“If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.”
—SAMUEL BUTLER, FROM THE NOTE-BOOKS OF SAMUEL BUTLER
Surely you know one or more prolific writers who produce so much material that you wish you could bottle their energy and drink it down later for yourself. You may picture them at their desks, typing away, with papers stacked manuscript-high beside them. (And maybe it’s only me, but I always imagine these productive writers sitting before old-fashioned typewriters. That’s how romantic and fantastic the notion is in my head.) Perhaps you even feel a little envious or resentful of their output: Hey, that could be me if only I didn’t have to [fill in the blank]. It’s easy to believe that a large quantity of writing is a sign of productivity, and thus, if you are not writing reams yourself, you aren’t being productive. But more writing does not necessarily equal better-quality writing, nor does faster writing lead to faster achievement of your goals. This chapter will help you redefine what productivity means and looks like for you.
For at least six years, I, like millions of other slightly crazed, well-intentioned writers, have participated in NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—in which writers attempt to produce a 50,000-word novel in thirty days while running on caffeine, blind faith, and a spirit of adventure. The part of my mind that is like an endurance athlete (trust me, it’s a very small, short-lived part) always thinks this sounds like a great idea and enjoys the endorphin rush of writing toward a fast finish. And it is fun at various stages—particularly at the beginning before reality has set in. But you know what the honest truth is? It kills me every year. By the end of November I am the crankiest, most burned-out, and spent writer I know. I can’t bear to look at what I’ve written, my head hurts, I’ve snapped at my family more times than I can count, and I usually celebrate my finish with a big, fat head cold.
I’m not saying not to do NaNoWriMo—in fact, on the contrary, I think every writer should do it at least once to experience what a true writing marathon feels like and find out how much work goes into being that deeply engaged in your writing. However, just because you write something fast doesn’t mean it will be complete and publishable when you reach the “finish line.” In fact, I’ve found I usually need an additional six months to a year after writing these fast drafts to make any sense of them and another similar stretch of time to revise them. A fast draft gets it down—yes, hallelujah! Amen!—but it doesn’t finish it for you.
So if you are going to undertake fast drafting (and there are even more radical versions than NaNoWriMo: the two-week official version of “Fast Draft” and the “write your novel in a weekend” boot camp style), be prepared to come out of those sessions with a lot of work left to do. Accept that what you write quickly may need more revision later. And don’t beat yourself up because you didn’t write a fully finished masterpiece in thirty days or less; great works aren’t written in one sitting. Consider, too, that you may need a lot of downtime after the intensity of the process—and that’s time away from your writing, which might ultimately be counterproductive to your overall output.
All of this brings me to a very important topic for making yourself productive in a balanced way: intentions. When I teach plot and scene to my writing students and clients, I stress the importance of characters having smaller intentions in every scene and larger dramatic goals to move the story along. A character without intentions wanders around her narrative. A plot without goals is a series of interesting but disconnected vignettes.
The same is true for your writing life. Intentions are daily motivators in small, manageable pieces; they spur you into action and carry out your tasks on the way to your goals. Your goals are the big-picture items—to be a published author, to have that story you wrote accepted by The New Yorker, to query literary agents—built from the efforts of your intentions. The more intentions you create for yourself, the more likely you are to follow through. In fact, Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University in California, did a study on goal setting with 267 participants that found that people are 42 percent more likely to achieve goals just by writing them down. Perhaps the very act of committing important intentions to the page puts them at the forefront of your mind. Writers know better than anyone the power of putting a thought to paper—it makes the item more real, focuses your attention, and motivates you to take action. Or as Henriette Klauser, author of the wonderful Write It Down, Make It Happen, says, “Life is a narrative that you have a hand in writing.”
From here on out, I’d like you to stop making to-do lists. Nothing causes more anxiety than a list of items looming like a dictator with instructions to do! You can all but feel a whip being cracked at your rear, can’t you? Instead, set yourself up with daily intentions as I mentioned above. Intentions are a kinder, gentler way to nudge yourself along. In fact, I recommend that you make a master list of action items for the week or month, and keep it in a binder. Each day choose only the most crucial items from the master list and write them on an erasable whiteboard, which will then serve as your daily intentions list. I do believe in creating parameters for your writing so that you are less likely to sit at your desk panicking in front of the blank page because you don’t know where to start. Just don’t create so many parameters that you stymie yourself.
Some examples of the kinds of intentions you can set for a writing session are:
Try to avoid putting items like this on your daily intentions list.
Part of being a creative person means that you may be more sensitive and open to ideas, energies, people, stories, and so on than most. That means you have to learn to corral and guard your writing time so that you use it wisely, like a precious elixir. It also means that you need to be careful not to set yourself up for failure by heaping more on your plate than you are liable to do or capable of completing. It means learning that voracious and prolific writing does not equal success. In fact, writers can be prone to “hypergraphia,” a condition of producing excessive amounts of writing. It’s related to temporal lobe changes in the brain consistent with hypomania.
It may seem a little late in the book to have you start thinking about long-term goals for your writing practice—except that I know you’ve been thinking about them all along. You were likely thinking about them when you picked up this book, and it’s partly why you did pick up this book.
Now I want you to reconsider your long-term goals. If you have one big, intimidating goal, such as “get published by Random House,” that’s fine, but what does it really mean? In other words, you need to consider the steps that will make your goal possible. If your goal comprises a series of many smaller intentions along the way, then you might begin to look at it as doable. Goals that maybe once seemed out of reach become possible: A novel is written, after all, in a series of small, manageable scenes and chapters, not necessarily in a month. Or, likewise, you may realize that the steps involved in trying to get The New Yorker to publish your short story are not as worth your while at this stage as seeking publication in journals more friendly to newer, less well-known writers. You might instead set an intention to publish many small pieces in smaller journals until you are ready to try your hand at the big guns.
Remind yourself that books are written sentence by sentence, not in complete chapters. Don’t query an agent before a manuscript is complete; hark back to the discussion about logical next steps, and find the one that you are ready to take next, without jumping to the finish line before you’re done.
1. Buy yourself an erasable whiteboard on which you can write your daily intentions. Don’t keep a long list of all your intentions in an overwhelming list in front of you. (You may have a master list you keep in a notebook, but hide it away.) Every day, erase yesterday’s intentions and copy only intentions from your master list that you can do that day. Try not to overachieve; instead strive to accomplish tasks in manageable chunks. Try to include “writing” on your daily intentions list every day, and remember to start with the most pressing task (anything that is deadline driven or that is driving you crazy) to get it out of the way.
2. Which of your goals seems more in reach after reading this chapter? Break down this goal into a series of smaller intentions or just the intentions you will set for your next session. What goals do you have that now seem worth pushing off to a later date?
What’s your “usual” comfortable stretch break? Ten sit-ups? A lap around the block? Set a goal to do just a little more during today’s stretch break, whatever it may entail. Another minute, another repetition. Not twenty more reps, not an hour longer of exercise—just a little more. It’s good to increase the amount slowly over time.