As a sign that I spent a lot of time working in the garden lately, last night I had gardening dreams. I dreamed that the people who brought over their tractor to till up our plot came back with lots and lots of starter plants. And I was torn between genuine gratitude (it was a lovely and thoughtful gesture) and wondering where to PUT it all because our garden may be big, but it’s full. Well, almost full; I have one row left to dedicate to all the varieties of herbs. And they brought me kittens. I couldn’t say no to starter plants or kittens, but now I had to sort them out and settle them somewhere.
It’s the same with ideas. Lately I’ve been trying to figure out what I should focus on after the two books on the table, and I have a bazillion ideas. Like the dream kittens and starter plants, book ideas need space and attention to grow and flourish. Hopefully my mind is well-mulched with all sorts of odd bits of information and experiences to give the book ideas fertile soil and let them establish strong roots. But the brain can only hold so much at a time, much like a garden row can only grow one thing at a time, after which it’s time to re-mulch and rotate. You can’t grow the same thing in the same place over and over. It exhausts the soil. And my brain has been somewhat exhausted by writing in one genre for some time.
The problem of how to rotate between genres has been a struggle for me for years now. You establish a name and people link expectations to it. Reader confusion is bad, and it takes time to establish a name in a genre, so the genre becomes the focus. This is especially problematic in romance, because if you want to build a name you have to write and release a lot of books close together. It might be possible to build a name in other genres with a book a year or every 18 months, but romance is more demanding. Tess Gerritsen blogged about how she changed genres from romance to suspense because she couldn’t write more than a book a year. This means that the time it takes to write in multiple genres makes it very difficult to keep up one genre while starting another, unless you are Paperback Writer.
I’ve tried to work around this by writing in different subgenres; I’ve done contemporary, historical fantasy, time travel, and paranormal/urban fantasy romances. I’m most at home in the paranormal/urban fantasy romance subgenre. But the problem remains; my garden is full and I have all these adorable kittens and tempting starter varieties that want my attention, too. And I need to find a way to rotate so that my brain is enriched instead of exhausted without losing the name I’ve built in one genre and without working 24 hours a day.
It’s a problem. But it’s a benign problem, in that all the things that want to come and grow in my mental garden are good ones and I want to somehow accommodate them all. And I think if I can figure it out, the rotation will bring good things to the established genre and a new one. If nothing else, the dream showed me that the possibilities are friendly and well-intentioned and really, who can say no to a kitten or a new kind of plant?
Develop a mental green house, to grow in pots those plants that won’t fit in your garden (perhaps a good place for the herbs). Or a story notebook, to write down the bare bones of the stories, so they’re still there when you get back to it. 🙂
Oh, I already do that. I have files and files of “to be written”. The real issue is figuring out if I have the mental time and energy to write in multiple genres at the same time. I used to do it before I was published, but I didn’t have kids back then. Looking at time demands, 2 books a year may be the max I can manage. Can you sustain a readership in one genre with a book a year and build a new readership at the same pace? Hmmm.