The Practice of Productivity
This week, I am pleased to re-post an excerpt from writer Priscilla Long’s excellent text The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life. I heartily agree with the many readers who find the book one of the most accessible, thorough and useful writing guides they’ve read. We can all benefit from Priscilla’s lessons, this one on productivity.
The Practice of Productivity
By Priscilla Long
How much time you spend on your writing will depend on how serious you are about it. For the serious writer, writing is not merely an assignment. It is a way of life, an everyday habit.
— Richard Marius
“The creative life happens,” writes researcher Howard Gruber, “in a being who can continue to work.” (1) Continuing to work through uncertainty, through lack of recognition, and yes, even through success, is a core attribute of most high-achieving creators. As a writer, you can decide to be productive. It is a decision that can open many doors. As we know, high-achievers in the arts are more productive than average achievers. They achieve more masterworks but they also make more messes, create more duds. (2)
I like the story told in that essential book, Art & Fear, written by visual artists David Bayles and Ted Orland. A ceramics teacher divides the class in half. Potters on the right need only make one pot, but to get an A, it must be a perfect pot. Potters on the left will be graded by quantity alone. Their output will be weighed on a scale, and the heavier the output the higher the grade. And here is what happened:
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all being produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
In the end what matters to the ambitious dreamer is a steady and even rather plodding stream of work. Poems, stories, novels, creative nonfictions do not emerge as perfect art-objects. They emerge rough, awkward, contrived, and arguably awful. “Artists get better,” write Bayles and Orland, “by sharpening their skills or by acquiring new ones; they get better by learning to work, and by learning from their work.”
One strategy toward increased productivity is to set forth on a project whose success is to be gauged not by quality but by quantity. I am currently composing “one bad poem a day,” an idea I got from my good friend, the poet Bethany Reid. Why a bad poem? Because, frankly, it is impossible, at least for me, to write a good poem every day or even every week. But to write a “bad” poem every day is quite possible, even for such a busy and overbooked person as myself. What I am providing for myself is a new body of work to work on.
The List Of Works
Record keeping is another strategy toward increased productivity. I have long studied the lives and practices of high-level creators, including visual artists like Georgia O’Keeffe. These predecessor creators inspire me. Perhaps I thought, I could ratchet up my strategies and techniques — do whatever they did — to realize my own dreams as a writer. One rather odd thing I discovered is that they keep track of their works. They keep records and these records account for all their works — not just works sold or commissioned or published.
In contrast, average creators tend to forget works, abandon works, reject works, and lose works. Because of this trail of lost pieces (poems, stories, essays, paintings, or whatever), they have a weak sense of what actually constitutes their body of work, and each new piece is brand new. Their lost writing is essentially devalued writing. (And if the writer does not value his or her own work, who will value it?) This is not to say that every piece is a good piece, but that any piece whether poem or story might be worked on and eventually driven into the barn of finished work. Writers who work on their craft gain a bit of skill each year and that skill is available for honing past work. A lost poem loses its chance at art. It is lost to the possibility of revision. The creative energy expended on it, which may have been considerable, is also lost (or at least dissipated). In contrast, Yeats (for example) continued to revise his entire body of work, including his juvenilia, throughout his lifetime.
Considering all of the above, I’ve worked out a system for tracking the body of work I’ve created over the past four decades. It is remarkable how my creative inventory has helped me to deepen and extend my creative efforts. I now require all the writers in my classes to do the same, and they too find it a useful and even remarkable tool.
Each writer will devise his or her own system for keeping track of works. But for any system, a few principles should be kept in mind. The first is that the creative inventory should include all works brought to the point of first draft, not just works deemed worthy. This is a creator’s tool, not a resume.
