One of the ways writers attempt to make themselves produce more words fast is to give themselves quotas and/or deadlines. “I will write 1,000 words/four pages/for three hours every day/week/month.”
Most of the time, this doesn’t work terribly well for me, for several reasons. The most obvious one is that arbitrary production quotas are usually just that – arbitrary. There’s no downside to missing them, and my backbrain therefore knows that they are safe to put off until fifteen minutes before bedtime, at which point, it is easy to say “Oh, too late; I’ll do more tomorrow.”
Daily production quotas don’t take my highly variable schedule into account. Weekly and monthly deadlines have similar problems. I lose a week every month running down to check in on my 98-year-old father – do I count that week as lost, or try to make up those words/pages/time on other days? Do I adjust my monthly quota for minor recurring things like my semi-annual dentist appointment, or only for major time lost, like the three-week train trip my travel buddy and I planned for three years? It becomes easy to spend more time tinkering with the quota schedule than producing.
And then there’s the concentration threshhold, which is defined as the length of time a particular individual can focus intently on doing one thing without taking a break. It’s currently a thing in business organizing, where they generally recommend one-and-a-half to two hours of focus at a time, followed by a half-hour break. Writers, in my experience, have a slightly longer work rhythm … and also a hard limit to how many hours they can focus in a day, no matter how many breaks they take. The limit varies, but…well, this quote says it best:
Most writers that I know can only write for up to four hours a day, and if they give themselves eight hours, they’re going to spend four hours procrastinating until they’re inside that window of “I only have four hours left,” and all of a sudden they buckle down and get it done.
–Julie Morgenstern
Yes, I do know burst writers who hammer away at their keyboards for six, eight, ten, sometimes sixteen hours straight. They’re not “most writers.” Their writing rhythm is longer, that’s all. The ones who can go for sixteen hours a day in a burst tend to produce the same amount, over time, as the ones who write for two to four hours a day, because after a week or a month of sixteen-hour days, the burst writers need several weeks or months of break instead of just half an hour (and a good night’s sleep).
This is another spot where my backbrain gets involved. It knows how long I can focus, and it has a much better idea than I do of what it’s going to take to accomplish a particular writing task. If my quota is “write four pages” but I’m burned out from dealing with a family crisis and a series of home emergencies, my backbrain knows I’m not going to get that much done in the four minutes worth of focus I have left in me. So it digs in its heels and won’t let me start. By the same token, if I’ve decided to finish the half-done chapter and allocated three days to that job, my backbrain knows it’s only going to take about three hours (I wish it would just tell me these things!), so it proceeds to goof off for two days.
Which brings me to my final point, which is that productivity for writers tends to be defined in terms of physical product: how many words, pages, stories, or novels the writer has produced in a given period of time. This is the way corporations have always measured productivity: how many widgets is the factory producing in how many hours of operation?
But writing isn’t fundamentally a physical occupation. It’s classic “knowledge work,” depending on thinking about imaginary things, abstract concepts, patterns of events. It doesn’t involve manipulating physical objects; it depends on thinking. And while we know a whole lot about how to manipulate things faster and more efficiently, I don’t think we know how to get people to think faster.
The one time that quota scheduling does work for me is when I have an outside deadline. The editor wants the submission by October 31. The anthology closes on the last day of June. The blog goes up Wednesday morning. But in those cases, my “daily quota” is more a tracking mechanism than an actual quota – it lets me know that if it’s 3 o’clock Tuesday afternoon and I haven’t come up with a blog topic, let alone a few actual words, I had darned well better sit down, have an idea, and produce some words.
As I mentioned regarding NaNoWriMo, writing quotas do not work for me because writing then turns into a matter of producing word count rather than forwarding the story.
Also, I do not write linearly. The “opening” words of my first novel turned out to belong to chapter seven, and I wrote the lead up to the big fight scene long after that scene had been written; so to tell myself I need to finish, say, chapter four by ten o’clock is more likely to give my muse laughing fits than get me knuckling down at the keyboard.
One of the old writers of series Westerns, from back when pulp magazines paid 3 cents/word, commented that his heroes developed very bad aim, because if they carried a six-shooter, he could get 18 cents if they used all their ammunition (“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!”) but he only got 3 cents if they hit on the first shot.
