed a break. That was part of why I started working on the WIP I just recently finished. The project I reached a milestone on is far from done, but that’s still about a book and a half in a year. That’s not too shabby.
That doesn’t really answer the question though, does it? A quick glance at my filing system shows dozens of short stories in various degrees of completion, a multitude of started novels that got sidetracked; notes on half a dozen different other worlds I’m building to flesh out someday are waiting patiently for their time to shine, as well as other projects that may or may never see the light of day. It’s a lot of words to say that my brain both likes WIPs and also gets distracted easily. My hobbies are the same way. Various shows, games, books all sit in various states of completion. Focusing on one thing at a time is something I’ve always struggled with, so my hobbies and written works reflect a lot of that. Others may feel different; I am not them, and can only speak for my own projects and sorting systems.
If I have all these partially completed projects, how do I pick one to work on? I choose by what draws me in the most. For short stories, if I get stuck or lose interest, I’ll switch to something else, even mid-sentence, because those are minor projects. For bigger projects, however, it’s harder. Part of what factors in is how much I have to do versus how much work I’ve put into them already. Part of it is too what really appeals to me at the moment. In some ways, the system I use to pick projects is chaotic, a force of nature on its own. I can follow a logical path until a point, but eventually emotions take over, and I wind up picking what draws me in the most.