Kind of All Over the Place

It's really, really difficult not to want to do everything. And I mean everything. It starts small. Normally you write nonfiction stories. Maybe you're working on your novel. An autobiography. You know, the kind of thing you write. Then you read this awesome fiction story, get an idea, open a file and start making up a world.

Then it snowballs.

You and your friends watch Transformers and you start to think about what you would do if you wrote a sci-fi, and you start to like the idea. You go home to think about it. Grab your copy of Watchmen to pass a few minutes and start thinking about writing comics. Putting it down you flip on the TV. Script writing. Everything looks good!

I know that, fudging a few details, that pretty much describes me anyway. I get so worked up about all of these things. Fantasy, sci-fi, lit-fic, light-fic, non-fic, erotica, script writing, comics, children's books, choose your own adventure, video game scripting…

It goes on and on like that. I just want to get into it because I like it all. And if I like it, and it can be written, it kills me not to try. And I'm sure I will try. I know I will. I just can't do it now. I think there's something to be said for pacing. Getting to things by steps. Starting small and building big. More than that, though, I think it's just sound strategy if you're serious about what you're doing.

And part of it comes down to marketability. People won’t be willing to ask you for work if they don’t know what kind of work you do. There is a good reason that so many authors only writ sci-fi, romance, non-fiction, etc., and it’s not usually because they just don’t want to do anything else. It’s because they get published the most often by being consistent. It’s the same idea behind a novel writer who gets huge advances for every novel, suddenly writing a children’s book and finding the advance is a mere shadow of what they usually get.

And when you’re just starting out it is especially important. You need more than anything to build a portfolio that somebody will be able to look at and see that they can sell you. And since people usually sell to a genre or a niche rather than a variety of things, you can’t get picked up if you don’t fit their model.

So you have to start with one or two things and stick to them. The real benefit of this is that as long as you’re only doing one or two things, you should get much better at them than if you were doing a bunch of things. And that will again increase your chances of getting picked up or published. Once you’re settled in. Once people know what you have to give. Then fulfill your creative fantasies. But keep your priorities first.

Although I do really want to try writing a comic…