Round Robin
Where She Stops, Nobody Knows
Earlier this week I wrote about how to turn yourself into an idea machine. Cyborgify yourself. It’s the way of the future. Dream of electric sheep.
Today I am writing about the natural conclusion of becoming an idea machine, which is, you wind up with more great story concepts than you can actually, reasonably write. Like I mentioned on Tuesday, when I began Shelf Life it was with a robust list of eighty-something topics, but I have now written approximately 170 of these and I have another 70 topics on my list, meaning, for every topic on that original list I used, I came up with two more. That follows in my fiction writing as well. It seems like for every concept I take out of the idea bucket to work on, I put at least two more in.
That’s why I have complete and incomplete manuscripts coming out my ears and several spreadsheets to try to keep track of where they all are and what they’re all doing (generating form rejections, mostly).
Slight change of topic: Consider Buridan’s ass. Buridan’s ass is a thought experiment named after French philosopher Jean Buridan, who supposed that if an ass were placed precisely halfway between two perfectly identical bales of hay, the ass would be unable to choose which hay to walk to and would eventually perish of starvation.
Anyone who has ever met an animal knows that in real life the ass would choose one at random to eat first and then immediately eat the other one and give itself a stomachache.
They could have called this “Buridan’s donkey” but no.
Cool, so anyway, because it’s unprofessional to use swear words in front of your clients, therapists who treat patients with ADHD (including yours truly) call this “decision paralysis.” Decision paralysis occurs when a person (with or without ADHD, this can happen to anyone, but it’s very common in those of us who have ADHD) has too many options, or any number of too-equivalent options, before them and cannot decide on one over any other, and so decides on a completely different thing (not one of the presented options), or makes no choice at all and goes off to do something else.
Decision paralysis is closely related to analysis paralysis, which is the act of overthinking something to the extreme that you never actually move forward with whatever it was you were analyzing. Related, but not the same thing. If you’ve been outlining your manuscript for 18 months without starting your draft, you may have some analysis paralysis going on. You might be overthinking it.
Today I’m mainly talking about decision paralysis; analysis paralysis we can talk about another day.
Decision paralysis in my writing activities is a big problem for me because when I sit down to work on writing activities I have too many options, and many of those options are too equivalent (that is, none of them is noticeably more or less appealing than any other). Right now, I have:
Four short stories out on submission (some with multiple markets), so I have to reconsider, revise if needed, research new markets, and resubmit them every time they reject.
Three manuscripts completed but in some stage of feedback and revision, so I have to collate the feedback I’ve received and work on revising those.
Six short stories with drafts started; all of these just need to be finished so they can move on to the next step.
Several other story ideas that are nagging me to let them jump the queue of above materials and start working on them (rude).
Sometimes this makes me wish to go back to the time before I had ideas cropping up every which way and I just thought of something from time to time and would wait (months sometimes) for that to happen and then write a bit and then go back to waiting for inspiration to strike. This is a great way to write one short story a year.
I would say it’s always better to have more ideas than you know what to do with, because you’ll never find yourself empty handed with nothing to work on, but then I saw an Insta post from my favorite author, Laini Taylor, where she said she had reached an age and amassed a quantity of ideas where she realized that, accounting for both those factors, there were stories she wanted to tell but she would not live long enough to tell all of them.
We all need to get a move on. The one thing nobody has enough of is time, and nobody can get more of it.
I am an excellent case study on decision paralysis because:
I am highly prone to falling prey to it (and overthinking is another of my favorite things);
I have ADHD, which makes me extra susceptible; and
I have a ton of writing projects in the works.
My writing friend Kat Crighton, who is also my regular friend, is like me—or perhaps it’s me who’s like them—in that they always have a whole bunch of stories in the works: longform, shortform, sci fi, fantasy, drafting, revising, and so on. So I asked them, what do you do when you have multiple, equally good story ideas and you don’t know what to run with? They told me their strategy, which I share here: A modified Pomodoro Technique–style round-robin approach, wherein they work on one idea for an hour and then move on to the next, in order, until one of the ideas grabs them.
Okay, so, a few definitions. “The Pomodoro Technique” is a time-management strategy wherein you set a timer for 25 minutes and make yourself work on one thing with no distractions (no checking email, no scrolling twitter) until the timer goes off; then you take a 5 minute break; and then you launch into another 25-minute sprint. My Birdcage Writing Group does pomodoros: Heads-down writing sprint for 25 minutes followed by a 5-minute check in as a group; it’s very productive. The Pomodoro Technique gets its name from the little kitchen timers that are shaped like a tomato (pomodoro is Italian for tomato).
“Round robin” I am here using to mean going through a list in order and returning to the beginning of the list to repeat the cycle again; not in the tournament sense where every entrant plays against every other entrant.
Kat suggested I try this method and I am pleased to say it helped me knock out my decision paralysis. I found it very soothing for my anxiety to remind myself that all the projects would get a turn over the course of a week or a couple weeks. Another pleasant discovery as I undertook this process—as Kat predicted might happen—is that starting work on the project selected randomly to go first uncovered my true feelings toward the pile of projects. As soon as I started work I felt a sense of “okay, only three other things to get through before I get to the one I’m really interested in” and—aha!—now I know they weren’t really equals in my heart after all.
