I wrote last week about what we can lose by quantifying our food and movement, how the counting of calories eaten and expended can destroy pleasure and instinct and damage our relationships with our bodies and our habitats. I sometimes use this harm as an analogy when talking to students about writing.
New writers often come to the making of literature with ideas about productivity founded in industry. They are afraid of wasting time, of making mistakes, of failure, as if there’s an overseer standing behind them with a whip or the sack. They ask me: “I have an idea, do you think this will work?” I always say, “try it and see”, because though after publishing some dozen books I can often foresee pitfalls, all writing takes risks, if only the boring risk of being derivative and formulaic. I can help students to see where they might encounter difficulty, but in writing, as in all other serious endeavours, there is no avoiding difficulty. I suggest reading the work of writers who have successfully navigated similar hazards, not because any book has the answer to any other book, but because it’s useful to see what’s already been tried. There are ways to make it more likely that you’ll recognise earlier if and how your idea isn’t working, but no way to guarantee success, and there is always the outside possibility that this person, in this place at this time will come up with a new way to write or a new story to tell. I’m not going to tell anyone not to try.
“But what if it doesn’t work,” students say, “What if I write a whole lot and it fails?”
“Then you write something else,” I say, or you write the same thing better, or if failure puts you off writing, you do other things instead. “But I’ll have wasted my time,” they say, “I’ll have wasted all those words.”
I had my kids in my mid-20s, which was unheard of among women of my class and generation
Men are deemed more masculine for taking up more space, women more feminine for taking up less
Only mothers who find recognition in professional life seem to be guilty of ‘having it all’
Some say you’re not a writer if you’re not willing to sacrifice your family to your art. Not me
I am not sure I believe that time can be wasted, but if it can, I’d look to time spent passively, scrolling and flicking, seeking short-term gratification in ways we haven’t actively chosen, donating our time and attention to media corporations without recompense. No time spent trying and failing is wasted. In some ways, time spent trying and failing – learning – is used better than time spent succeeding, though succeeding is certainly more fun, and also the frequent outcome of effort and failure. But to try and fail, to take risks, to chance our time and effort, we have to stop counting words written and hours spent, stop imagining there’s some formula or algorithm for artistic success.
Counting words can be as bad for you as counting calories. It’s an industrial way of thinking about art. The suspicion can go both ways: there’s a feeling that people who write a lot, fast, can’t be doing it properly, aren’t suffering enough or working hard enough to be serious. On the other hand, people who write little, slowly, maybe aren’t trying hard enough, aren’t being productive, need to spend more time at their desks. The truth is that there isn’t a rule. Different writers write differently. Some of us make a fast, messy first draft, which becomes the basis for slow, detail-oriented (detail-obsessed) rewriting and revision. Some write costively but change little after the first careful version. Different books can require different methods from the same writer. There’s no metric for artistic success.
At the same time, writers write. Writing too brilliant or fragile to be written at all isn’t art; the work is to find and make the forms of brilliance and fragility. I’ve always been suspicious of “writers’ block”. Administrators don’t get administrators’ block, nurses don’t get nurses’ block, they (mostly) show up and do what they said they would do when they said they would do it. Once you’ve signed a contract, the work of art is to do the best you can in the time and with the materials available, because art is made in the material world by bodies and bodies require shelter and food and healthcare for which we need money. There is a time to count and a time to be counted; the work is to know when that time comes.