Writing straight from your heart is illuminating, cathartic, liberating, and productive. But it is not everything.
Productivity is not the leading force in your career, but only one of several important cores of your professionalism as a writer. Accepting this principle leads to the inevitable, releasing, and uplifting corollary that there are times when productivity should be de-emphasized.
The recognition of productivity’s importance does not make you its slave. Many young writers, eager to start off on the “right foot”, create an environment that maximizes their writing productivity, believing that they can “mass-produce” manuscripts, The difficulty with this unbalanced approach is its un-sustainability. As long work days stretch into the evening, family life suffers. As five day work weeks stretch to six and seven day writing-marathons, the natural leisure of a restful weekend is squeezed out. Holiday periods are compressed, and the restoration of vacation is squandered by constantly rewriting a chapter or waiting for a review of another lands in your email box. Thus, productivity is maximized at the expense of personal development.[1]
The “productivity at all costs” environment is degrading as your personal damage grows, and the self-sacrifice becomes the driving force of self-destruction. Ironically, the environment created to maximize writing productivity ultimately poisons the plant it was designed to nourish.
Alternatively, build an environment and a work-style that focuses on creating and energizing your attitude and sharpening your talent. Specifically, this means first creating the internal attitude, then the external environment that allows you to bring the best of your talents to bear on your novel.
Take the time to develop your best judgment. Take the time to create good standards. Take the time to generate a finely tuned ethic. Each of these come from careful thought, reading, and consideration during your character sabbatical.
A useful metric is ask yourself when working “Am I giving the best effort, attention, insight, and intellectual force to this?” If you can’t do that because you too tired, or too hungry, or too angry, or emotionally spent, then you have no business trying to write a chapter or develop a character. Fix the attitude or physical problem first, then return to work.
Building this attitude and environment takes consistent effort, requiring you to accept a productivity pause while you instead focus on your actions, motivations, and values. Consistent effort here sharpens your skills, permits the best application of those skills, and thereby generates the best work from you.
In addition, this atmosphere, unlike the previous environment, is actually good for you. The fact that you have chosen not to sacrifice your best nature to productivity, but instead are willing to sacrifice productivity so that you can use the best of your talents to be productive reaffirms the natural authority that you have over your life. You aren’t being productive to gain value. You are productive because you have value.
Sacrificing time for another
Writing can be collaborative and interactive. At its core, collaboration means that you sacrifice some of your productivity time for another author.
Commonly this level of sacrifice is small. You may be working against an imminent deadline when you receive a visit from a friend and fellow writer who needs your help. Perhaps it is with a technical matter involving a complicated piece of dialogue. It might be an ethical issue that they observed with their publicist. Perhaps they need to talk through some insecurity as they face a difficult reading, and they need you to be a sounding board for a few minutes.
There is no question but that you “do not have the time for this”. If you take time from your productivity to help your colleague, you miss your own productivity goal.
I have felt this way often, but have rejected the concept that the time I give to them is time that I lose. This is because I have never experienced, despite fears to the contrary, my self-sacrificing effort for another to come back against me. The entire concept that time is a zero sum game, when it comes to self-sacrifice, I have found is a theoretical canard; a disturbing self-protective idea from my self-absorbed mind.
One of the assumptions in the “I have no time for you” philosophy is that it is more important that you meet your goal than that they meet theirs.
That may be wholly wrong. It is quite possible that their work stands to make a greater contribution than yours.
This is a turn of the question that we commonly do not consider – that in the end, our colleagues may be a greater writer than we are. This forces us to ask why we are doing what we do? For society? For ourselves? Sometimes we cannot even know until the end.
Gravity
Consider one of the important scientific questions consuming7th and 18th century England. What is the nature of gravity and what laws govern it?
Many scientists and philosophers at the time claimed to have the answer, but upon closer inspection, none seemed to have the proof demonstrating that answer’s veracity. So specialists turned to Robert Hooke.
Robert Hooke was a scientist of great reputation, having made stunning advances with the early microscope, and, using this new microscope, discovered the cell. When asked, Hooke asserted that he knew the law that governs the attractions of bodies for each other, and in fact demanded he be given credit for the solution to the problem. However, he never provided the answer or the proof of his answer, demanding that his reputation required that his word be accepted.
One of his inquisitors, Edmund Halley, in frustration visited Cambridge to see Isaac Newton, to get his perspective. Isaac Newton during this period of life was a morose and brooding recluse.
When Halley asked him about gravitational law, Newton glibly recited the law of gravity, and said he had a proof. But when Halley challenged him for it, Newton was unable to find it in the mess of his writings that were strewn throughout the room. Halley was crestfallen, but Newton, unshaken, said that he would simply re-derive it, and asked Halley to return.
At the appointed date and time, Newton provided the detailed mathematical proof.
Halley, stunned at the clear proof of the law if gravity that he had suspected but never seen, asked and cajoled Newton to publish this at once. But Newton was adamant. He had had a run in with Hooke years ago, when Hooke falsely accused Newton of plagiarism of his work on the light spectrum. Newton, then young, isolated, and humiliated, retreated to his home on the campus, vowing never to publish again. He now spent his time alone working in alchemy, brooding, and applying mathematics to the New Testament in order to predict the second coming of Jesus.
Now,, Halley left his own work behind, devoting himself to Newton. He spent months with the recluse, finally convincing him to put his writings in one body of work. Halley edited Newton’s work, debated with him and ultimately befriended him. He drew no salary for the effort, and let his own work in mapping the stars and a lucrative sea salvage operation lapse.
Finally, Newton was done. The final work was published under the title of Principia.
Principia is considered one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. Not only did it explain the movement of the planets, but it removed the notion that astronomical forces were solely in the purview of God and beyond man’s understanding. Thus, the entire field of astronomy was now laid bare, available not just for awe and inspiration but for study and deduction.
And this body of work would not have been generated if Edmond Halley not sacrificed his time, effort and what little money he had to be the friend, counselor, benefactor and psychologist of Isaac Newton.[2]
The power of self-sacrifice can be explosive.
[1] Unfortunately, there are literary agents and publishing houses who are perfectly happy with your uncontrolled productivity. Indulging themselves in the self-serving notion that “if you’re willing to kill yourself, why should they stop you,” is the snide justification that permits them to profit from your self-destructive work effort.
[2] Ironically, what is known as Halley’s comet was not discovered by Halley. His contribution was that his assertion that comets followed elliptical orbits and that they returned at predictable times.