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Productivity in a Time of Madness
People have wondered how my writing is going. So, here it is:
I’ve been stuck inside my house since mid-March.
I’ve got three kids, two cats, and a dog, all trapped in said house with me.
I’ve been teaching a 7yo to read, potty training a 2yo, soothing a 10yo’s anxieties about missing a Zoom meeting and getting in trouble. There has been a lot of crying.
I’ve been making lunch for everybody, especially for my wife, who has spent about 9-10 hours a day, every day trying to make sure my state’s transportation systems are safe, funded, and provided with all the PPE necessary to save lives.
The president is a fascist traitor. No, that’s not a political opinion.
Cops are tear-gassing and beating people protesting police violence all over my homeland.
The fireworks – always prevalent – have been going off all night, every night since early May.
A global pandemic has killed 115,000 of my countrymen at this point, with only more on the way.
…
And during all of this, I have managed to write two short stories, a rough draft of a novel, and a textbook chapter.
So, the question is: HOW?
Let’s first recognize my privilege: I am still employed and I don’t need to worry about food or paying my mortgage or anything. My family is supportive of my writing – especially my wife. My 10yo daughter has been crucially helpful in wrangling my toddler, allowing me to spend about 4 hours any given day (in 2-hour spurts) at “work” up in my office. Oh, yeah – I live in a house large enough to have a room to myself I can call an office. I also do not suffer from any particular mental illness I am aware of – I do not battle depression or anxiety, I am not a victim of trauma. I am extremely fortunate.
Beyond this, though, I find that the global catastrophes are motivating me to write rather than preventing it. For one thing, writing is an escape for me – I crawl inside my book or my stories and live there for a while and forget about everything in the world. It isn’t that I’m not worried about the world outside, but I have found that pretty much the only thing I can do is to sit down and write through it all. I sort of need to, in order to feel normal.
I say all this not as a kind of humblebrag, mind you. If anything, doing this has made me feel strange and almost disconnected. The vast majority of people I know are having trouble staying motivated, distracted too much by the outside world to focus. It sort of makes me wonder if my capacity for empathy is broken or if I’m being unusually selfish by locking myself away as I am (to the extent that I am). But…I can’t help it. I have to write to feel normal. I have to tell stories.
And furthermore: remember that this isn’t a race. I am writing well right now, fine, but soon enough you’ll be writing better than I am. And what does better/worse even mean in this context? We are all doing what we can. Me? I’m huddled up with my laptop in my office writing as much as I can – that’s how I’m coping. You? You might be coping some other way. Regardless of how, though, we are going to make it through this. We are all going to have stories to tell. And we are all going to have the time to tell them one day.
So, don’t measure how you’re writing against how anybody else is. As somebody who can’t write at any other time than the summer months (because of my day job), I keenly feel that sensation of falling behind, of not being able to keep up, of losing your focus. That’s me, eight months of the year. How do I deal with it then? I do a little work here, a little work there. I plug along at a snail’s pace. I focus on short fiction and editing and keep my expectations low. It’s frustrating, but I get there. You will too.
Good luck, my writing friends. It’s nuts out there. Keep dealing as best you can. You have my admiration and my support, always.
The Writing Groove
Everybody’s writing process is a little bit different – I want to make that clear at the outset, here. Anybody telling you that you have to write at such-and-such a time or at such-and-such a pace is full of it. I, for instance, roundly reject the notion that you must write every day. Horseshit, I say! I used to try doing it that way, and my productivity was abysmal. Then I stopped worrying about writing every day and started focusing all my writing efforts on particular weeks or months where I would have fewer distractions (the summers, semester breaks, vacations, etc.), and my yearly productivity basically tripled almost overnight. I now write a novel and anywhere from 5-10 short stories a year, and have published *about* a novel and 3-5 short stories a year for the past few years. So, what I’m saying is that my system seems to work.
No matter what your writing process is like, though, I think we can all agree that the primary obstacle to producing those words is the challenge of sticking your butt in a chair and writing them (whenever and however that is done). It’s hard work, writing, though very few people who aren’t writers think about it as such. To them (the “norms,” let’s call them), we are eternal dawdlers and daydreamers, sitting in our comfy little offices and wasting our time telling make-believe stories for short money. “Get a real job,” is the sentiment (even though almost every single writer I know has a “real” job in addition to their other, evidently fake one).
Remember: the words don’t write themselves
Such people must be met with stiff resistance, friends. Don’t let them get away with such slights. You tell your uncle that you have taken the week off to write and he says “so you’re free for lunch?” The answer is “no, I’m working.” Writing is work. You do it for pay (well, unless you don’t, and don’t intend to, in which case a lot of this doesn’t necessarily apply). There are literally endless distractions and interference that can keep you from writing those words, from earning your (admittedly meager) pay. You must resist them.
For me, the very best tool I have against distraction is routine. During my writing periods, I get up, eat, get the kids to school/daycare, go to my office, and dive in and write for a few hours. I take breaks, usually at the scene breaks in whatever I’m working on. I work until lunch, then after lunch I put in another hour or two, and then, after approximately 5-6 hours of writing in a day, I’m spent and I read or do something else for a while before I pick all the kids up from school again. This is my approximate routine, and it works very well. Your routine may well be vastly different, but I bet, once you get into it, it works similarly as well.
I call this zone – this place where you are set in your routine, churning out the words on a regular basis – “the groove.” It takes me a few days to really get into the groove, but once I’m in it, I do not want to come out again. I resent disruptions to my routine – I don’t want to switch who picks up whom from school with my wife, I don’t want to run errands of any kind, I don’t want to have to deal with things that don’t fit into the groove – because it’s just so damned easy to get knocked out of it.
Once, I was on a deadline and we had scheduled a trip to Hawaii to visit my sister and meet my new niece. This was a 10 day stay in Honolulu with family, on the beach, hiking volcanoes, going surfing.
I was distraught.
My sister’s apartment? A ten minute walk from this beach. Seriously.
I know, I know – what kind of psychopath is upset by a trip to Hawaii?
The writing kind, is what. What if I couldn’t concentrate? What if I couldn’t put my butt in the chair and produce those words? I’d miss my deadline (unacceptable to me). I fully realize that other people don’t understand this. Right now, there’s a significant portion of my reading audience scrunching up their nose and going “seriously? Hawaii? Poor baby.”
But I am being serious. Distractions are the #1 most dangerous thing to a writer, by far. Other than your own personal obsessions, there is almost no reason to sit in front of that computer and infinite reasons not to. Maybe you’re hungry. Maybe you hear the phone ringing. Maybe somebody’s at the door. And on and on and on…
The good news is that I managed to produce plenty when on vacation in Hawaii. How did I do it? Routine! My wife would take the kids out in the mornings to do something fun and I would stay in the little apartment and type away. Then, in the afternoon, I would enjoy Hawaii – the beach, the ocean, the city, and so on. It worked, and if it can work there, it can probably work anywhere.
Get in the groove, people. Fight to stay there. Write those words. Conquer your writing goals!
Auston Habershaw 