Juggling Multiple Stories and Characters

For the last year or so I've had four writing projects all in the works simultaneously. While the specific projects may change, I always try to do some work on all four stories each week while giving the majority of my time to whichever one I have the most ideas for. I've written before about how I manage my time in handling all these different projects, but I thought this time I’d talk about keeping all my stories and characters distinct and separate from each other in my head as I’m writing them.

To be honest, I usually don’t feel like this is a big problem for me, and I think the main reason is because I try to be sure that all of my stories are as different from each other as I can make them. While all my stories have common themes and may share my particular storytelling style, I try to make each story feel different from anything else that I’m working on. To me, each project has its own emotional color that tints and shades everything that I write in it.

One way I get that emotional color is by doing my best to make all my major characters distinctive. This is especially true of each POV character, since it is their personality, motivation, and thoughts that will have the greatest effect on the narrative. Sometimes, when I’m worried that my POV characters are getting too similar to each other, I try looking at some event in one of my stories and asking myself whether all my POV characters would react to it the same way. This allows me to examine not only my characters’ actions, but also their emotions and their motivations, and often reveals how little nuances can be used to define any character.

I also try to spend as much time and effort as possible on the world-building and backstory for each project. Of course, there are times when I’ll have plenty of ideas for just one of my stories, and it can be a real temptation to skimp on my other projects by using stereotypes, clichés, or even material lifted from another of my stories. My best answer to this is usually taking a break from the trouble-project for a little while, and sometimes even putting it away entirely if necessary. Usually though, I’m able to identify what it was about the story that intrigued me in the first place, and I’m able to focus on what makes it unique and special.

Of course, all of this would do me little good if I couldn't remember which details go with which story. This is especially difficult when each story takes place on a different world, each with its own rules, personalities, and locations. Luckily, I have a pretty good memory for story details, and whenever I think there’s something that might be too complex or detailed to remember, I write it down. In fact, when I give my world-building workshop to sci-fi and fantasy writers, I usually recommend that they create an encyclopedia file for each of their stories. This file should be filled with everything that is distinctive and unique about the story’s characters, setting, and history. Keeping this file as organized and up-to-date as possible has been my best solution to avoiding mistakenly mixing together any of my story elements.

While this may all sound like an awful lot of work, I feel like I’m not the only one who benefits from it. Just like authors, readers are sensitive to stories with too-similar details, and while I do want all my stories to have similar themes and be lots of fun, the last thing that I want is for all my books to sound exactly the same. It may take a lot of work to avoid that, but I think it’s definitely worth the extra time and effort.