Building Pyramids and Focus

I knew Father’s Day would be rough for me this year, so i didn’t push myself to do too much writing last week while the advertising was in full swing. Instead, I gave the week over to all sorts of catch-up projects and a bunch of forward planning in an effort to make good use of the anxiety-driven energy that set in.

One of those projects involved sitting down and implementing the Pyramid Technique for figuring out where my writing-and-publishing priorities are currently sitting.

This technique is borrowed from Dan Blank’s Be The Gateway, where he uses it to help clarify life priorities. This feels like a good time to do this, as I’m heading into the second half of the year with the distinct feeling that I’ve got a lot of planes in the air and nothing is really landing.

PHASE ONE: THE INITIAL PYRAMID

The process I’m using ran something like this:

• Grab a bunch of index cards
• Every writing and publishing project that has my attention gets a card, regardless of what stage it’s at, or where the results will be published. All that matters is that it’s on my mind mind, and getting a fraction of my attention or work time–and both publishing tasks (like creating Short Fiction Lab bundle) and writing tasks (like drafting a story, a novel, or a series bible) are taking up mental space.
• Scribble in deadlines for any projects that have them.
• Sit down at the table and start arranging the projects in a pyramid–the most important goes at the top, the least important at the bottom. Each row can only be one card larger than the row before it. The results will end up looking something like this.

That’s thirty-six projects that got dumped out of my head on the first past–writing stuff that I’m actively thinking about and jotting notes about in my journal. A mix of thesis projects, non-fiction drafts, stories, novellas, and novels, along with a spot for writing regular blog posts, which rated surprisingly high on my priority list.

PHASE TWO: WHAT’S IMPACTING N THOSE PRIORTIES?

After it was done, I sat down with my original pyramid and started making notes on the card. Little things like which genre/subgenre a project belonged to, or how it fit into my broader plans as a writer and publisher. This made it really clear how many of these projects were SF or fantasy, how many were related to building up a platform as an author, and how many were just stray ideas that didn’t really fit anywhere.

One trend that quickly emerged as I did this: Short Fiction Lab projects occupy fifteen of the initial pyramid (and there’s a small horde of less developed short stories that didn’t make it on because they’re in my inactive projects folder). One of those projects was way up at the top of the list, but the others made up the bottom row because they don’t become a priority until current Short Fiction Lab project is done.

In reality, these stories are all one project–create an ongoing Short Fiction Lab line. In my head, it behaves a lot more like a blog than a discrete writing project. As a result, I grouped all those projects into a stack that could be arranged into its own mini-pyramid of projects within the broader scheme.

Interestingly, the thing that feels like the highest priority on that Short Fiction Lab pyramid isn’t drafting a new story, but rather doing the production and design for a bundle and the associated changes to the back-matter of earlier books. I’ve been slowing on my current story draft ever since this idea came into view, and I started planning things and while I won’t swear that this is the reason, I’m tempted to try and clear that top project card and see if that changes my projects.

PHASE THREE: WHAT HAVE I MISSED?

Useful as that first braindump was, it’s also unreliable. Once you’re at thirty-six projects, it’s highly probable there’s stuff that’s slipped your mind. It’s even more likely that you’re spawning half-finished projects at a rate of knots, simply because unfinished projects beget more unfinished projects as subconscious looks for ways to complete the open loops.

So I walked away for twenty minutes, flicked through my various notebook projects, and came back to see what I’d missed.

Turns out, I was six projects short. Some of these were stuff ticking away in the background, like my write-one-page-a-day novel experiment that fell by the wayside last week. Some where projects I simply didn’t regard as writing, even if they really are–stuff like my newsletter, which didn’t make the list, even if blogging did.

So I wrote those things up and added them to the pyramid, rejigging the priority to include them in the spaces they currently occupy. The results looked something like this:

PHASE FOUR: WHERE ARE THE UNSOLVED PROBLEMS OR MISALIGNED PRIORITIES?

This process resulted in some surprising things. The biggest is that the top three spots on my priority pyramid aren’t occupied by fiction. The very top of the pyramid is my thesis draft right now–and it’s likely to stay that way until said draft is done, given the deadlines and the complexity of the work I’m doing there. That said, the second row was occupied by my author platform activities–writing regular blog content and producing the weekly newsletter.

This gives me something to ponder, right from the outset: are these really more important than getting new work written? Or publishing new projects that these platform activities are supposed to be supporting? I don’t have answers to this yet, but it’s a fair reflection of my process at the moment–the first half the week tends to be dominated by ticking platform activities off my whiteboard, even at the expense of other writing.

I get a lot of satisfaction from doing both of these projects, and they feed into some of my larger priorities as a person, but they may be taking up more time than I want them too at the moment.

The other useful datapoint came way down in the pyramid, in the section I start to think of as the Urban Fantasy Doldrums. I’m going to throw up another image here, as it makes things a little easier to explain:

That there, spread across four different priority lines, is a knot of four seperate Urban Fantasy projects with one or more novellas or novels in them. All of them are in seperate universes, unrelated to one another, all using Brisbane or South East Queensland as a default setting, and all having at least 70% of a draft and/or future stories partially drafted if I start digging into my files.

And all four were intended as open-ended series, rather than discrete blocks of narrative, even if the realities of process and publishing stopped that from happening.

As a writer, I’ve got no problem with this–they’re all interesting characters and interesting worlds. There’s stuff there that interests me on the writing front. I fret a little about the possibility of repeating myself, but that’s something I can hopefully work around.

As a publisher, running multiple unfinished series in the same sub-genre, from the same author, this makes for a considerably bigger headache. There’s enough similarity there that they’ll bleed into one-another’s branding, especially if they’re all gearing up and trying to get traction with readers at the same time.

The usual points of differentiation in this situation are usually works coming out from different publishers (if you’re an author), works in similar genres coming from out from multiple authors (if you’re a publisher). Both those options disappear if you’re an indie publisher, unless you’re taking on pen names (something I’ve considered) or working in clearly packaged narrative units like a trilogy or “season.”

Laying the cards out like this actually helps shape some decisions for me, because it pulls attention towards these kinds of issues I need to navigate. There’s a lot of Kieth Murphy books in the pyramid, courtesy of the rights reversion a few months back, but its possible my ambitions and future plans are slightly misplaced. Sure, I could be doing a lot more with the character and the series, but do I want to do that more than I want to kick off some of the books that I’m holding back–subconsciously or otherwise–in order to make that happen?

NEXT STEPS

The current pyramids are really a reflection of what is–the priorities tend to match the things that get the bulk of my attention now.

As anyone whose read You Don’t Want To Be Published knows, I’m a big advocate of knowing what you want from writing. The challenge is that we often want all sorts of different things, and the weighting we give those desires is subject to shifts over time.

Fortunately, part of the pyramid’s charm is that it’s easy to adjust in response to those shifts….and the same tool that helped me prioritise writing projects can also be used to clarify the weighting I give to my various writing and publishing goals.

All I need is a stack of index and a little time to sort them.