Embracing a Multitasking Lifestyle

By Anaea Lay

Between smart phones and Twitter, we're in an age where people love to lament our short attention spans and our inability to focus on any one thing. It seems like writers are particularly prone to this, complaining about flash games and social networking eating away at their fleeting opportunities to commit acts of fiction. They practically create fetishes for unplugging, disconnecting, going on retreat and just focusing on their precious prose. I'm the last person to sneer at anything that leads to more fabulous fiction in the world, but when it comes to the multitasking lifestyle taking over the modern age I can summon only one response: Bring it!

My personal advocacy for multitasking while writing goes back to the day I discovered that I work better with music in the background. Music was the gate-way distraction. At this point I'm so addicted that my response to business trips is excitement over all the writing I'll get done while I'm in meetings. When those stories sell, it's like getting paid twice.

Writing while distracted isn't for everybody, but I'd argue that quality craft demands multitasking. This is something that becomes clear very quickly if you try your hand at writing scripts: the best story craft multitasks like a fiend. A minimally competent line of dialog makes sense and is believable coming from the character who uttered it. A good one will also tell you something about the character. A brilliant one does all those things, moves the scene forward, and changes the stakes.

Writing scripts is a good way to learn the importance of multifunction prose, but you can see it everywhere. For example, take one of my favorite first lines in fiction, the opening to Robert. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. “Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.” In twelve words you learn several things about the book you've picked up, among them:

1) The fairy tale opening words indicate it probably intends to teach you something
2) Mentioning a Martian tells you it's speculative, specifically involving humans having access to Mars or vice versa
3) Opening the sentence with a phrase that essentially means, “Long ago,” and ends with indications that it takes place in the future warns you this isn't an entirely serious book.

Heinlein probably didn't check his twitter feed while writing (I am careful about assumptions when science fiction writers are involved), but he definitely understood putting his prose to multitasking work.

Flash fiction, at its best, indulges in this this kind of heavy-lifting with an expertise worthy of respect, even for people who aren't fans of the form. Take, for example, a story by Robert Smartwood published in Pank magazine, “Seven Items In Jason Reynolds’ Jacket Pocket, Two Days After His Suicide, As Found By His Eight-Year-Old Brother, Grady.” It's a fabulous story, consisting of nothing more than the descriptions of the seven items. The title gives the reader all the frame they need to figure out what's going on, and then appreciate the subtle horror of the interplay between the reader's understanding of what happened and Grady's inability to parse it.

I could go on with dozens of other examples, but I won't. My RSS reader is getting full.

Anaea Lay is not an evil alien bent on sowing chaos and ending the world. Nor is she a mad scientist prone to creating monsters in her basement. She does live in Madison, Wisconsin where she makes up weird things for fun and profit. She is also a featured writer in the June issue of Apex Magazine.

Learn More about Anaea on her website.