William Landay

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Creativity

A Thousand Words a Day

I have a new work routine. Mornings, I go into the city to write in the main reading room of the Boston Public Library, where I churn out a thousand words a day on my new novel. The BPL has wireless internet access, so I don’t bring a laptop. Too much distraction. Instead I type on a little portable keyboard, a gadget called the AlphaSmart Neo, which I’ve written about here before. In the afternoons, my thousand words complete, I work on other things: research, editing, email, this blog, etc.

Ordinarily I do not like routinized, quota-based writing schedules like this. It does not fit my personality very well. I prefer to work in intense bursts of three or four or even five hours at a time in which I start and complete an entire scene in a single heroic effort. These marathon sessions leave me exhausted, so one exhilirating hyper-productive day is usually followed by two desolate fallow ones. I would prefer to smooth this out, of course, and maintain a more professional, clockwork writing schedule. But my brain does not seem to work that way. My natural method is sprint-and-recover, sprint-and-recover.

I don’t recommend this method to other writers. Novel-writing is harrowing enough without putting yourself through the wringer this way. More important, the net result is fewer words produced. The hare may write better than the tortoise, but he will write less. And publishers value “more” over “better” — regular producers, however mediocre, are in demand; erratic producers, however brilliant, less so. Particularly at this point in my career, I simply can’t afford another missed deadline or long silence between books.

So, after an unproductive week last week, I’ve resolved to become a thousand-word-a-day tortoise for as long as I can stand it. Why 1,000? As you can tell from this (still new) blog, I am obsessed with other writers’ work habits, their daily routines, their work spaces. It is a natural curiosity for anyone in a solitary profession, I suppose. You want to ask, “Am I doing this right?,” but there is no one to put the question to. So you study other writers to see what works for them, and you experiment to see what works for you. Unfortunately there are as many writing routines as there are writers. On the low end, there is Graham Greene and his famous 500 words a day. Many writers talk about 1,000 words a day, including one recently quoted here, J.G. Ballard. The most common writer’s routine I’ve heard is “five pages a day.” (A thousand words comes out to only three or four manuscript pages. You’ve read about 450 words so far.) So I’ve chosen the middle way, neither especially ambitious or lax.

And it seems to be working. Why it is working I have no idea. Maybe it helps to get on the train and commute into town every morning like a banker. Maybe it is because the soaring, barrel-vaulted reading room at the BPL is a beautiful, inspiring space. Maybe it is just refreshing to dump a work routine that has ceased to be productive. Who knows? These writing routines tend to work for awhile, then, for mysterious reasons, they don’t. That is just the way it is in a creative endeavor.

So I’ll stick with it while it’s working. I’m not naturally a thousand-words-a-day kind of writer. I want to be great, and I worry that you cannot be great if you aspire merely to be consistent. But for now this is what I have to do. My book is due January 1.

Makers vs. Managers

I’ve written before about the need for writers and other artists to have long stretches of quiet, uninterrupted time to submerge completely in their work. A post is making the rounds today by the programmer and entrepreneur Paul Graham that places the artist’s workstyle in a wider context.

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it. …

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you’re a maker, think of your own case. Don’t your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don’t. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

I quote the piece at length here because Graham gets it exactly right, but you really have to read the whole thing. I read it with a little shiver of recognition.

Of course all writers are both makers and managers at different times. The trick is to keep the two roles separate, to wall off your “maker” times, those long periods during the day when you are trying to create. It does not matter if you retreat to a dedicated workspace like Philip Roth or just a crowded coffee shop, so long as you segregate your creative-work time from ordinary, “managerial” work time. A writer’s workplace is to some extent a state of mind, a “maker” state of mind: isolated, entranced, submerged.

To non-writers, no doubt this all seems a little fussy and precious. That is because most people, not just powerful people, live in the managerial mode, shifting constantly from task to task. I am lucky my family understands that Daddy needs to go off and be alone for long periods to do his work, and they indulge me. My kids don’t know any different. To them, this is all just part of Daddy’s job and his personality. They understand, too, that I am often “distracted and cranky” when I am writing, as Stephen Dubner describes his own maker times. All part of the writing life, I suppose. Still, as a writer it helps to have myself explained to myself, as Paul Graham has done today.

Update: Daniel Drezner, a professor at Fletcher, adds an important thought about the particularly high cost of interruptions in the early stages of a creative project:

I think the problem might even be worse than Graham suggests. Speaking personally, the hardest part of any research project is at the beginning stages. I’m trying to figure out my precise argument, and the ways in which I can prove/falsify it empirically. While I’m sure there are people who can do that part of the job with a snap of their fingers, it takes me friggin’ forever.  And any interruption — not actual meetings, but even responding to e-mail about setting up a meeting — usually derails my train of thought.

