I read a quote today from Norman Mailer: “Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.” It resonated with me for two reasons. One, I’m a smidge insecure about my status as a Real Writer, and two, I’ve had a lot of bad days recently. I haven’t been writing much, and, as you may have noticed, I haven’t been updating Ye Olde Blogge often, either. Mostly, I’ve been watching reruns of Futurama and waiting for grad school acceptance letters (or, as is statistically more likely, rejections) to arrive. It’s really, really hard to motivate myself to work when I just don’t feel like doing it. I’m too tired, or I have a headache, or that bird outside is really loud, or I need my special pen (even though I rarely write long-hand). The amount of creativity and effort that goes into making excuses or distracting myself from work could fuel a solid afternoon of writing.
It’s kind of like going to the gym: you know you should do it, and you know that you’ll feel better afterward, yet you never seem to put on your action pants and head out the door. I haven’t put on my writer pants in ages, aside from knocking out a dirty short story last week, and I fear that pretty soon the zombiefied corpse of Norman Mailer will shamble up to my door, demanding my Real Writer Card back.
In the Inc. Magazine article “7 Qualities of Uber-Productive People,” Jeff Haden lists the characteristics that separate the successful entrepreneur from the crash-and-burn failure. Conquering fear, soldiering on in the face of ridicule, and asking for help are all qualities that are helpful–perhaps essential–to writers, but one of his points struck me as particularly relevant:
They see creativity as the result of effort, not inspiration.
Most people wait for an idea. Most people think creativity happens. They expect a divine muse will someday show them a new way, a new approach, a new concept.
And they wait and wait and wait.
Occasionally, great ideas do just come to people. Mostly, though, creativity is the result of effort: toiling, striving, refining, testing, experimenting… The work itself results in inspiration.
Remarkably productive people don’t wait for ideas. They don’t wait for inspiration. They know that big ideas most often come from people who do, not people who dream.
I wrote before in my post The Museless Blues about how difficult it is to work creatively when you feel like shit and your life is headed downwards in a handbasket. I have, no joke, about thirty projects waiting to be written. I keep having great–or at least workable, ideas for plots and characters, but I do nothing with them beyond scribbling a few notes in a composition notebook…and then losing the notebook. My failure to turn those ideas into actual pages of fiction is bound up with fear of failure, doubts about my ability to write, and just plain ol’ American laziness, but I usually blame it on a lack of inspiration.
Last October, I decided to learn how to play the guitar. I practice five days a week, anywhere from half an hour to two hours. While I won’t be joining a band anytime soon, I can play about a dozen songs and sing along. What I’ve noticed is that at the beginning of my practice sessions, my fingers are usually a little stiff and my voice kind of weak. Once I warm up, I’m able to play more fluidly and sing more powerfully. At a certain point, my fingers start to hurt too much to keep playing, but for a while I feel like a goddamn rockstar.
Now, a clever person would realize that the same process–warm-up, work, don’t stop until your fingers hurt–would describe an ideal day of writing. I want to get up in the morning, have a cup of tea, and knock out a thousand words before lunch. I certainly have the time, and I have no lack of ideas to draw on. Instead, I fall back into the same old patterns. I check my email, read webcomics, watch TV on Netflix, and maybe do some chores if I’m really serious about avoiding work. That’s right–I’ve gotten to the point where I’ll do laundry or wash dishes to avoid having to write. Even though that’s kind of the cornerstone of what a writer does for a living.
Here are some things I’m going try in order to be more productive:
Stop reading blogs about productivity, organization, or creativity in lieu of actually doing work
Set regular ”office hours” and stick to them
Do all my writerly work on my laptop, do my goofing around on my desktop (Damn you, Buzzfeed, and your compulsively readable lists!)
If necessary, take laptop to library or coffee shop and turn off wifi connection
Set and track daily and weekly productivity goals–1 blog post, three comments, 5000 words, etc.
I’ll let you know how it goes, but in the meantime, how do you stay focused and motivated?
It is a debate curiously unique to artistic disciplines; while few would argue that mathematics or physics are unteachable, a Google search for the question “can writing be taught?” retrieves 130 million results. Substitute the word “painting” or “acting” and it finds, respectively, 23.5 and 51.7 million pages. There are many who believe that creative writing can (and should) be taught, but just as many who believe that formal pedagogy is at best irrelevant and at worst actively harmful. The question is really two-fold, however; can writing be taught, and can creativity be taught?
