The Myths and Realities of Writing Every Day

I used to make a habit of writing a thousand words a day. I have done this in various weeks long or months long pursuits of a goal, but never consistently. Now, I’m content with around 500 words most days, or four out of five days. I’m doubtful of writers who claim to do their writing as if it is a job, four to eight hours a day. If you have that luxury, because there’s such a demand for your work, then more power to you--I just don’t believe you. That also might be for the factory of thriller writers, but for the literary writer--where the words are considered with regard--there’s more useful strategies.

I try to get a few pages in every day with some regularity, half of which might be channeled into an active piece aiming for publication. On a very good week, I might produce several thousand words, which is the level I think you have to be at to produce a novel with any useful efficiency. I say efficiency, because you have to keep at a novel. When you put it down for too long, you can lose the thread and the inspiration, if you had that to begin with, and it’s difficult to pick that up again unless you are a genius. The pressure comes in at this sustained level, because then you have to find the time to dedicate to the sometimes teeth-gnashing goals of a quota, in pages or word count.

For anyone who is starting out writing, the idea that you have to practice, that you have to produce every day in order to make any headway, can be daunting. It takes years to get there, but it also can happen overnight simply by vowing to write a bit each day.

Any writing can get the gears turning, though for the most part, I think this process is something you don’t hear a lot of established writers talking about: how unproductive daily writing can feel. And yet you have to get over that hump to produce the work, and remind yourself with great patience that writing is really about re-writing. For most of the last few weeks I’ve been up around 6 or 6:30, and written at least 2 pages, sometimes more. How focused was I on the story I’ve been writing? Loosely, I had an idea and wrote to that end. When I sat down to read my twenty plus handwritten pages recently this week, I caught glimpses of a Nabokov-ian spoof filtered through my own concerted seriousness to say something compelling.

Usually, or ideally and rarely, I would be burning with a story to write, and would crank it out as soon as possible--usually in the early morning. Sometimes I’ve awakened at four in the morning with an idea that I could not shake, and forced myself to write, then after an hour and a half fury of near illegible scratching on a legal pad, I go back to sleep. Some of the best things I’ve written have occurred like this. There’s something about the synapses in the morning that are unpredictable and wildly able to go anywhere, it can seem.

I imagine the reason writers don’t often talk about this process is because it’s not romantic, and doesn’t convey the heroic notion that usually puts the vocation into a hallowed and sacred act that leads to the magical writing of magnificent, well-received tomes for mass consumption--if we could all be so lucky. In contrast, that idea that one writes as a job can be equally daunting sounding. If a writer does treat it as a job, I can almost guarantee for the full four or eight hours they are not continuously writing--either that, or the writing is mostly garbage. There’s a kind of sweet spot about how much time and how much you write each day that is probably optimal, but there is no formula. Everyone has to discover their own practice.

I’m not sure writing isn’t ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. I think because I have experienced the inspiration driving the writing, I’m inclined to believe anything less is wheel spinning--though wheel spinning can indicate that the mechanisms are at least working.

When you generate this much writing, at some point you have to realize its potential. At five or six thousand words, is it going to be a story you pursue or not? And then, further, are you working on a story, or a novel, or something else altogether? I’ve put some much editing time into even relatively short pieces, that I know a novel takes a yeoman effort. In the futile seeming generation of all of this raw material, you might begin to think it is all a waste of time.

It’s not a waste of time. All writing can lead to this next story or article that will, or could, be the piece that pushes you to the next thing. That’s largely what writing is about, having the faith to continue on in absolute uncertainty. This is easier to consider in thought than practice, but it’s true.

Memorable Nonfiction 2010

Reading feeds the desire to write, and writing in itself is often an extension of reading. This explains why I read novels above most other works. Since I read so few biographies, memoirs, essay collections, and letters, I’m more selective, though maybe I ask of these works the same thing I ask of novels: that they feed my thinking and get me motivated to write. Three non-fiction books stood out for me this year.

The best biographers give you the life complete, baggage and all, written with no distracting bones to pick with their subject. The biographer takes on the self-erasing task of subsuming themselves in the life story, and sifting through the expected mundanity in order to reveal the exceptional. This could be difficult to accomplish for anyone compelled by their subject and trying to interpret the life, yet a degree of fandom is essential, as well as restraint. One of the best literary biographies for having covered this ground, and yet not shying away from either critical assessment, or candid and sometimes difficult judgment, is Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. Though I was mostly a casual reader of Cheever’s well-known short stories before I picked this bio up, I came to admire the conflicted writer who, at heart, made a unique and solitary venture of his fictional output over a long and sometimes troubled life. This reading sent me to Cheever’s overshadowed novels.

