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.

Demystifying the Writing Workshop Ideal

When in the dark night of my literary soul I sometimes wonder, what if I had gotten into Iowa? I console myself with this thought: I might have gotten into Iowa if I had tried, later (in other words, if I applied now). I know I have the confidence for it now. But it’s a stupid question. Still, I often wonder what I’ve missed for opportunity for having not gone to a “better” school. Is all of my praise of my school something like the kid who is happy on Christmas morning with the particular shape of his lump of coal?

With these things it can seem like sour grapes. But I don’t think I’ve failed to exceed even my own initially meager expectations, so why look back with anything resembling regret now?

At Iowa, they must insistently focus on getting their writers’ work placed--a clear commercial approach that really had nothing to do with where I went for my MFA. There it was almost a defiantly anti-commercial, as if it was shameful to aspire to literary success.

In equal ways I’m resentful of my prior unsuccessful attempts to get into good MFA programs (by good I mean, perhaps the top ten on the US News listing), and yet glad I ended up with the experience I did. Likewise, with those Stegner people--I think about a former colleague applying every year and wonder when he’ll just start trying to write better and do what he can to get his work published. I don’t admire his blind persistence (to be a Stegner, or not to be, that is the question) because it assumes that lottery quality of it. Yet is the fact that a Fellow who has produced nothing but mediocre novels, and got in the year I last applied, make me wonder if in fact it isn’t unlike a lottery?

And yet if it is a lottery, I’d sometimes much prefer the odds of having gotten it; yet what does it say for all of the successful Iowa grads I admire I can think of an equal number whose work fails to excite (not only me, but the book world public,) and whom must have initially been greeted with the kind of bated breath and expectation befitting a Nobel candidate?

This all comes from someone who looks at himself as exceptional, of course, though probably not in ways that most people care. I consider that what I’ve been able to produce has been exceptional, and for whatever reason I didn’t have the grades, the pedigree, or the proper ass sniffing tolerance to get into an Iowa. I certainly dashed expectations of my imminent failure when I got accepted into the University of Michigan architecture program and became one of the sort of elect there--and I didn’t work nearly hard enough at what I should have then. And I’ve been floating on my U of M laurels ever since.

Maybe the question isn’t, is Iowa great? so much as, can Iowa open doors? Absolutely.

Just the tenor of these Kevin Brockmeier notes makes me believe Iowa is a cut above. The impression I have is that apparently all of these writers get publication contracts out the door--so it’s pure prestige to go to these programs. And knowing now what I do, I might have tried harder to get in. Because once you get in, that’s where you will forever be associated, besides all of the connections you will make in a good program, all of the opportunities to advance, and the name of the school you will forever talk about.

If someone says it doesn’t matter where you go to school, guess again.

Writing Ad Infinitum

Writing, like any craft, is something you do because you have to, at least in its most rewarding manifestation. Or, more generously, because you want to. This has nothing to do with writing for pay, for there’s little of that to go around. Yet, regarding writing for pay, no matter how good you are at it, you’ve got to get to certain unlikely heights or unquantifiable hype before a wide audience will read you, but even then, you don’t necessarily have to be good at it. Although it might serve you, the aspiring writer, in the long run, to improve at it.

After you’ve come to terms with the reality that you have to do it, the struggle is to probably get noticed; all you can do is work to make the best writing possible, all that you have control over is to challenge yourself. As a writer writes to be read by a number of people, you confront the transition of private to public, then, and decide, I am a writer. You recognize you want to connect with other writers, and eventually, readers.

These are wonderful notions in themselves, but far too idealistic to get you to the next step.

For years, you will rework a manuscript that you are convinced is publishable; it is not. After yearly disinterment and brushes with hope, you will rechristen it with a pithy, though enigmatic title, say, “Messenger” or, “The Adjective Noun of Proper Name,” ultimately dropping the definite article because it makes the work sound more professional, more befitting a work of literary art. You will find an agent who reads said novel twice in two years. (She has it in her hands for that period--who knows if she actually reads it.) Once, you will stay after work and retype the entire manuscript late into the night because you don’t have a copy in a file format you can print out from your workplace. In this marathon session that could put Kerouac to shame, you will inadvertently riddle the MS with errors you don’t have time to catch. You will insist on sending out bound copies single spaced, of your manuscript, until a knowledgeable friend tells you that there is something called “industry standards.” You will learn these and stop sending out unprofessional formats of your writing.

You shouldn’t expect anyone to take notice. You hope someone will read you and connect with your work, and conceive of ingenious, though mind boggling and time consuming schemes to make this happen. This requires a degree of marketing and selling to rival a fortune 500’s advertising campaign. You will send your work out and receive enough rejections to save the rainforest, or at least to wallpaper every square inch of your walls in the theme of “rejection letter boogie.”