In a quote from this article on the University of East Anglia, which was the first school to offer a creative writing degree in the UK, Sir Malcolm Bradbury questions whether ”writers of small talent can be transformed, by the touch of a hand or the aid of a handbook, into significant authors.” Keep in mind that Bradbury is the man who founded the program, and even he isn’t convinced that it can teach what it sets out to.
The dorms where I lived at UEA. Apparently, the architectural style is known as “New Brutalist,” which is wonderfully Orwellian.
“Significant” alumni of UEA include Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, and Ian McEwan, author of Atonement. (From that limited sample, apparently UEA is the place to be if you want your book to eventually be a film starring Kiera Knightly.) And me, of course, although I only studied there my senior year and didn’t take any writing classes because I was too busy drinking at the uni bar. What’s really amazing, though, is that the oldest creative writing degree program in the UK is only forty years old. What did aspiring British writers do before 1971? Read and write on their own?
In America, the first writer’s workshops began cropping up in the 20s and 30s. The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop established the idea that creative writing was a teachable discipline. Here’s an interesting read from The New Yorker about the rise of the creative writing program in American and its impact on post-war literature. The author, Louis Menand, is both skeptical of the ability of these programs to produce great writers and grateful for his undergraduate poetry workshop experience, even though he never published a single poem. He also claims that the programs themselves are skeptical of their ability to produce great writers. He cites the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s bashful statement, “[t]he fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us,” from the program’s own website.
In researching this post, I read another article about UEA’s program from The Guardian, in which well-known writers offer their opinion on the teachability of writing. They seem evenly split on the issue. Unsurprisingly, those who have graduated from or teach at university programs are in favor of them. Will Self argues against formal courses: “I say, go and get a job, a fairly menial one instead. Otherwise what are you going to write about?” This idea, that you need to go out and live your life–preferably with some interesting hardships–in order to be a proper writer, seems to be prevalent among those who disdain creative writing degree programs. Andrew Motion, who is a teacher at the University of London, counters that “[t]here was this idea that creative writing was something that had to take place in a garret. But aspiring dancers go to the Royal Ballet School, and actors to Rada – why should writing be any different?”
I can see where Self is coming from and even agree with him to an extent, but there is an element of reverse snobbery in his statement. His recommendation to get a menial job seems to imply that honest hard work is a better teacher–and motivator–than formal education. If one interprets the old chestnut “write what you know”literally, then writers should go on safari, fall in love, sail around the world on a tramp steamer, punch someone in the face at least once, and possibly sleep with a foreign spy. If one interprets the age-old advice to include emotional experience–after all, Emily Dickinson wrote poems of great depth from the comfort and safety of her Amherst attic–it would still be true that writers with small lives must, perforce, write small books.
The equivalent of an MFA from Columbia.
I’ve had bad things happen to me. I’ve been through dark times and I continue to wrestle with clinical depression. I’ve worked menial jobs, too. At the end of those days, when I was tired and sore and sad, and I was hungry but I couldn’t afford anything other than pasta for the third night running, all I could manage was to fall in front of the TV or directly into bed. Menial work doesn’t promote creativity. At best, it motivates you to do something–anything–to get out of the rut in which you find yourself, but, like clinical depression, it leaves little energy to take the very action that would improve your situation. Menial work leaves you emotionally drained and uninspired. It quite literally sucks.
* * *
Here is Stephen King, who is unarguably one of the most successful writers in history, giving an interview in 2006 about the teachability of creative writing:
Even though he begins the video by saying that writing can’t be taught, he immediately turns and says that it must be taught because writers need jobs and would-be writers need space to develop. ”…[P]utative writers need two things: okay, they need positive reinforcement and they need to be collegial, for a while, with others of their type.” The reason, he says, that creative types need to be collegial is to get laid. He also argues that writers who are ensconced in academia tend to produce work that is “pale,” “mannered,” and “self-conscious and defensive about what its up to.”
In addition to experience–maybe including a little adventure and hardship–writers need time and support. Unpublished writers, in particular, may lack those things. A full-time, residential, and fully funded MFA program allows writers the gift of two or three years to focus on writing, reading, and teaching. Doctoral programs, most of which are really PhDs in English with creative dissertations, allow an additional five years of research, pedagogy, and workshopping. These programs also offer a community of other writers and validation in the form of good grades, positive workshop comments, and professorial approval.
