Slow Productivity

[osprey_archer]

Recently sholio review Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and as I have long vaguely followed Newport’s career, and also am a choir who loves to be preached to about the problems of productivity culture, I picked it up.

Newport lays out a seeming contradiction I’ve vaguely noticed before but never formulated: the people who find productivity culture most enraging are often, in fact, very productive people, who yearn to achieve great things. But the contradiction is purely a matter of semantics: “productivity culture” enrages such people precisely because it often leads to a kind of distracted busy-ness that makes it hard to actually dig in and accomplish something meaningful.

The problem, Newport explains, is that current productivity culture privileges steady work, and moreover steady work that is pretty close to the outward edge of a worker’s capacity, whereas innovative artistic or academic work by its nature requires more slack. There are periods where you’ll work sixty hours a week (and be happy to do so! The ideas are flowing! Work is the thing you most want to do in the world!) but also periods where you’ll outwardly be doing nothing.

He illustrates the point with stories about artists and scientists from the past: Jane Austen, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, New Yorker feature writer John McPhee. I love reading about people creating things, whether it be a novel or the theory of gravity, so very much enjoyed these interludes.

But my main takeaway from this book is that, although I enjoyed it, it’s not really the book I need right now. My problem in this moment is not “how to step away from meaningless busy-ness toward true accomplishment” but “how do I start writing fiction again?” (Obviously I’m still banging away at book reviews and letters to penpals etc. etc.)

The problem is twofold. One, I haven’t made time to write; and two, I don’t currently have a story I feel an urgent need to tell. I have written some short stories this year (eight currently in the caddy!), and when I’m excited about a story, suddenly it becomes easy to make time to write. But I think that if I were writing more regularly, I’d have more story ideas, perhaps even more long-form story ideas, which is really where my heart lies.

(Actually, the problem is not ideas per se, but ideas I’m so invested in that I’ll keep working through the frustrations inherent in writing a novel. You can scamper through a short story on inspiration alone, but a novel always has bits where you yell “This is the worst story ever written and I am the worst writer ever born!”)

However, if you make time to write and then sit down with nothing you want to write, you may just end up staring out the window at the Canada geese. There’s a bit of a chicken and an egg problem.

But the first step to fixing any problem is to define the problem, so at least I’ve done that?

Comments

[asakiyume]

Even though you say it's not the book you need at the moment, I was just thinking thoughts along those lines. Not every human endeavor can be "optimized" in the same way that a factory floor can (and maybe it's not even entirely optimal for a factory floor, but that's a question for another day). Invention and imagination don't operate on a so-many-units-per-time-interval schedule.

How about microfiction? I feel like, for me, that's been a great way to get in a small, inconsequential, yet satisfying bit of writing each day, and it lets me assess ideas, too. ... Although if I'm honest, the fiction that I've written recently that isn't my main WIP hasn't directly risen from the microfiction, so that's more of a theory on my part than an actual practice... And maybe the exercise value of writing in a very short format isn't actually that useful for longer work, IDK.

But it's definitely true that with microfiction there's no difficulty in finishing a thing, and it does let you play around with stray ideas you might not want to invest time in otherwise.

Frankly, though, eight stories in the hopper sounds GREAT to me.

Re: letters to penpals, I have one on the kitchen table that I started a week-and-half ago (*sob*). It'll get to you one day.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, it's a good book, just not one that speaks to my personal problems at this exact moment. Useful for other people or other times in my life, perhaps.

I've never tried microfiction, except in the sense that many of my youthful efforts petered out at microfiction length. (Now there's an idea. Maybe I could excavate something from there.) But I think I'd rather go in the other length direction, if not to novels at least to longer short stories or novellas, because if I've got an ongoing story I've got something to work on during a writing session.

(Although technically the Lily Dale story is ongoing and it's just languishing because it IS in that stage of "This is the worst story ever written." It's only a DRAFT, self, it is ALLOWED to be the worst story ever written at this point.)

The eight stories are waiting for me to find a market (or waiting for me to get tired of looking for a market and post them here and/or on Patreon). So if nothing else I am working up a nice stock.