For this process, you will need a timer but that’s almost not even worth saying. Everyone has a timer, probably multiple types of timer, close at hand at all times. Your smartphone can do this. For my own writing and other Pomodoro Technique–ing work, I have this little visual analog timer I got from Amazon (that is not an affiliate link). I like it for this because as the time ticks down, the red slice of the clock shrinks and you can glance and very rapidly get a sense of time remaining without having to actually read the numbers on the face. It also beeps when the clock runs out, which gets my attention if I’m really focused. If you are using an hourglass, beware, cause they don’t beep or make noise. But your cell phone, or a kitchen timer, or any other kind of timer would work well for this.
A pomodoro interval is 25 minutes on, 5 minutes off, but you can do any interval that makes sense to you—just make sure you build in a short break between sprints and actually take the break. When I’m on a tear, that timer goes off and I sometimes am irritated that it distracted me, but this is actually good. Cutting myself off and rerouting my brain for a couple of minutes before setting it back on task helps me stay productive longer. Use your break interval to mindlessly scroll Twitter, or buy some garbage on Amazon, or answer your texts, or whatever. When I write with friends in person or virtually, we start the session by telling each other what we’re going to be working on and then we use the brief breaks to stand up, stretch, and check in to see how everyone is doing on their project.
Next you need some distraction-free time and space, at least to the extent that you can get free of distractions, and that’s different for everyone. For me, my big distractions are digital temptations and people interrupting me (there’s overlap there, too). Because I’m in a household with no children, it’s pretty easy for me to stop the in-person people distractions (I just ask my partner to give me a few hours uninterrupted). I also turn my phone to silent and close messaging applications on the computer I’m using (Facebook Messenger, Discord, Twitter DMs, and so on).
If you’re writing with pen and paper, you can probably skip this next step: Dialing down the digital temptations. It helps me to keep my Windows desktop clean so I if I happen to see the desktop I don’t get distracted by seeing an icon and then thinking, “Oh right, I was supposed to add Denise’s phone number to my address book let me just do that real quick.” Oops. I try to keep my desktop filed and neat.
Next, I close down all the applications that are likely to distract me and try to keep open only the ones I need for writing. I need my word processing suite (for me that’s Google Docs in a web browser), and I might need access to the Evernote notebook where I keep all my writing notes. I close down everything else. In my browser I try to have as few tabs open as possible: The document I’m writing in, the Google Drive tab, and maybe a tab for the dictionary or thesaurus. I make myself promise not to open additional tabs (I do not always keep this promise).
Now I just need my list of projects in the order I’m going to work on them. Depending on my mood, I might put everything on the list (revisions, drafts, submissions packaging, and so on) or I might put just one type of thing (just first drafts, for example). To go in a round-robin fashion, the list needs to be in a fixed order. It can either be in random order or it can be in some kind of logical order.
If you’re going with a random order, just write them down and then shuffle them somehow (you could assign each one a number and then use a random sequence generator like this one. I suggest you use a true randomizer instead of going by “the order I thought of them in,” because you might get great insight when the randomizer shuffles the first thing on your list down to number seven and you get deeply disappointed.
A thing I think I might try but have not done yet is put a jar on my desk and every time I think up a story idea I’ll write its title on a little slip of paper and fold it and drop it in there so I can pull things out of the jar at random to work on. I can refold the slip and throw it back in the jar if I quit before I finish the task, or have the satisfaction of ripping the slip into tiny shreds and then ceremonially burning them when I finish a task. Like I said, I have not tried this yet so I can’t say how well it’ll work. Don’t set your office on fire, though, or if you do, don’t hold me liable.
If you want to make your list in logical order, here are some suggestions for how to do that:
Snowball Method—put them in order from “least amount of work needed to finish” to “most amount of work needed to finish.” I always give new projects a target word count when I start them and record the current word count, so for me this is easy as getting the difference between current and target and ordering them from least to greatest (I actually can sort on that right in my tracking sheet).
Alpha by Title—can’t go wrong with good old alphabetical order. Pro tip: Don’t put all the titles that start with “the” under T.
Chronologic—you can put your list in order from newest to oldest (or oldest to newest) based on when you started the project or when you worked on it last.
Deadline Method—if any of your projects are intended for specific avenues that open and close—for instance, if you want to finish a novel in time to query an agent who is opening for queries in July, or you want to submit a short story to a themed magazine issue that closes for subs in three weeks, or your beta readers are waiting on a specific thing—then you can impose some order on your list this way. This is a good method to combine with another method in this list—for instance, put your deadline items first and then all non-deadline items in alpha or snowball order.
Once you’ve got your list order set in stone, get your first document open in front of you and set your timer and go. When the timer goes off signaling the end of your work on this project and a quick break before you take a turn with the next one, one of two things will happen:
You’ll be ready—maybe more than ready—to move on to something else, or
You’ll find you want to stick with the thing you were writing and just keep going on that.
If the latter happens? Give yourself another sprint with it, and another, till you’re stuck or out of motivation, or till it’s done. Either way, you beat decision paralysis and got some writing done.
Hey if you do the jar thing let me know how it turns out. I’m going to save the next pasta sauce jar I open to use for this. Hopefully a red sauce. Keep it all in the pomodoro family.
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