You will submit to contests so often that you don’t even remember what you sent where. You will put so much extra money into this that you could have funded a writing year abroad where you could forget too much about a “writing career”. You will establish a rigorous system of sending at least one hundred and forty submissions a month and maintain a byzantine excel spreadsheet to track them, and then you will abandon it because it takes up too much writing time. You will send stories out when you feel like it. You will send stories out when you absolutely do not feel like it. You will stop sending stories out so that you can work on your novel, which will take one year, then two years, and longer. You will keep focused on what’s important, the work. Nothing else will matter, really, but you won’t admit this to anyone. You will realize getting published is sort of a great thing, and yet not always as great as you imagine it will be.

Once editors acknowledge and publish your work, however, you’ll find that publishing a short story is not enough. Why? It just never is. You want bigger rewards, bigger pay-offs, more kudos. This, if you are not careful, can give you an assumed rewards expectation which can lead to violent attacks of hubris, mislaid entitlement, and an all around general boorishness that will garner you no respect whatsoever from your peers.

A little reward will sometimes mean a lot. You would not have stayed with writing if you hadn’t improved at it (though that seemed to take years due to a stubbornness and cluelessness about following basic grammatical rules, something to this day you are occasionally defiant about, when you are not outright dubious), and you probably wouldn’t have continued if no one published anything you’d written. On the other hand, this is difficult to say: you’d already been at it for years with nothing to show for it when you finally decided, for the third time, that you’d apply to several estimable creative writing programs and go back to school to pursue an MFA, much to your family and friends' pitying and doubtful looks.

You will finish your MFA, after two years of self-flagellation and hard work, and get annoyed when people knock MFA programs as worthless, saying they produce lackluster writers who have a cookie-cutter approach to fiction. After your many hundreds of pages of theses, fictions, and musings, you are convinced there isn’t anything such as cookie cutter writing. There are boring writers and there are interesting writers. There are great boring writers and great interesting writers. You will hope that you are in the latter category (G.I.W.) Writing isn’t easy.

Maybe there are people out there who have done it effortlessly, but you come to believe most success is ninety percent hard work. You will say that in a generous mood; in a bad one, you’ll say someone with a great success just got lucky, and you’ll inadvertently rip a few writers out of envy (but where on earth does that get you, really?). On some days, you will contend with watching a crop of younger writers who you see gliding along as if in an easy self-sustaining clique that publishes its members’ work regularly and widely while your work is disregarded, when, in fact, your writing is probably equally compelling, worthy of accolades, and accomplished, if not, dare you say it, more so. But you don’t for once feel luck with what you do. You feel grateful for your patience and perseverance.

Things change; you progress. You work at writing long enough and you become proficient. Barring that, technology arrives and you discover the blog, where you can write (and publish!) any old thing you like, though you recognize the thirty million other blogs you compete with, and that yours is not so timely. You choose not to care--it’s an outlet to write on your favorite subject. Nor do you post seventeen times a day and link to every conceivable blog post with the slightest reference to your insightful topic. An added bonus of your blog is that you can write during the off times when you are wrestling with whether to switch your four-hundred page novel from past to present tense, though you wonder if this spontaneous and possibly frivolous decision will destroy two years of work.

For enough times as you have stories published, you’ve not yet had a novel published, and it’s not been for a lack of trying. But what you realize is that your personal vision of your work, and any kind of outside acknowledgment must be compartmentalized in order to continue through the silent reception you believe you are receiving. In other words, you have to banish such thoughts about even having external rewards from your thinker like an ancient yogi master, if you want to continue. As well as a novel is or is not going, the frustrating struggle to find an agent, or drum up the enthusiasm to keep working on the novel, is often at odds with the desire to have a readership. It can be too easy to feel embittered or ambivalent at your colleagues’ successes, even though you should take their arrival as a measure of you own success, or at least your proximity to it. Though it’s almost easier to consider disparities: how much less time (you believe) they’ve had to struggle, how readily agent X must have responded to their query, whereas all you received from said agent was a fifteenth generation xerox of a rejection letter so badly faded that trying to read the return address is like trying to decipher the Maya codex.

You will even harbor doubt about attempting to state your situation in anything other than cynical terms, as if you’re not allowed optimism; it will become difficult to maintain hope when you feel what’s really more appropriate is gallows humor, and a measure of downright crabby cynicism.

You have to learn to see yourself outside of much of this, and take solace in your own path for it has allowed you to reach the point when others will have already given up. You will not know how to give up. You are like an ultra long distance runner: your work makes no sense to most who are not themselves, running, and for anyone else, your endurance, dedication, and discipline can seem crazy or ill-advised for the presumed meager rewards that you may or may not receive.

You have to believe in and rely on your writing community, however obscure, that supports you unconditionally. You will have learned, against what you believed, that you can sometimes get by and even thrive on such support. Because at some point you did go looking for a community, which is maybe what was missing from your efforts those first years.

All you can do, finally, is the work, the eternal return to the well, cultivating the satisfaction and the inspiration you always have been able to, maybe more than should be humanly expected. Inspiration is not a matter of frequency, it’s about courting the fickle muse, after all; you count yourself lucky when she responds at all.

And, sometimes, in the midst of these pep talks, you’ll think, “But do other writers grapple with these issues?” To which you will offer your own resounding “Of course not, they’re focusing on writing!” But something tells you it’s okay, you do it the way you want, you always have anyway.