The early stages of a novel — or any creative project, I imagine — are equally tentative and fragile.

Capote and Ellison: Blocked or just procrastinating?

“Did Truman Capote and Ralph Ellison have writer’s block — or were they just chronic procrastinators?” This interesting article from Slate, by Jessica Winter, considers whether there is a difference between writer’s block and procrastination to begin with.

Famously, both Capote and Ellison went silent after producing great books. Capote’s silence lasted nineteen years, from the publication of In Cold Blood in 1965 until his death in 1984. Ellison struggled for nearly forty years to produce a followup to his 1952 debut, Invisible Man. He never did.

Their struggles were not alike, though. Capote seems to have produced very little in all that time. Ellison, when he died in 1994, left behind thousands of pages. One was paralyzed, the other flailed. But both seem to have had the same inner problems: perfectionism, crippling anxiety about meeting heightened expectations after an early success, low self-esteem, excuse-making.

As a writer and lifelong procrastinator, the stories of Capote and Ellison scare the hell out of me. The lesson: the ultimate failure for a writer is not producing a bad book; it is producing no book at all.

(And yes, I realize I am procrastinating by writing this!)

chronic procrastinators?Did Truman Capote and Ralph Ellison have writer’s block—or were they just chronic procrastinators?

Richard Diebenkorn: Notes to Myself on Beginning a Painting

Richard_Diebenkorn's_painting_'Ocean_Park_No.129'

The following list was found among the papers of the painter Richard Diebenkorn after his death in 1993. Spelling and capitalization are as in the original. (Via Terry Teachout.)

Notes to myself on beginning a painting

  1. attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion.
  2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued — except as a stimulus for further moves.
  3. Do search. But in order to find other than what is searched for.
  4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.
  5. Dont “discover” a subject — of any kind.
  6. Somehow don’t be bored — but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.
  7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.
  8. Keep thinking about Polyanna.
  9. Tolerate chaos.
  10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

Image: Richard Diebenkorn’s painting Ocean Park No. 129, 1984.

Creating Writers: Do MFA Programs Produce Dull Writers?

Can creative writing be taught? Virtually nobody thinks it can, but there are 822 creative writing programs in the U.S. ostensibly doing just that.

Louis Menand has a (typically) great piece in the current New Yorker that considers the rise of these programs. Here is Menand’s opening. (MFA’s, you are advised to avert your eyes.)

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers.

Read the whole thing. In fact, read everything Louis Menand writes.

Personally, I have never taken a creative writing course and can’t imagine ever doing so. To me, the question is not whether writing can be taught; it’s whether creativity can. These programs seem designed to produce a certain kind of writing: conservative, restrained, discreet, sophisticated — dull.

Imagine you are a young writer thrown into a workshop. You are anxious, surrounded by a dozen equally inexperienced but ambitious student-writers all eager to critique your work. Are you likely to go out on a limb by trying something wildly original? Of course not. In that environment, you don’t take chances. You conform to the expectations of others. Why throw meat to the sharks? It is no wonder that the beau ideal of these programs is Raymond Carver, whose stories are so concise and involuted that they are workshop-proof. (I should point out, I love Raymond Carver.) The simple fact of submitting your pages to others for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down compromises the writer’s independence — and at just the time in a young writer’s development when he is still searching for his own unique style.

Of course there is no way to measure how the increasing professionalization of our writers has affected our literature, but here is an anecdotal test: when was the last time you picked up a book by a young American writer with a truly wild, out-of-left-field new voice, unlike anything you’d ever heard before? To my mind, there is a ton of very good books out there but there is a sameness to the prose, a cautious, sober tone that we take for “good writing,” even “literature.” It is as if we have come to a consensus about what good writing is supposed to sound like. It is a tyranny of good taste. For some time now, the most daring new writing has come from other countries, particularly Latin America. How sad that even our creativity has to be outsourced.

Yes, yes, it is too much to lay all that on the rise of creative writing programs. Plenty of dull writers have nothing to do with these programs, and plenty of iconoclastic writers have come through MFA programs with their creativity intact.

On the other hand, it is hard to imagine these programs not tending to homogenize our young writers. There has to be a standard curriculum, after all — they have to teach something. We have created a national professional academy for training young writers just as we train young doctors and lawyers. That may be good for writers, not so good for literature.

