Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Your Projects Inform Your Other Projects

Let me start by saying something painfully obvious: experience informs your future. In other words, the lessons you learn now will help you do better in future endeavors. Basically, when your boyfriend or girlfriend breaks up with you because of your poor hygiene, you learn to get nice and clean before your next date.

Again, I know this is obvious. You can't even understand what experience or knowledge is without also understanding that concept. But let me take it a step further: Your projects inform your other projects.

Say, for example, you are writing a story that has an antagonist who cares only about his pet schnauzer. This could be a weird character for you to work with. You may have to study dog ownership, the kinds of bonds people in real life can have, and you may also look into mental illnesses where people lack empathy towards humanity.

You have done your research and it has helped you make a believable character. And because you have done this research, you also now have a far better understanding and some new ideas for a protagonist character of a completely unrelated story you also want to write who happens to be an animal charmer.

You are now making a completely different character, one who is personable and energetic, but happens to share this quality of love for animals, and you know how to implement it because of the work you did with an unrelated project you're juggling.

This is yet another reason I like to have multiple projects I'm actively working on. They very often spur one another on, inspiring me with new ideas to play with that I would not have come up with if I hadn't have happened to be juggling them.

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