Cheese Pizza Effect

Nothing is more disheartening to a fiction writer than a rejection letter with a carefully worded reasoning that interprets the entirety of their three hundred and seventy-five page novel based on thirteen percent of it. And yet this is the norm in the industry.

There is often talk of how if As I Lay Dying were submitted to a publisher today, it would never be published. Of course the assumption is of this being a first novel by an unknown writer (it was in fact the sixth novel of the, in 1930, not yet well-known William Faulkner), and that the narrative is just too formula defying and experimental so that no publisher with a tenuous bottom line would touch it. This may be true, but would Faulkner have written As I Lay Dying today if he was also reading “How to Get Published” books?

A formulaic approach can ruin a narrative, yet so often we are told that the “partial” (usually the first 50 pages), unless it hits the benchmark items on an idealized fiction checklist, will fail to be picked up. See any “How to get published” or “How to land an agent” books out there, for example, and invariably these suggestions, as specious and broad as they may be, are touted as “keys” to a novel’s success. If you have a narrative that evades these rules, you may begin to doubt your inspiration--as non-formulaic and deeply satisfying as was the writing of your novel--and may try to second guess your first fifty pages, as that is likely the first and only impression most agents and editors will have of your work.

The problem with formulas is that, beyond an MFA or years of trial and error writing several novels, they don’t assume a writer can trust their own voice. One needs to learn their own rhythms and patterns, and what it is they like, or, more emphatically, what they love. Ideally, one is better off writing a lot so that they come to know their own predilections (know thyself) and discover their own formula--rather than ascribing to one from without. Practice, not formula.

Publishing may try to play it safe, but too many rules and guidelines ignore the subjectivity of the creative act. The inspiration. In design we called this phenomenon the cheese pizza effect: since there are too many options to satisfy everyone, play it safe and order only cheese. I could stretch the metaphor and say you’re either lucky, or maybe boring, if you actually prefer cheese pizza.

For short stories, I wrote about placing emphasis on the opening sentence so that an unwitting reader will want to read further. I think similar narrative strategies can apply to longer fiction, and some rationale is better than none, but re-thinking the first fifty pages of a narrative that works can feel like self-sabotage. Yet, after repeated rejection, how can you say what you have works? As Stephen Elliot in The Daily Rumpus (e-mail newsletter) says: “If you write every day for a long time you should get to the point where you know when your story is working and when it isn't. Not that something is perfect, or can't be improved upon, but certainly if it's good at not [. . .] Otherwise, what have you learned?”

There are plenty of novels out there that wouldn’t have been published but for the singular connection an editor or agent made to it, and few of these novels can be reduced to the items on a checklist. Drawing in a reader is not ultimately only about the success of the first fifty pages screaming out the triumphant success of the novel, though it’s hard not to think about the possibility in preparation for when someone finally does request the manuscript.

That powerful transaction of writer to reader, and reader to writer, is more important, and completely unquantifiable, and completely non-formulaic. There are no shortcuts. Write a good novel first, and you will have a better chance of getting the wheels rolling.

I think as writers we should assume that our ideal reader is out there, someone who is interested in the art that we create. A great percentage of what we do is to rake through hot coals to find a compelling idea because it inspires us; an idea does have to motivate one enough to invest the time. The practice of writing fiction can’t be about filling in a checklist. The pursuit of the craft is private and unique, one shouldn’t try to out-wit an industry. Just make art, not cheese pizza.

A Beautiful Necessity

"What I know about writing I know from having read the work of the great writers." So says Richard Bausch in The Atlantic, regarding his one foray into contributing to an ill-fated how to collection of essays in which his work was unceremoniously left out.

I think the impulse to offer how to advice is as much out of reminding oneself how it is done, as a form of practice; if someone finds it useful, so much the better. What I like in Bausch's attitude is that he makes explicit what I assume, in my good nature or goodwill, is everyone's motivation. Of course this is naive. I suspect there are millions of people for whom writing is not derived from "a kind of beautiful necessity."

McEwan On Process

Ian McEwan, during his visit to San Francisco to promote Solar, was on KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny this morning, and he responded to a few questions I asked about craft and process. I’ve transcribed his compelling response here:

“My important bit of process is hesitation. If I get an idea, I sit on it. I don’t do anything with it. If it’s a good idea on Monday, it better be a good idea three Mondays later. And often it isn’t. What can seem like a fantastic idea one end of the week, will fade by the other end. So I am a great hesitator, I pause, I brood. Sometimes I don’t even allow myself to take notes about a scene that I’m going to write because I don’t want to start crystallizing it into words. So I carry a lot around in my mind. I am someone who can sit by the delayed luggage carousel for twenty-five minutes quite happily just turning over the stuff that’s there; I don’t need a notebook.

On the other hand . . . I’m a great one for writing the opening paragraph for novels I need never actually complete. Knowing I don’t have to write them confers a great deal of freedom on me. And I’ve started one or two novels that way recently, just idly turning out a sentence or a paragraph that intrigued me.”

A link to the full audio mp3 of the program is available here.