Writing in the Age of Distraction

I’ve said here that the internet is lethal to book-writing. And to me, it is. But since the internet is not going away, we writers had better learn to manage it. Cory Doctorow is one writer who seems to have figured out how. Somehow I missed this great piece by Doctorow on Writing in the Age of Distraction.

The single worst piece of writing advice I ever got was to stay away from the Internet because it would only waste my time and wouldn’t help my writing.… But the Internet has been very good to me. It’s informed my creativity and aesthetics, it’s benefited me professionally and personally, and for every moment it steals, it gives back a hundred delights. I’d no sooner give it up than I’d give up fiction or any other pleasurable vice.

Doctorow offers six techniques for getting your work done without quitting the internet cold-turkey. It’s worth a read for any web-frazzled writer — myself very much included.

Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow: Why Writers Get Stuck

For the last couple of weeks I have been struggling with a scene that just won’t come. The scene is an important one. It opens the second act of my novel and changes the tone of the book in important ways. It is no throwaway transition or plot-mover. It really has to work.

I am not “blocked.” I don’t believe writers’ block actually exists. Anyway, the trouble is not that I can’t write; the trouble is that I can’t write well. Everything I type feels cliched, phony, flat. It is crap — but there is no shortage of it. So, not blocked, merely stuck.

These stalled periods are always miserable. I feel anxious. Often I can’t sleep. A morning becomes a day becomes a week with no new pages, and I get increasingly nervous, short-tempered, gloomy, agitated. I try to hide all this anxiety from my kids (I have two little boys, ages five and eight), and my wife has learned to tolerate my stuck times, as well. But there is only so much I can do: when I am stuck, it is hard on everyone.

For writers, there isn’t a lot of support in this situation. “Write fast,” people tell you, or “turn off your internal editor” or that sort of thing. That is the common wisdom.

But I’d like to suggest that being stuck is natural, even inevitable. It is a necessary part of the creative process. Lord knows, I go through it often enough.

How do we know what is a natural part of creativity? The process is only dimly understood. There is no way to see into the mind as it creates (though we can increasingly see into the brain). But creative people have always been able to describe subjectively how it feels to create, and these descriptions do suggest patterns.

In 1926, Graham Wallas presented one of the first models of the creative process in a book called The Art of Thought. For Wallas, creativity occurred in five steps:

(i) preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual’s mind on the problem and explores the problem’s dimensions),

(ii) incubation (where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),

(iii) intimation (the creative person gets a “feeling” that a solution is on its way),

(iv) illumination or insight (where the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness); and

(v) verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).

These stages all ring true to me. After many days of anxiety, I woke up early last Thursday, before dawn, with a sudden awareness that I had cracked the problem. It was an intimation: I knew I would solve the problem the next day. I knew why the scene was not working. I still did not know how I would fix the scene, exactly. But I was cheerful and certain I would do it. I told my wife that morning, “It’s going to happen today.” And it did. I tore up my outline and reimagined the scene in a way that made it feel more fresh and inventive to me. I am still writing that scene, but I know now that I am on the right track.

To my fellow writers, I would like to offer a simpler way to think about this process: suck, squeeze, bang, blow.

It is an old phrase that describes how a common four-stroke engine works. The piston cycles down and up twice. (1) Down, and the expanding chamber is filled with gasoline mist — suck. (2) Up, and the gasoline mist is compressed in the shrinking chamber, which makes it more explosive — squeeze. (3) The spark plug ignites the compressed gasoline — bang — and the piston is blasted down again. (4) Up a second time, and the rising piston pushes any unburned gasses out of the chamber through an exhaust valve — blow. Then the cycle begins again. That’s what moves your car down the street: suck, squeeze, bang, blow.

Ideas work the same way. Your mind is an engine. The idea is sucked in: you turn to the scene you want to write, you begin to consider it. The idea is then squeezed, or “incubated,” to use Wallas’s word. Your brain has to work on the problem and keep working on it, squeezing it, until bang!, finally the breakthrough comes. Then comes the working-out, the actual implementation of the idea — the writing.

I do have a point with this tortured, silly metaphor. Fellow writers, the squeeze — that nerve-wracking, despairing period of waiting for the idea, the breakthrough — is part of a process you have been through and will go through again and again. When you get stuck, when there is a problem with a scene or maybe the scene is just misconceived altogether, when you hit a passage in your writing that is difficult and you fumble with words for days on end — when you are really stuck — then the squeeze will be especially harrowing. You will worry, as we all do, that the illumination will never come. Don’t give up. You are stuck for a reason: your mind is working on a problem, and your scene will be stuck until the problem is solved. Remember, squeeze is followed by bang, incubation is followed by insight. This is our job. This is how we earn our ideas.