King is also right, however, that too much academic is bad. Writers need to escape their ivory towers at some point. The danger of over-intellectualizing is actually the thing that concerns me the most about pursuing an MFA. There are few crossover successes between the worlds of literary fiction and popular fiction, and I don’t just want to write–I’d actually like to making a living from it, too.
In the introduction to his 2000 memoir/guide On Writing, King wrote that although he had been kicking around the idea of the book for a while, he didn’t want to come off as a “literary gasbag or asshole transcendentalist,” which I think sums up his opinion of formal creative writing pedagogy. A conversation with Amy Tan changed his mind. He recalls that the question Tan, as a popular novelist, is never asked about the language and craft of her work. “They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and Styrons,” he writes, “but they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper.” There are degree programs now for popular writing, such as the MFA at Seton Hill or the MA in Professional Writing from USC. I’m pleased that popular and genre fiction is receiving more academic recognition (Vermont College of Fine Arts even has an MFA in writing for children and young adults), but I also worry that having separate programs reinforces the stereotype that writing can have either literary merit or popular appeal, but not both.
* * *
I began studying creative writing as a high school junior at the South Carolina Governor’s School the Arts. We took intense, college-level classes in fiction, poetry, playwriting, and creative non-fiction, as well as a short unit on editing that has proven to be the most useful class I’ve ever taken. After high school, I continued studying at Sarah Lawrence College, where I eventually got burned out on workshops and ran away to England (see above). Now, after ten years, I’m seriously considering an MFA. And after that, maybe a doctorate. My reasons are fairly straightforward:
1. There are no jobs for librarians. Also, I am not a very good librarian. I’ve always considered myself a writer who was just working in a library to pay the bills, and that attitude does neither me nor my patrons any good. The MFA programs I’m looking at are not only fully funded (meaning no additional student loans), but many of them also offer teaching assistantships with tidy little stipends and health insurance. As someone who has been living below the poverty level for most of the last year, that sounds like heaven.
2. I want to write and teach. I love teaching. It’s rewarding and invigorating to me, even when I was teaching remedial English to students who might have shanked me in the parking lot over a bad grade. In order to get a gig teaching creative writing at a college, I need to publish and have an advanced degree. While browsing the job postings on highered.com, I found that many of the schools wanted a PhD as well as an MFA. While getting the degree, I hope to write publishable stories and at least one novel. I’m also looking for a program that teaches, or at least acknowledges, the practical side of publishing.
I also hope to meet a dashing archaeology professor and have adventures. Sexy adventures.
3. I’m sick of South Carolina. Objectively, Greenville, SC is a great place to live. It has one of the best downtown districts in the country, a lively arts scene, and easy access to the mountains. However, I’ve lived here off and on since I was in middle school, and the town has a lot of baggage for me. Also, being a godless, liberal heathen in a socially conservative place like South Carolina is no fun. I want to move north and/or west.
4. I want to study writing novels. All the fiction workshops I’ve taken have focused on the short story. When I first started writing Grey Magic, I discovered that novels are not, in fact, just really long short stories. There are things about pacing and balancing a plot that I hope to learn.
*FYI: Admissions boards, if you’re reading this, I think I’d make an excellent addition to your program. Ignore the bit about being drunk for my entire senior year.*
* * *
I believe that writing can be taught. There are skills and tools, including how to take criticism, that can be learned in the classroom. And although writing is a solitary act, I find that I am more inspired when I’m in a community of other enthusiasts. However, to return to Bradbury’s quote, I don’t believe that talent can be taught. It can be shaped, honed, and channeled, but it cannot be learned. Call it talent, creativity, or genius–that ineffable spark that is both innate and divine–but it doesn’t come from a workshop or textbook. Study, however, can make make it easier to translate talent through one’s medium of choice.
I’m reminded again of Malcolm Gladwell’s rule that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something. There’s a similar saying that you need to write a million words of crap before you get to the good stuff. Here’s Neil Gaiman’s take on it from a 2002 blog post:
Chuck Jones told would be artists to draw, explaining that “you’ve got a million bad drawings inside you and the sooner you get them out, the better”. Raymond Chandler is reputed to have told would be authors that they have a million words of crap to get out of their system. And in both cases there’s a lot of truth there — if only because it allows you to keep going despite your technical limitations and inability to get the words or the pen to do what you want, and eventually find yourself, well, competent. And some of the words and pictures you turn out on the way can be pretty good too.