I will look forward to your letter whenever it arrives!

[minutia_r]

"I am a choir who loves to be preached to" is great

[osprey_archer]

Thank you!

[ellenmillion]

I am in that place on my novel where I am yelling exactly that, so... yes. This resonates.

[osprey_archer]

Truly a classic moment in novel-writing *sob*. The worst part is that sometimes - not often! but sometimes! - the book really isn't working, which makes it harder to just dismiss the "is this the worst book in the world?" moment.

[sholio]

Yeah, I think "the right book at the right time" is the thing! It was exactly that for me - I've been going at an unsustainable pace for the last few years, it's causing my work ethic to disintegrate, and I really needed to be told that it's okay to slow down and take time off and focus on things other than writing for a while, and you'll still get there in the end. But not being able to sit down and write is the opposite end of the stick to that particular problem.

(FWIW I do have a lot of *actual* productivity books as well - in the sense of "ways of getting the words out/upping your production schedule" - if you might like some recs, although I'm about to leave town for the weekend so I'll need to wait 'til I get back to rec them if you're interested. Totally understand if you aren't into self-help gurus for that kind of thing, though!)

[osprey_archer]

I think part of the difficulty right now is that I took a break from writing because I was moving cities/starting a new job/moving house etc - all legitimate reasons to take a break! - but once you've taken such a long break it can be hard to get back in the groove. I was hoping that writing a few short stories would provide a sort of on-ramp back into novels, which they haven't so far, but hey, a short story is nothing to sneeze at.

I think right now a lot of productivity guides would hit me in a place of "the gap between where I am and where they think I am is an unbridgeable chasm." I will contemplating what might be useful. I have considered some version of bingos for origfic, though, which seems promising.

[elanid]

This is very slightly in the direction of unasked-for advice, so please disregard if it’s totally unhelpful! I teach a class at my local writing center that’s aimed at helping people get writing done on long projects (where “long” really just means “longer than they’ve been able to work on so far”, so for some of them that’s daily poems or a single essay and for some it’s novels), and there are maybe two or three things from that class that your post made me think of?

1. I think that for me, setting time to think and work on the project every day (or, you know, every writing day, whatever that means to you) helps even/especially when I hit that horrible “is this broken or am I just having writer emotions” part. Like, some days it’s then half an hour of staring at a Canada goose, and some days it’s half an hour of scribbling sad thoughts about how you’re the worst writer ever born (I do think scribbling the thoughts is better than just thinking them, especially if your handwriting is kind of illegible so that it’s hard to torment yourself by rereading them…), and some days it’s 25 minutes of sad thoughts and five minutes of insight into whether it’s actually broken.

2. Everyone does have their own process, and I think our knowledge of what that process is can often be very subconscious, but…I wonder, I guess, if you know what types of activities help you (or have helped you in the past, at least) to figure out whether it’s just sad writer feelings vs actually busted book? For me it’s all the scribbling up above, plus like, long walks pondering grimly and also, weirdly, aggressively doing the dishes, but this is very idiosyncratic and specific.

And the other thought of course is that sometimes someone else can tell you if it’s actually broken, or even just having a friend read it and become enthusiastic about it sometimes suffices to be like, oh actually I too am enthusiastic now…

Anyway, very sorry for the unsolicited advice…and also hello! I think I followed you originally because I like your fiction a lot (especially the Gawain novella, which I often think about as an ideal version of a certain kind of dashing bad idea character), but ultimately subscribed because of the book reviews, which continue to be excellent. I hope any of this is at all useful, or at least not too irritating!

[osprey_archer]

Thank you! I do think it might be helpful to spend some time writing each day on something that might not be fiction but also isn't a book review for DW... they just come from different parts of the brain and writing book reviews doesn't necessarily get the juices flowing for fiction.

When I'm working on a story, I often find long walks very helpful! And even if they aren't helpful in the specific sense of helping with story ideas, they are helpful in making me feel happier.

Nice to meet you! Glad that you like the book reviews and Bad Idea Gawain. What would his life be if he made good choices?