Methods Of Productivity, Or How To Write a Novel

 Sometimes I have to remind myself that every human being that ever lived had the same amount of time per day to get things done, and that I have no excuse for being unproductive. The truth is there is plenty of time to get things done, so long as you prioritize your goals and divide them into workable steps, then recognize your time leeches and shotgun those bastards in the face. (Okay, so maybe leeches don't have faces, and shotgunning a leech would be overkill, but work with me.)

Also, you might shoot your junk off.

First, prioritize. For instance, here are a few of my goals: learn French, publish a novel, and marry Emma Watson. The novel is my highest priority, followed by Emma, then French. If I should find any of the lower goals distract me from the higher, I will adjust my methods or cut the lower goal out. (Sorry Emma.)

It's not creepy because we're almost the same age. (Okay, so it's creepy.)

For the purposes of this post I shall concentrate on the highest priority, the novel. Now, it's well known that almost every person thinks she can write a novel. Of those people, a significant portion of them can't, a smaller portion could but never will, and a smaller group will work on one novel their entire lives (or claim to work on it) and die leaving 26 pages of intensely rewritten crap. Please, don't be in that last group. If you're going to be a failed writer, at least be a successful failed writer: take the time to finish your failures. The reason so many people fall into this trap is that they don't realize the big secret of novel writing: it is impossible.

Before I go on, please note that while I'm using a novel as an example, this applies to everything you might wish to do. Everything worth doing is impossible. Your job is to find out how to break that impossible task into pieces that are possible. For instance, the novel. Many people don't know this, but a novel is actually made of words.

Words: the pre-internet Youtube video

Pick up a big heavy book, like Anna Karenina or Moby Dick. That giant inexplicable tome of genius is just a bunch of words, one after the other, written by some fat guy sitting in a chair. If you wanted to, you too could write Moby Dick (or at least a book as long), but if you sit down with that goal in mind you're going to be so overwhelmed you won't be able to start. And even if you do manage to start (thanks to diligence, creativity, or cocaine) you'll probably get stuck after a few pages and freak out. How can I do this? You'll think. Why am I trying—it's impossible! Well of course it's impossible: you didn't break it down. Remember that fat guy writing one word after another.

Let's tone it down a moment: you just want to write a good, short novel, say 80,000 words. That's still a lot of words! If you try to write 80,000 words, you'll get discouraged. Don't. Write a thousand. Anybody can write a thousand words, it's like two pages. A thousand words is no novel, but at least it's possible. So don't worry about whether you'll get the novel, just write the thousand. Make the goal and then do it. Congratulations! You achieved your goal! But you didn't, you say. You have no novel. Well, here comes the easy part. Tomorrow, do exactly what you just did today. It'll be even easier. The day after that, do it again. In less than three months you'll have a novel.

The bad news is it will probably suck.

Anything else can be addressed in this fashion. Learning French? Impossible. Memorizing twenty French words in a day: easy. Do that for a year, and you'll be on your way. (Of course you'll need grammar, but you get the point.) Want to marry Emma Watson? Impossible. But I've got a plan for that too. I can't give my daily steps away, of course, but let's just say I'll be spending a lot of money on protein shakes and binocular polish.

Of course, once you've identified your steps and made a daily plan, the main enemy will be your own laziness. Even if it's something you enjoy, the thought of having to do it will elicit an immediate response of deliberate distraction: I don't wanna write my words! I need to check Facebook again in case somebody liked my Gizmo reference! I need to clip my toenails! I haven't vacuumed under the bed in a week! My daughter needs fed! Shut up. You've made a daily, possible goal and you must stick to it or you'll never achieve the impossible. What helps me is to write both the daily goal and the results down on a chart.

My current chart (page)

I put mine on the wall above my monitor, where it stares accusingly down at me as I waste my mornings reading about cereal mascots on Wikipedia. When I put up the chart, I wrote down my daily word quota (1000 words) and decided on a schedule (Get up at seven, get coffee/toast and do nothing else until my words are written). Now, every day I write in the exact number of words I wrote that day and the times I started and stopped working. That way, if I screw around and miss a day, while no one will be there to punish me, I have to stare at that 0 every day and think about whether I'm really a writer or just a moron with a childish dream. And then I put a thousand up the next day and feel a small triumph over a world that doesn't know I'm there. The chart knows I'm there: I'm filling it. When it's done, I'll have a novel, and even though that in itself is only the smallest step on the way to publication, I'll know that I took the impossible, broke it down, and accomplished it of my own volition, with no one's discipline but mine. And once you've experienced that, you'll realize how powerful this approach is, and you'll know that every step was worth it, and it'll make it that much easier to do the next impossible thing. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got an engagement ring to buy, right after I figure out Emma Watson's birth stone.

(This is part 1 of my productivity post. I'll get part 2, A Defense From Leeches, up in the next few days. It addresses the shotgunning mentioned in the intro.)

On Reading Current Literature

There are immortal novels being written right now. Some were even recently published, I'm sure. I don't know this because I've read them—I haven't read much current literature—but because people are as brilliant and violent and honest and moronic as they've always been, and with the increase in population there has to be even more geniuses bubbling up from the glorious mediocrity of our species. Why, then, don't I read them?

It's not because I think modern writing is crap. There's a hilarious character in Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando who is a literary critic living in the time of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. He rants about how terrible current writers are and avows the Greeks would never have allowed such mucking about. Later in the novel, he pops up again in the 1920s (yeah, it's a weird novel) and rants about those modern writers, declaring that the geniuses of Shakespeare's time would never allow such idiocy. The point is pretty obvious: we obsess over the geniuses of yesteryear because they have already been proven as such by the passage of time, all the while ignoring (or actively hating) the geniuses of today.