The second is that the inventory should be organized chronologically, with the most recent at the top, so that you can see at a glance what you were doing ten years ago or twenty years ago, and so that you will have an ever-growing record of your output for the current year. Georgia O’Keeffe’s system was to keep a page in a notebook for every painting she started, in which she included materials, notes, title, dimensions, where the work was located, and so on. Because she did this as she went, the notebooks, which are dated, proceed chronologically. For visual artists such a notebook will become the basis for an eventual catalogue raisonné. A visual artist will typically include a visual representation of the work as part of the inventory.
The List of Works forms the core of my own inventory system. When I first started making my list, I was astonished at how much work I was sitting on. This, it turns out, is a common astonishment for writers who undertake to make a chronological list of every piece of work that has reached the point of first draft or beyond. If you’ve been writing for a number of years, you’ll find that it will take some time to complete your list (you open another drawer only to find one more forgotten poem, one more forgotten story). However, the minute you begin to construct your list, the benefits start accruing, and once the system is set up, it’s simple to maintain.
I keep two Lists of Works, one for prose and one for poetry. (For me this double list came about for reasons of personal history: I had begun the Complete Inventory of Poems years earlier and it is, alas, ordered from early to late — a lot of work to reverse. Most writers should simply make one list for all works.) My two lists literally contain every piece I’ve ever brought to the point of first draft or beyond. Among the items on my “List of Works — Prose” are my published history book, the draft of a novel, and a rather dreadful story I wrote in 1964, more than forty years ago. on the “List of Works — Poetry,” the earliest poem is dated summer 1970. (It’s the first poem I typed out of my journal. May the untyped “poems” of the sixties rest in peace in their respective journals.) My two Lists of Works tell me that to date I’ve written 394 poems (some published, some in circulation, some in draft, some inept) and 138 prose works, including the history book and including thirty-eight short stories (some published, some in circulation, some in draft, some inept).
What is this, quantity over quality? Exactly. But the speed of work is not at issue. I for one am a slow writer. And I definitely resist the idea of churning out slight pieces. The actual numbers matter only to the poet or writer. This is your private working tool, and the numbers it reveals are nobody’s business but your own.
The list allows you to see the work you’ve done and it signifies respect for work done. It allows you to track your yearly production. It allows you to find any given piece to take up again. The list gives you a practice that you now share with those high-achieving creators who do quantify their works. (Georgia O’Keeffe, 2,045 objects; Edouard Manet, 450 oil paintings among other works; the American painter Alice Neel, about 3,000 works; dare we mention Picasso? — 26,000 works; the remarkable short-story writer Edith Pearlman has published, according to her website, more than 250 works of short fiction and short nonfiction. That of course, does not tell us how many works Pearlman has composed.)
How to Set Up Your List of Works
Force each title on the list and all associated information to take up one and only one line (you can clearly see the items at a glance). Order the list chronologically by year, beginning with the present and working backward. Works done long ago with fuzzy dates go under decade dates (like “1980s”). As you continue to make new poems or stories it’s easy to update the list, using exact dates. Every time I complete a first draft of a new work, I put it on the list, with its date of original composition (the date the first draft was completed).
Your list includes the title of the piece. It includes the date of original composition. That is, when did you complete the first draft? That’s the date you want. Date of “final” completion is not of interest and in any case it floats. As you move backward in time you will no doubt have to guess at some dates. The date you achieve that first draft is autobiographically interesting and once fixed, never has to move. (Visual artists do it a bit differently since they typically do not consider a work a work until it is finished.)
Put after each title the word “published” or the word “circulating,” unless it is neither published nor circulating, in which case put nothing after it. Literary writers such as poets, who are not working on commission, typically have several pieces working and some lying dormant, ready to be taken up at a later date.
Finally, and this is important: The one line of information per title does not say where a piece appears if it has been published, it does not say where is circulating to, and it does not contain any sort of judgment or assessment or plan (such as “abandon?” or “revise” or “shorten”). This is not a work plan. It is a record.