Nevertheless, quotas DO work for some writers. It depends on one’s process … and one one’s goals.
Pat, thank you so much for this blog post! I keep re-reading it, because I’m finding it so helpful. It had never occurred to me that my back brain might have a say in how much I can focus and think on a given day for a given section of story, but it makes so much sense that this would be so.
I feel like this concept has overturned what I thought I knew about my process for writing, and I now need to re-conceive and re-formulate what that is. But I suspect that I could do with trusting myself more. I’m not quite sure what that will look like, but I want to find out.
The concentration threshold is also a new concept for me, and it takes some of the pressure I exert on myself off, which is a relief. I can now see that when I’m working on something I find really stretchy, I’m good for maybe 1-1/2 to 2 hours; not stretchy, but just hard: 3 hours; well-started and rolling along: 4-5 hours; and with the occasional burst (perhaps 3x per year) of 8-10 hours.
But I now see it’s counterproductive to expect bursts or even rolling along of myself. Those states just happen when they happen; they’re serendipitous.
I can probably expect 3-hour stints fairly regularly, but not when I’m in a stretchy bit. Definitely more trust and patience would be a good thing.
And I loved your point that there’s an inherent mismatch in trying to apply techniques developed for managing physical manufacturing to thinking. Wow! I hear writing quotas all the time, and then feel inadequate because the advice given by those talking in this way seems so wrong for me.
I think I see a more free writing self ahead! Woot woot! 😀
I have come to this same conclusion after pushing myself through two bad novels.
For some of us, the words become concrete. That is, once I put down the words, it takes a jackhammer to remove them.
So for me, writing 2000 words a day is a bad idea. It’s much better to write the 500 correct words.
One more reason that nanowrimo is not a cure all.
It depends what you are trying to cure. Nanowrimo is great for people who find editing easier than first-drafting, and often helps a lot for people who get “stuck” because they think their first draft must be perfect and they keep fiddling with it. For folks like you, who need to do the basic editing stuff fast before the quick-dry sets up, it’s not so useful. Nothing works for everybody.
I especially like the point about “knowledge work.” I sometimes have to remind myself that guiltily spending two hours on necessary background or worldbuilding (as distinct from*un*necessary worldbuilding) is still solid writing work, even if no new words get written during that period.
Rick
I set a quota of a page because that’s how long it took me to get warmed up. If I was still not writing onward after, it was a real problem, but before that page, I was still not warmed up.
Years ago, I assigned myself two hours a day, seven days a week, on writing projects. In my case that isn’t limited to fiction–at the moment I am close to done with one novel, a non-fiction book on legal systems very different from ours, and partly done with a book, or possibly web page, of short works of literature with interesting economic insights. Working on a writing project sometimes means reading Maimonides or Icelandic sagas, both relevant to the non-fiction book.
So if the novel isn’t coming along I can switch to working on one of the other projects. That works for me.
Reading your blog counts too.
I find a monthly quota useful in that it keeps me honest about whether I’m putting in the butt-in-chair-hands-on-keyboard time necessary to actually produce something. It’s a handy metric, but it’s important to remember that what it’s measuring is only one aspect of creating a story. It should not be mistaken for the whole of the writing process.
In the midst of doing NaNo as I am, what you say about concentration thresholds really resonates with me. The NaNo-mandated average of 1667 words per day is vastly more than my usual output; it’s frustrating to do what for me is a quite respectable day’s work, only to realize that my reward for my diligence is to sit down and do it twice more!
Your experience matches mine closely. About the only thing I can add is that my dedicated writing time is generally more productive if I know in advance what I want to work on or fix or achieve. If I make a general plan, say the night before, of what I hope to do, I tend to do it, rather than sit down and expect the Muse to visit.
A word-count quota wouldn’t work for me because I have to
regularlyirregularly but fairly frequently stop and do plot-noodling or world-building or a rolling rewrite. But I do need to find a way to make myself stick to a daily time quota – one where the times spent only counts if I’m putting words into one of the WIP project files, even if it’s not a story-draft file.