Which highlights why I don't currently read new literature: it's not because I think there is no modern Faulkner (actually, there is: Cormac McCarthy. Now that I think about it, I guess that is one current writer I read) but because I'm too impatient to take time wading through possible crap when there is an inexhaustible resource of certain genius from the past. I've already mentioned Faulkner: he published nineteen novels. I've only read seven (currently reading the eighth). Why should I pay $25 on some random person when that same money can buy me ten used books that have already proven themselves immortal?

I'll answer my own question: to support modern writers, to discover new voices on my own instead of depending on others, to see what the latest writers are doing to further the art, to have the excitement of watching a brilliant career unfold in real time. All of these are valid. The other day I was looking for writer blogs to follow, and thought for a moment “I should just search my favorite authors to see if any of them actively blog,” and then I realized they were all long dead (which is a pity, because Virginia Woolf would have been one prolific blogger) or old hermits like Cormac. 

So I've at least started to take steps toward reading current authors (sort of). On my to-read pile I've got Phillip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, but to be fair they were both born in the 30s, so they're not exactly of my generation (lol). But it's a tiny toddler's step forward.

Happy Bloomsday, by the way!

Part of me still thinks I should keep to older works as a kind of education. I like to read authors chronologically, starting with their early novels and moving forward so that I get a sense of their development, and it would make sense to approach literature as a whole in the same way. But I haven't exactly started at the beginning of literature, and mythology bores the hell out of me, so I guess that's already ruined.

Maybe I should try to work in a modern novel for every third book I read, or something like that.  Anyone have any suggestions? I like literary works, but am not a genre snob (I still maintain Stephen King is a genius for writing compulsively readable stories), and generally enjoy the kind of books that were often banned a few decades ago. I don't really have interest in supernatural stuff unless it has a brilliant new angle like Let The Right One In. I respect every writer and wish them success, but my taste just doesn't align with the Stephanie Meyers and Dean Koontzes of the world.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

The Inconvenient Necessity of Survival

Dustin Hoffman misled me again.

I don't think I could live as a reporter. For one thing, writing news means reading it, and while I strive to remain well informed, so much journalism is just terrible writing. And even when it's acceptably written it's largely power serving bullshit. Then, of course, in order to inform others you have to pretend that you are informed, which is almost never the case. The more I learn the more I realize how clueless everyone is. So much of being a journalist, pundit, or intellectual is affecting knowledge you don't have in a theory that is either unprovable, uninteresting, or so formed to be impervious when repeatedly proven wrong. That's not to disparage those out there doing their best, but the overall result is pretty fucking weak. I'm glad there are people trying, but if I were involved for too long I think I'd grow to despise my existence.

I'm going to give Comparative Literature a chance, but much of literary criticism seems to be the same. Novels are an extremely personal medium, and what few truths they address that lend themselves to discussion outside the writer-reader relationship can be addressed in a few vague and obvious observations, after which all discourse degrades to clever people being clever, honing their theories as new fictions ascribed to the old, each theorist competing to out-smart the other. In the end what results may be intelligent or even amusing, but it has little to do with the work that supposedly spurred it. It's like calling out shapes we see in clouds, only most clouds look like nothing, and we are such social animals we must make up for this lack by getting creative—because what the hell else are we going to talk about if not the clouds? So a gray shapeless cloud that means only rain is accused of being a dog, or whatever the viewer can claim to justify. This is not to say that novels are meaningless or cannot be discussed at all, but that the best meaning to be found in novels is far too intimate for one-on-one discussion, let alone that of a classroom. That's why the novelist spends hundreds of hours crafting hundreds of thousands of words in fiction form instead of writing a short lecture or essay. But then, not all criticism is ascribing bullshit to defenseless dead authors—some of it is quite interesting, such as when it is an investigation of the social circumstances of the author, which is at least somewhat factual and keeps the analyzer from straying too far into her own creativity. I don't know, I don't have that much experience with literary criticism. Only high school classes, online lectures from Yale, some essays, and quite a few introductions I've had the displeasure to make myself read. So I'll give it a chance. It's better than working. (Maybe: I'll find out.)

The reality is I'm not going to be happy doing anything but writing novels. If I can make a living that way, great. If not, then that's something I'll have to face: I'll need some other job to keep me fed while I write novels anyway. But I'm not going to do anything that negatively affects my writing. If studying literature somehow hurts my writing, I will stop studying literature. My two goals are to survive and write. Everything else is mechanics: a means to those two ends. So while I try this college thing, I'm looking out for palatable ways to make a living. The key to surviving independently seems to be building a number of small, passive revenue streams: make a little writing freelance articles, a little off novels, a little from a blog, some from some other entrepreneurial venture. I don't mind having a job, even a mindless, boring, or difficult job, but all forms of tyranny oppress me, and any boss with any measure of authority turns into a tyrant, so I'd like to figure out a way to survive without a boss. Sounds naive, right? But thousands of people manage it every day, and I see no reason I shouldn't find a way to make it work for me too. If that doesn't work out, I'd at least like to get away from the soulless corporate structure which penalizes just about every symptom of being a human being.

But above everything else is the writing. If I can get those 1,000 words in every morning, getting published will eventually happen, and beyond that I'm not too worried. It's just the inconvenient necessity of survival: that hard damned reality. I've got to figure something out for that.