Writing a novel (or many) as a multipotentialite

 You are going to have dozens of ideas, and they are all excellent. They are all worth writing.

But - you can't choose. You can't focus, you can't commit to only one, you can't finish before the other ideas come rushing in and stealing your attention.

You don't have to. 

What? But... but everyone says you have to choose and focus and commit, to be able to write a novel!

Not everyone. I don't. And I should know.

I have been writing since I learned how to. That was 43 years ago. I haven't actually written a novel yet. But I have been writing, and I keep writing, and I'm getting very close to actually having written several novels, now, when I realized that I don't need to choose. Jules Verne wrote several novels at the same time. He had problems focusing and choosing as well, he just didn't know it was a problem, so it wasn't a problem. 

Don't write just one book at a time. Write all the books you want to write when you want to write them. The best thing with writing novels is that it's OK it takes time. The writing itself doesn't take that much. I mean, as I posted about Barbara Cartland and Pulp speed, writing is easy and quick. It's all the other things that take time. It's the getting bored with your book and doing other things. It's the "squirrels". It's the "grass is greener on the other side" syndrome. It's trying not to procrastinate and then ending up spending hours on social media, because... er... squirrels? 

The thing is that if you follow the squirrels BUT KEEP ON WRITING, you will end up with novelS, instead of A novel.

Just think about pulp writers. They have a formula they know very well and can write a novel following the formula sleeping, and this is why they can produce dozens of "novels" very quickly. They are writing their stories "at the same time", even when it might look like they just write quickly. Trust me, they are thinking about the future novels while they sit down and write one. Most pulp writers leave dozens of unfinished novels when they die... how would that be possible, if they only focused on one?

Now, a lot of people critique them for writing the same book over and over again, and THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT IS EXPECTED OF THEM. They do have a formula, and that makes the writing formulaic, BUT THERE'S NOTHING WRONG ABOUT THAT. People like being able to trust the author. When the author manages to hide this fact better than your average pulp author, it's called "the author's voice". This is why people have favorite authors. They know what they write and they trust to read something similar. This is also why many authors write different genre with pen name. If I am expecting a murder mystery and pick Agatha Christie, I won't be happy with a romance novel, so she wrote those as Mary Westmacott.

Anyway, squirrels :-D I was talking about the fact that it is quite possible to write several novels at the same time. People have done it.
It's possible to do it well. People have done it.
So why not you?

The trick is to follow only the literary squirrels. 

How do you know which squirrels are literary? 

In a way, they all are. You learn something every time you follow a squirrel, and that is material for your books. In another way, only those, you follow in writing, are. 

If you want to write a novel as a multipotentialite, you have to set yourself mini goals and deadlines. If you write only two hours a day, you will have written your book(s) one day. When one project gets boring, you switch to the next. Or read a bit. Write about what you read. You can probably use that in one of your books. This is why NaNoWriMo is great for us. The only time I have been able to produce 50.000 words in November was when I wrote several different stories... half of them were short stories, the other half was drafts in a couple different novels. :-D