Despite periodic bouts of sniveling uncertainty and a knee-jerk instinct to avoid sounding full of myself, I think I’m a good writer. Years of classes have given me confidence in my technical ability, and response from readers has made me feel proud of the things I’ve written. I’ve been in workshops with people I thought were really bad writers. Just terrible. Couldn’t string an anecdote together, let alone a compelling plot. Totally pedestrian worldview. And yet many of them studied hard and wrote hard and kept their eyes on the horizon. They collected rejection slips, but they remained undaunted. At the time, I didn’t know whether to feel sorry for them or hold them in awe. Of course, while I was busy pitying and/or sneering, they were honing their skills and toughening their hides. They may not have had much raw talent, but they had discipline and perseverance, and I was wrong to have felt superior. My mistake was in thinking of talent as a zero-sum game. The goal is not to be the best writer in the workshop; the goal is to be better than yourself.
MFA and PhD programs give writers the room they need to work as well as a community of like-minded individuals in which to thrive. That room away from the grind of a menial job–a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf might say–will accelerate the time it takes to write a million words. The requisite 10,000 hours, when sneaked into lunch breaks and early Saturdays and thirty minutes after the kids have gone to bed, would take decades to complete. Graduate programs give you two or three or five years of non-stop, living and breathing nothing but writing. While creativity can’t be taught, it can be fostered. A creative writing course can’t teach someone how to be a good writer, but it can give them the time to be a better one.
I registered for unemployment benefits, applied for a part-time job at a local bookstore, and sketched out a budget. I also slept for an extra twenty hours, played Skyrim for so long that my eyes went all glassy, and ate nothing but pizza, ice cream, and fluffernutters. The one thing I didn’t do was write. I tried. I even opened the Word document and revised a couple of clunky sentences. But I didn’t put any new material down on the page.
How many times have you said that you’re just not feeling inspired? You’ve got writer’s block! You’ll start working again when you lose weight/pay off your bills/get through this really rough week at work/move out/get married/get divorced/send the kids off to school…there are a million million excuses that we put in front of ourselves and then point to and say, “See that, there? That’s why I haven’t written today.”
If a waiter said he just didn’t feel like waiting tables today, he’d be fired. If a surgeon said she didn’t want to do another appendectomy because they were boring, she’d be fired. If you called into your job and said that you weren’t going to work because you were tired, and you felt fat, and your horoscope said that today wasn’t a good day to get out of bed, you’d be fired. But if you say that you don’t feel like writing today because you’ve got writer’s block, you somehow expect others to be sympathetic about your plight. Poor thing; being creative is so hard.
In the best and rarest moments I’ve ever experienced while working, it’s as if the words are coming from somewhere else. The characters are speaking and acting of their own volition, and I’m wonderfully, inexplicably surprised by what happens next. Invariably, these moments only happen after several solid hours of work. These aren’t the middle-of-the-night, moth-wing brushes of ideas that only occur when you’re half-asleep and there isn’t a pen nearby. Those ideas are never as good as they seem to your sleep-addled brain. I’m talking about the feeling that you are no longer the sole author of your work, that someone or something else is with you, guiding your hand. This isn’t as creepy as I’m making it sound, I swear. If you haven’t watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk on creativity, I strongly recommend you do so now. It’s only twenty minutes, but she describes much more elegantly than I have the nature of genius.
The trouble comes when I try to bait the muse. If I could just recreate the circumstances of her last visit, maybe she would come again. If I worked at a special time of night, or drank a couple beers, or played loud music, or worked in total silence, or went back and re-read the last good passage that I wrote…but that moment of sparkling creativity doesn’t come, and I get discouraged, and then weeks go by and I haven’t written a damn thing. Revision doesn’t count as writing. I’ve spent countless hours sifting through finished chapters, picking up a word here and there and burnishing it with my shirtsleeve. This is just procrastination dressed up in a fancy hat.
I keep forgetting that the only way to get inspired is to work. It doesn’t happen the other way around.
Make a commitment to write 500-1000 new words today. Let me know what happens.
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