Synchronicity, thy name is INTERNETS. Two academics reflecting on the frequency and quantity of their writing practice, published so close together that it can only have been accidental! In order of posting, it’s Dave Beer first, discussing a newsletter by Irina Dumitrescu in which she…

… gently pushes against more oppressive notions of productivity. This also brought to mind Oli Mould’s book Against Creativity. The problem with just focusing on the number of words written each day is that it doesn’t allow for that sort of reflection – making the formation of the final work more difficult. Including thinking time within writing, and expecting to have days when the number of words isn’t that great is, Dumitrescu notes, important for the writer and the writing. We often think of writing in quite disembodied terms, but it is deeply corporeal. Which is where Dumitrescu’s piece implicitly takes us:

‘And here is the hardest part: sometimes the creative process requires neither writing nor thinking, but rest. A break. A distraction.’

A gap for rest can perhaps help the writing, as can leaving it behind to focus elsewhere.

Then Mark Carrigan, reflecting on his usual “binge-writing” approach, which he’s trying to replace with a daily quota of words, as set against a more Beer-esque (Beery? Beerish?) approach as advocated long ago by Bertrand Russell (who I think we might reasonably file under Extremely Hard Acts To Follow):

In practice this means that thinking feeds writing. Unless you give yourself time to think, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to sit down and write later in the day. This is the problem I suspect I’m likely to find this term, at least based on the amount of my time in the last two weeks which has been consumed by administration. The challenge to write 1000 words a day certainly carves out a space in which I am committed to expressing my thought. But I’m concerned it risk squeezing out the thinking (and reading) on which that thought ultimately depends.

One might be tempted to say that Beer’s earlier post contains the answer to Carrigan’s later one, but I think that would be unwise. The answer to which of these two approaches is better is probably “it depends”—upon the particular writing task at hand, upon the way you manage projects (as mentioned previously, Beer tries to limit himself to a single project on desk at a time, which makes a lot of sense but may not be a realistic goal for many writers, academic or otherwise), and upon the writer themselves.

To be clear, I see this as a separate issue to that of The Practice. The morning pages, at least for me, are non-negotiable, and are not capital-W Writing in the way that I take both Beer and Carrigan to be be using the word in their posts; though sometimes Writing falls out of the morning pages (though it hasn’t done for me for quite some time, which is as good an indicator of burn-out as any other), they are more about turning the tap on the fermentation vat of the unconscious and seeing what comes out: venting the outgassings, if you will. Capital-W Writing is more directed and purposeful; you sit down with intent to write a particular thing, even if what you end up writing ultimately ends up as part of something else. The Practice, meanwhile, is something more like therapy without the therapist.

Ultimately I think both Beer and Carrigan are saying things that are correct. Beer’s point about resting from Writing, or/and resting a particular piece of Writing, is borne out by scores of reflections-on-the-art by creative writers that I’ve read over the years: the plot snag that untangles itself overnight, or during a walk, for example, is almost a cliche of the genre. But at the same time, I think the aspiration to do daily some work toward the end of Writing, even if that work is deliberate thinking or reading around the project, is also helpful, so long as it doesn’t become the performative and/or self-flagellating productivity fetish—hashtag-am-writing!!!1one—that Dumitrescu rightly warns against.

While I’m hesitant to advise far more accomplished writers than myself, such as Carrigan, I would nonetheless say that he’s probably right to worry about reading and thinking being sacrificed on the altar of wordcount; indeed, given his description of “binge-writing” tracks very closely to my own experiences (both with my earlier fiction work, and with my PhD thesis in particular), I suspect we may have some degree of similarity in the mental apparatus that enables us to write at all (though I may just be flattering myself shamelessly).

All this is very much front-of-mind for me, as I’m working to build back up my own Writing stamina after the horrifying drought of the summer just gone, with a particular focus on non-academic forms, especially fiction. With the exception of my story for the Phase Change anthology (which I believe is out in the world as a physical book at this point, though I am still without my contributor copy, sad-face-emoji), I have hardly written any fiction at all since moving to Sweden; there are obvious contextual factors that might be blamed for this (ahem), but nonetheless it’s something of a slippage from the small if regular amount of work I was doing in that mode before moving. Now that it seems there will likely be fewer (or perhaps even any) demands upon me for writing in the academic mode in the medium to long term, reconfiguring the brainfarm and reallocating bandwidth to more purely imaginative work is something I’m keen to do.

And so, I too am currently making the time to work on (fiction) Writing every day—though at present I am keeping the minimum contribution level very low (non-quantified, in fact), and allowing thinking and reading of a deliberate and directed sort to count as that work.

Which leads to the question of what I mean by “deliberate and directed”, and whether deliberate and directed thinking can ever replace the more “subterranean” processes that Carrigan quotes Russel as relying upon… but that’s a question for another day, I guess.