A piece you may never revise just sits there, like my short story written in 1964. It is part of your body of work. It shows you where you have been. For me, that first story of mine, however amateur, is a remarkable repository of threads I find woven into subsequent writing. Thus may a creator’s preliminary works have interest and value. (Besides, some day I may revise that old story.) Here is a literal copy of a segment of my list.
LIST OF WORKS – PROSE LIST 2008
“Studio” (November 2008) CIRCULATING
“Memento Metro” (October 2008) PUBLISHED
“Elegy for Roz” (June 2008) PUBLISHED
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fur-Covered Teacup”
(June 2008) PUBLISHED
“On Quietness” (March 2008) CIRCULATING
“The Keeper” (story) (January 2008) 2007
“My Brain on my Mind” (June–December 2007) PUBLISHED
“From Chaos to Creative Achievement” (July 2007) PUBLISHED
“Got Manure?” (June 2007)
“My old Friend” (story) (March 12, 2007)
“Polymer Persons” (February 2007) PUBLISHED
“Purple Prose” (February 2007) CIRCULATING
etcetera
Where are these works, physically? I keep one digitalized copy, latest version only, on the computer and I keep its printed-out hard copy in chronologically ordered three-ring binders (one for poetry, one for creative nonfictions, one for short stories). Previous drafts and marked-up workshopped copies are put far away in archive boxes or in the recycle bin. The hard copies of current versions have their date of original composition written on them.
As you begin this process of listing your works, you will make interesting discoveries, the first being the actual extent of your work to date. Another surprise for me was to find works I considered vastly inferior, requiring (I thought) massive revision, which in reality were close to complete. A lyrical essay I wrote had been gathering dust for five years. I worked on it for two hours and sent it out. It’s a lovely piece (I now think). It appeared in a lovely literary journal and was that year nominated for a Pushcart!
Constructing your List of Works will help you become a more aware writer. Each year it will give you a measuring stick of your annual progress — defined not by the external world of prizes and publications but by you, the creator.
Finally, the List of Works stands as an emblem of respect for the work. It is a creator’s tool that can help artists, poets, and writers realize their dream of creating a meaningful body of work.
WORKING AND PLAYING WITH THE WORK
There are a number of ways to stay productive and many are fun. Take an evening writing class at an adult education center or writer’s center and then do your assignments. (You would be embarrassed not to!) There are very well-published writers who continue to take courses from time to time. Consider the assignments to be more than mere make-work: Plan yours to result in a published piece.
Make a schedule with a buddy to do such-and-such an amount of work by such-and-such a date on which you will meet again at a cafe. Take a book of short creative nonfictions and write one piece a week using each structure in turn (following carefully the guidelines laid out in Part II, so as not to create an imitative piece but to use the deep structure only). Or do what poet Marvin Bell begs us to do:
Stay up half the night for a week and write one hundred poems. Write badly, rawly, smoothly, accidentally, irrationally… join the disparate. Make the unlike and the unlike like. When you can’t write, read. Use the word window in every line. Write about colors. Set out to write a poem “like a sweater.” It makes no difference. The coherence is already within you. Afterward, you will have learned more about writing than an entire semester of classes can teach you. (4)
All this works its alchemy because work grows out of work. Productive writers have more fun. The stakes on each piece are lower, because you are making more pieces. Another lucky thing: When you learn to be really productive, you begin coming into more surprises and more interesting turns. As your craft skill becomes more acute, you come to see that you can turn any piece — at least any piece written from the heart — into a fine finished piece. It all becomes so much more engrossing and entertaining and it is the road to that charmed country we call success.
Notes:
1) Howard E. Gruber quoted in Vera John-Steiner, Notebooks of the Mind, 78.
2) D.K. Simonton, “Creativity from a Historiometric Perspective,” Handbook of Creativity edited by Robert J. Sternberg, 122.
3) David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear, 28–29
4) Marvin Bell, “Three Propositions,” in Writers on Writing, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, 10–11.
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