David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto had me riffing on its provocations. Like any good book of philosophy, this one forces a reader’s reaction. The numbered paragraphs are widely borrowed from attributed sources and compiled to construct a number of dubious arguments (the novel is dead, “sampling” is the future of literature, truth is more worthwhile than fiction). Nevertheless, the resulting compendium is provocative for the daring of the broad sampling ( a preponderance for several quotable essayists), often rewritten to make Shield’s points, which proves or at least validates that his de-contextualization experiment might just be a hybrid form of memoir-slash-manifesto. Though it also provides a convincing case that the novel is alive enough to provoke diatribes against it.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1940, are almost too specific, direct and intimate, like catching one side of an eavesdropped conversation, that a guilty taste of voyeurism is unavoidable. What comes through the young Beckett’s missives is a hubristic certainty, a kind of unassailable arrogance, as well as an authority tempered by doubt and perseverance, as when he declaims to his cousin Morris Sinclair: “Here I strut about, I cannot and will not do otherwise, and have no idea if God helps me or not.” One would have been honored and maybe intimidated to have received from Beckett a multi-lingual letter laced with multiple literary references. But even a partially committed Beckett completist will be curious to thumb through this first of four projected volumes for prime examples of an endangered, if not yet extinct, form of writing from a modern master.

Reality Hunger's Discontent

The death warrant for the novel always seems to be a celebration. Literary forms grow and transform over time; undeniably, the novel may be the most open, enigmatic and constantly challenging of forms. Why would there be a need to pronounce the novel dead if it wasn’t in fact alive and well? One rarely hears novelists proclaiming the end of the memoir, or the end of poetry.

In fact, so often people have a vehement dislike for and anger towards “the novel”--to which I often think: what did the novel ever do to you? Because it is a difficult form that defeats. Maybe what ultimately defeats is a lack of commercial success.

The benchmark of commercial viability is difficult to come by. Only a few books make it to the darling list. One of the results of this is the attempt to invent a new form. Another is to go meta.

Because the form has existed for so long, so effectively, and in light of technology, it seems viable to question the novel’s means and methods are no longer relevant or somehow wanting. Experimental writers take this up as a badge of honor, subverting narrative in the “traditional” sense (The failure to play the commercial game is to buck tradition, to deny what a marketing machine expects and searches for).

To identify a benchmark as baseline is usually the best most writers can wish for; then, to remain undaunted in the long haul of writing a novel, to say nothing of writing one of originality, is a meager dream. This might explain the proliferation of that type of novel that people supposedly want to read, the block buster, which is usually anti-original, formulaic, genre work.

To imagine that anyone is so in love with “reality” or aching for it, we have reality TV programming. But don’t imagine that those reality narratives aren’t shaped into some from of drama in the editing room (to lesser or greater effect--I’m willing to bet that among the writers on those programs is a novelist or two).

Without the anointment of commercial success, and having failed to live up to the demands of the form, so called re-invention is necessary. This is also known as a good career move.

David Shield’s Reality Hunger appropriates samples, sound bites, other writer’s pithy phrases out of context, and re-contextualizes them. He is utilizing the plagiaristic taboo writ large. This is the nature of the web having its influence on publishing. As with blogs, there is so much work to reference and draw from, to lead the reader to more and more information. One has to get read. The present horizon of the mobile text (the ephemeral written word on the web) means the writer can’t count on anyone getting that far into any one particular book. Yet Reality Hunger is a book, not an online text.

Reality Hunger as a text is a great idea. The style is a gimmick that provokes, seizing on the controversial aspects of recent memoir scandal (the appropriating element), as well as wrecking the house on the way out the door (the death of the novel element). But I won’t call it art.

Providing an antidote to an imagined problem is a proven marketing ploy, its effectiveness is a foregone conclusion once the publisher rallies behind it. Whatever the form of Reality Hunger is, it will never replace the novel.

Philosophy Made Me

As I read this article, "Against Readings," in The Chronicle Review, it reminded me of my own literary beginnings, which really began with philosophy. 

 

While studying fiction in grad school for creative writing, there was an expectation to treat the books we were reading as academic exercises. But I felt there was something alienating with literary interpretation; as much as I would have liked to have considered I had the potential to undertake that work, I had always preferred my own approach: unhindered reading, culling from a well of intuition, and drawing my own conclusions. I discovered that my advisors--steeped in and perhaps blinded by their academic backgrounds--often had a hard time with my open approach. 

Unless one is incapable of thinking deeply, carefully and thoughtfully about what they read, I have never understood why any approach other than a self-interpretive one makes sense. I think this rings true for someone like me who indoctrinated himself in philosophy out of curiosity and circumstance. Stuck every Saturday at the mall for two hours, after boredom with video games (or I ran out of money), I wandered the aisles of B. Dalton's and found The Myth of Sisyphus, Walden, the Tao te ching, Being and Nothingness, and Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness (believe it or not at a ripe fifteen). Eventually, there were generous readings of Emerson and William James. After the enlightenment of half a dozen courses that touched on these subjects in my undergraduate years, I ended up with some clever misinterpretations of Derrida via a whacked out architecture curriculum with undigested bits of Foucault thrown in for good measure until, searching for solace amid this despair, I finally discovered literature capital L (Henry Miller, Thomas Mann, Borges), landing in a no man's land of my own making. But I wouldn't have gotten there without philosophy. 

Early on there was no one to talk to about what I was reading--that would have to wait for college and some surprisingly astute teachers--I didn't know anyone who had read these works, and I wasn't finding copies of them in high school. I was secretly proud, and quietly uncertain, but somehow affirmed to have discovered my own rejected thoughts in their alienated majesty in books written long before I was born.