Cory Doctorow has recently published an interesting article in Locus that addresses an issue that I’ve been locking horns with over the last 4 months: Writing in a world full of distractions.
It all sounds good in his article. Like there’s something wrong with all of us out here who are wallowing in our own excuses for not perennially producing novel-length works. And, yeah, there’s no question that I could sit at a keyboard and pound out 1000 words in 20 minutes, but there’s an element that’s missing in that equation:
Thought.
I’m a believer in genius. I believe that there are people out there who have a miraculous ability to just sit down and wiggle their fingers at the keyboard, complete novels unspooling before them with relatively little effort or forethought. I might be convinced to go as far as to say that Doctorow possesses some genius with his being able to compose complete and coherent stories in 20 minute snippets over the course of a year without planning or thinking beforehand.
But I don’t work like that.
Writing advice from writers hurts more than it helps
It’s a pretty shitty thing for a successful writer to do, publishing an article that makes it sound like the way that they do things is the ONLY way to do it. I hate Stephen King’s On Writing for this reason. I think book and article paint an unrealistic vision of what it means to be a writer, or even more generally, a creative person.
I wasted so much time because I was convinced that the only right way to write a story was to let it unfold before you, writing from first page to the last, without an idea of the ending. That the only thing that mattered when writing was the word count that you hit each day. That the only time you could say you were writing was the time that you had your fingers on the keyboard.
I don’t write like that. I don’t think I ever will. When I’ve attempted this approach, I only end up with reams of unfinished beginnings and middles, abandoned because I painted myself into a corner or started working with an idea that was too thin to support the weight of what was hung upon it. Those who can do it might be geniuses, wired in such away that they do their thinking and planning subconsciously beforehand or on the fly while they work. Maybe I’m just not smart enough.
The truth is that most of the stories that we read, see, or hear have been crafted, outlined, plotted out in a treatment, built a scene at a time, rearranged, cut down. While it sounds like more work to do all this before even starting to write a line of a draft, I believe it actually saves time. You get to your destination faster if you know where you’re going.
There’s no one right way to write. No one, not even the most successful writers out there, can tell you how you’re supposed to do it. You need to find that out for yourself.
Changing gears faster
Despite my disagreement with the approach to writing he takes, I did get some value from Doctorow’s article. It gives me hope that I can actually produce work in my current environment if I can train my brain to change gears faster.
My problem is that it always has taken me a good chunk of time to shift attention from one task to another, to spin up and get in the groove. This is something that I need to work on. It actually stops me from even starting. I’ve been slowly improving my start up time, but I still need at least an hour in which to work on something small that takes a significant amount of focus. 15 minutes of that hour is spent in a weird state of crossfading between what I was doing and what I will be doing. Then there is a good 30 minutes of work. And then the last 15 is spent looking at the clock, thinking I only have 15 minutes, 10, 7, 2 minutes left before I have to stop.
I had the same problem while working on a help desk. It was a maddening situation. We were assigned projects to work on between phone calls, but it was tough not to get incredibly frustrated when, every time we’d get a head of steam built up on our project, we had to answer a phone call. Train of though completely derailed. In my time there, very few projects were completed this way. But there was a lot of websurfing and instant messaging.
Working in a distraction-rich environment is incredibly inefficient. It’s very annoying. And supremely frustrating. And it’s keeping me from taking advantage of what little time I have during the week.
But, again, I have hope. I’m attempting to shorten spin-up time. I’ve been struggling to get a start on season 5 of Q-Burger. I’m planning things out, focusing on characters and plot elements. So here’s what I’m going to do this week:
I’m going to set a timer for 20 minutes and do my best to just jump right in and start typing.
There’s clinical evidence about all these phenomena. Software developers do better when they have offices with a door, because the creative process is aided by uninterrupted time. There’s a sort of “zone” that is very real, and it takes a long time to get into, and it is trivial to shatter – receiving an email is enough.
That said, there is also some interesting research around creativity and frequency of effort. In one study, two groups of students were asked to create pottery – a jar, I think. The first group was given (say) a week to create one jar that was as good as they could make it. The other group was to make as many as they could in the same time. Interestingly, the best jars came from the second group.
Research into creativity and genius also suggests that there’s sort of a 10,000-hour, ten-year “entry fee”…until you’ve put in at least that much time, you won’t produce the great works. See Malcom Gladwell’s “Outliers”, among others.
So there’s probably a lot to be said for just sitting down and “writing”, where “writing” may include the planning you mention. Don’t get caught up in the definition of “writing” being “adding words to the story in a word processor”. It’s a common trap in software development: the urge to start coding right away, and the failure to include testing, documentation, design, rollout, and support in the effort involved to produce a working system.
I’m sure I’ve seen at least one of these arguments on your blog, so I’ll bet you’re aware of these factors already, but I felt compelled to post.