Thursday! Between the Zines: Productivity, Schmoductivity
V3, I38
Forgive the abrupt start, but there’s a little something stuck in my craw I want to talk about before I get to the Zine Stuff: productivity. Well, not productivity entirely, because I’m a fan of the Puritan work ethic (though it can easily go awry and we need to be measured about what we consider virtues1), but productivity as we artsy-tartsy types tend to approach it. Specially, I’ve seen some writer friends of mine agonizing lately over how little they write compared to how much they are sure they must write every day. Productivity is a good thing, or so we’re told almost from the day we’re born. We wake up early to get to our work, put in our time producing whatever we produce, and we quit at the whistle. Oddly enough, we creative folks, who cringe at the very thought of working an office job or clocking in to our place on an assembly line, come to our work as artists as if art is made the same way.
It isn’t. I mean, it can be. Plenty of artists put themselves on a “one work a day” schedule that works very nicely for them. I guarantee you, though, they don’t come to it like Fred Flintstone clocking in to operate that dino-loader. They take the approach, so far as I know, I’m going to suggest to you in a minute.
Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin with this2. The common wisdom around the creative community is that a serious writer3 must write X words every day, where X is some number derived from what other authors say they write daily or calculated to get a book of X+X length written in a year. Maybe that’s Stephen King’s 2000, Hemingway’s 500, Anne Rice’s 3000, or Michael Crichton’s 10,000. Put your butt in the seat and get that word count target! Ring that bell! DING! WORDS ARE DONE! Come back tomorrow where you read the last bunch of words you wrote, get a nice running start and hit that target again! Keep on going until you get 120,000 words written, then BOOM! Book. Of course, it’s an ugly book because first drafts are always misshapen monstrosities4 beloved by no one and destined for remolding as quickly as possible.
But, hey, you hit that word count.
What if you didn’t, though? What if you only got half of it done? What if you spewed words, all of them crap, balled up the papers on which they festered, and tossed them in the trash? What of your word count now? Surely you’re no kind of working writer. You couldn’t even hit a measly X number of words! How could you possibly hit BookTotalX or PodcastSeasonX or PoetryCollectionX? You can’t. You suck. Might as well bag it for the day, like you have the past week, like you have the past month, like you have the past six months.
That’s no kind of creative life.
I don’t even care about your book or whatever you’re doing. Well, I do care, but not as much as I care about the creative fire burning in your heart that you keep smothering with the blanket of “I failed again to hit my arbitrary goal”. Do you think that setting a goal you clearly can’t meet because it doesn’t suit your needs serves you in any way but negatively? Do you think that your inner critic actually needs that daily affirmation?
Let me toss something a little different your way. Take a look at it and see if it makes sense. Ready? Here it is: stop writing words and start writing scenes. No one ever finishes their novel and says “I’m sure glad I wrote that hundred thousand words!” If they do, they’re probably getting paid by the word5. You’re not writing a number of words; you’re writing a story. Stories are made of scenes. String together a bunch of scenes in a way that makes sense and move your characters from a good place to a bad place back to a good place again and you’ve written a whole story6. That’s it. Write the scene in front of you and stop when it’s done. If the scene is very long, pick a solid halfway point in the scene — a point where you flip viewpoint or action — stop there, and finish the scene tomorrow. Then write another scene. Then another. Keep writing scenes until you get to the end. Boom. Done.
Remember those artists I mentioned at the very beginning? The “one work a day” artists? They’re not working to a count or words or brush strokes. They’re making a whole thing — or at least a distinct section of a big thing that’s a thing in itself. They might write a book of 60 chapters, but they write a chapter every day, no matter how long that chapter may be. They’re doing their version of a scene and it works.
What I’m really saying here is don’t torture yourself over words. Tell a small story that’s part of your big story. You can do that, right? Of course you can. You’re a storyteller. You’ve been telling little scene-stories your whole life. Might as well keep on doing it, since you have so much experience and have gotten so good at it.
We’re not talking about throwing productivity out the window. That’d be a bit silly. I’m only suggesting that a little reframing might do us a world of good. What do you say?
And now, let’s listen to a poem. And when I say “let’s”, I don’t mean me. I already heard this one a few times. It’s good. Trust me.
Yeah, I know I pronounced “Cyril MacReady” four different ways. He’s a complex man, always on the move. He doesn’t have time for proper name pronunciation!
My dream is to support my family with my art. Can such a thing be done? Yes! But I need your help. How? I’m glad you asked!
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There is virtue in work, but there is far less virtue in being worked to death by people with the power to compel that work from you. Neither is there much virtue to working yourself to a frazzle to afford a lifestyle that keeps you away from your family, forces you to farm your kids out to day care workers or government bureaucrats, and grinds your soul to a nub.
Could have fooled you, huh?
You know, the kind of writer who IS PROFESSIONAL and TAKES HER CRAFT SERIOUSLY and PUTS IN THE HARD WORK and OTHER SERIOUS-SOUNDING DESCRIPTIVE PHRASES.
Must they be, though? Maybe I’ll kick that idea around in another newsletter.
You know, for some crap mill like BuzzFeed, Gawker, or the New York Times.
Want to be fancy? Take characters from bad to worse to a little better to really bad to better to good to really good to uh-oh bad then to great. Roller coasters like that work great, especially if you’re writing action or romance.
I started setting scene goals for myself and it helped. I was never a big word count person to begin with, but I edit as I write—which I know people say is a no-no. I may be slower, but it’s what works for me. :)