Focus

[mrissa]

I said there'd be a more substantive entry later; I suppose I didn't specify later today. Which is good, because this probably won't be it. I've had a good day in many details -- lunch, dinner, time with markgritter vegetating on the couch, making a pan of brownies -- but I've also had some really intense dizzy spells. Still, dizzy spells beats dizzy days any time.

For a long time, I've been meaning to say that I think focus can be overrated. We're a culture of specialists. "That's not my field" is way too many people's mantra. I sometimes joke (half-joke, at least) that I write spec fic so I never again have to answer the question, "What on earth could you possibly want to know that for?" A really alarming range of stuff can be classified as, "Maybe for a story sometime." And I love that. It's a really good thing. It's good for me internally, and I think it's also good to have people around who can do that.

But part of my being able to say this is that focus has never been a long-term problem for me. I've never had difficulty settling in and doing one thing -- in this case writing -- long enough for it to do some good. For awhile I was able to split hyperfocus into physics, writing, and the broad category of "important people in my life"; I had to drop physics, but there wasn't really any question that it was the right choice for me, either at the time or in retrospect.

Still, every once in awhile I think it might be appealing to have just one project at a time. Just one thing on my mind. Just one set of characters clamoring to have their say. Not having frogs leaping over dinosaur bones and smack into the face of sea giantesses.

It's not going to happen, though, so I might as well enjoy watching them jump.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think I've had something of a mental shift in regards to my fiction, away from thinking of any one thing as flashy. I mean, in some regards I want them all to be flashy, the book that someone rereads obsessively, the short story that makes their whole world ring like a bell. But in other regards, it's much healthier for me to want to sell a bunch of interesting short stories on a bunch of interesting topics to a bunch of interesting places than to fixate on THAT ONE MARKET taking THAT ONE STORY. Does it mean that each story shouldn't be as good as I can make it? Of course not. But it's not a bad thing to tell more than one story, or at least to tell a story more than one way.