First off, an announcement: my sometime writing partner, Caroline Stevermer, has a new title just out, The Glass Magician. She did a live interview on Monday about it, which is now on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLBMsbrjzq0. It’s set in a very-alternate-universe New York City in 1905, and she talks a bit about the worldbuilding and the difficulties faced by her vaudeville-magician protagonist when she discovers that she is magic, for real. I recommend both the interview and the novel.
Last week’s post got me thinking about writing productivity in general. I have often heard writers complain about not being as productive as they would like, usually in the context of having more ideas than they have time to write. I’ve heard lots of writers trade tips on becoming more productive, and heaven knows that improving your productivity is a popular topic on writing websites. I look at them a lot myself. I am, after all, a writer, and I have never heard a writer complain about being too productive.
Modern society places enormous emphasis on productivity, whether it’s measured by income, output, social media presence, or whatever. Productivity, it seems, is the prerequisite for success in any and every field.
Yet I’ve often heard people complain that a particular writer has been writing “too fast.” The speed complaint is almost always paired with a complaint about the writer’s current work suffering from declining quality; this connection is so common that many critics and readers look askance at writers who can produce a volume of work more rapidly than what seems to be the average. There’s an unspoken assumption that great art must be labored over, that if it didn’t take a lot of time to produce, it can’t possibly be any good.
Both ends of this argument are, in my opinion, focusing far too much on productivity – the one group holding it up as an ideal, the other as something that’s automatically detrimental. The result is an emphasis on the speed of the process, rather than the actual quality of the resulting product.
It’s kind of understandable. Speed is something that can be measured and compared. Quality, especially when it comes to art, is a lot more subjective. And a lot of the things that can contribute to an artist’s ability to achieve speed plus quality – inspiration, creativity, talent, experience – are practically impossible to pin down, let alone quantify. Add to that the artist’s intention – whatever it was they set out to accomplish – and it becomes a lot simpler to stick to words-per-day, paintings-per-month, or statues-per-year as a stand-in for all the messy unmeasurables that crop up when you start involving questions of quality.
What it comes down to, in the end, is why a particular writer writes. Even that is not as simple as it sounds.
I write to tell stories, to have fun, to pay my bills, to stretch my limits and hone my skills, and, sometimes, to please a particular person. Sometimes all of these things work together happily; Sorcery and Cecelia was one of those books. Other times, needing to pay bills means taking on a project that I’ll enjoy but that someone I care about will dislike. Or the story I want to tell (or the limits I want to stretch) won’t be commercial (i.e., no bill-paying). Untangling my need to pay bills from my desire to stretch, tell a particular story to the best of my ability, and have fun doing it is impossible for me to do, and I’m sitting right here in my head.
There’s also a necessary balance between striving for perfection (it will never quite be the book in your head) and maximizing productivity. Exactly where that balance point is depends, as usual, on the individual. One writer may be intent on producing one, or perhaps two, perfect (or nearly) books in his/her lifetime, and is content to let all their other possible ideas die unborn as long as they get those one or two. Another may be happy with a bookcase full of “good enough” novels that paid the bills with some left over. Most of us are muddling around in the middle, wanting to do a better job than last time but unwilling to spend ten or twenty years polishing a single manuscript.
To put it another way, there’s focusing on production, and there’s focusing on the product. Most writers, in my experience, will end up unhappy if they sacrifice too much quality for producing in quantity; many will be equally unhappy if they obsess about quality so much that they never get around to writing even a quarter of the stories they would like to write.
It is therefore a good idea to stop from time to time to look at where one is. The balance point between production and product shifts back and forth over time; the trick is to let it shift only as far as it needs to. It’s only at the far ends of the continuum that a fixation on quantity becomes detrimental to quality, or an obsession with quality brings production to a standstill.
Yes! I have already read _The Glass Magician_ twice through. It’s excellent, and it is obviously set up for several sequels.
“Quality, especially when it comes to art, is a lot more subjective.”
You said it! I’ve held Shakespeare up as the greatest English writer, because he managed to be massively popular, stay relevant for centuries, originate new words and phrases, come up with great characterizations, while at the same time a) being massively entertaining, and b) multi-layered, with puns, political allusions, and even ribaldry, all at the same time.
And yet, if anyone tries to do something similar, they’re most likely going to come up with something multilayered, but so dense it’s a struggle to fight through.
So multilayered = quality? Not necessarily. Massively entertaining = quality? Only to an extent.
I repeat: You said it!
I point out that we have no way of knowing whether the words and phrases were already current in his era and he’s merely the one who recorded them.
Okay, sure. Change “originated” to “popularized.”
So, accuracy = quality for a comment? (Gulp) 🙂
Try “imported to London audiences.”
There was a PBD series some years ago, _The Story of English_, featuring Robert MacNeil interviewing (among others) a lot of language experts. When they got to Shakespeare, someone pointed out that a lot of the language we see for the first time in Shakespeare were common in his Warwickshire dialect.
E.g., “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.”
Technical language for people who trim hedges. Member of a two-man hedging team: “I rough-hew them, and he shapes their ends.”
Kevin, I’m with you on Shakespeare.
“…massively popular, stay relevant for centuries, originate new words and phrases, come up with great characterizations, while at the same time a) being massively entertaining, and b) multi-layered…”
Yes! Respect.
Hmm. I agree about the subjectivity of art precisely because I can’t stomach calling Shakespeare “the greatest English writer.”
I enjoy and appreciate many of his plays and sonnets, and I will not deny that he’s extremely influential, but there are authors whose work is more entertaining to me; who have most definitely invented words; whose work is beautifully multilayered; whose characters I find *much* more convincing than many of Shakespeare’s, especially his female characters (what happened at the end of “Taming of the Shrew”?! What was that?!); and who haven’t had a chance to be relevant for centuries yet, but whose work has stayed relevant for the decades since it was written, at least. (I suspect that they’re all less popular than Shakespeare, but I don’t include “your work must be read by a wider audience than the centuries-old famous works of a man from England” in my “great author” criteria.) As a bonus, I’m less likely to run face-first into a nasty stereotype about myself/family/friends when I read those authors’ works than when I read Shakespeare’s, and I can’t help but wonder if Shakespeare’s popularity and influence have reinforced some of those stereotypes.
(…sorry. That came out as more of a rant than I’d intended. Upshot – yes, art is extremely subjective.)
I’ve spent a lot of time in my head trying to parse the differences between greatest and favorite. I can say that Shakespeare is by no means my favorite writer, but I think by the criteria I set out above that I can call him the greatest.
But that’s the fun part. It all depends on how you define “great.” Popular? Innovative? Multilayered? Imaginative? The possibilities go on and on. I can call him the greatest, but that’s based on the criteria I picked. Mileage will vary!!!
Yep, I’m one of those who wishes I was more productive, because the ideas far exceed the time/energy/focus needed to write them. And I like these ideas; I want them to become the books (or short stories, or whatever) they have the potential to be.
Which means I either need to produce product faster or live to several hundred years (and stop getting new ideas, which doesn’t seem to be happening, either).
Fortunately?, I’ve got a lot of margin before I need to worry about people saying I write too fast.