A good grab-bag of writerly tips and tricks here from Irina Dumitrescu, mainly focussed on… well, not productivity, exactly (because that’s a framing that I am trying to avoid using these days, for Reasons) but what we might call instead the Getting-Something-Done Problem. Many of them are commonplaces of online writerly discourse, but some are less so… and some of the latter, interestingly, are techniques that I discovered for myself independently under circumstances of desperation.
Perhaps my favourite, and most reliable, from that latter category is this one:
Talk to yourself on paper: write out “what I’m trying to do is….”, “What I think the problem might be here is…”, “What I want to say is this:” and see what comes out.
That was, for me, an accidental discovery made somewhere in the middle of my PhD, but has been a sanity-saver across pretty much every sort of writing I’ve found myself doing since. Worth noting that it works differently in different contexts, though: in non-fiction settings, doing this is a way of getting myself out of the digressional weeds and back to material that might actually make the main draft, but when applied to fiction, it takes me out of draft material and into a more structural, bigger-picture perspective.
A bunch of the How to keep going tips remind me of stuff Cory Doctorow has said about his process over the years, much of which seems to boil down to a conscious separation between planning/plotting and drafting: it may have changed in the years since, because he’s much more experienced (and, impossible as it may seem, much busier*) nowadays, but as I recall it, plotting was a mostly cerebral think-it-through thing to be done while, I dunno, walking the dog or chopping vegetables, while drafting was (obviously) something to be done when sat in front of the keyboard; the crucial thing was to avoid crossing the streams. I wonder how that approach has changed for him, if indeed it has?
It should go without saying that there’s no one-size-fits-all advice when it comes to a creative practice, and there’s plenty in this list that I’ve either found ineffective or actively counterproductive. In the latter category, for example, I would have to put co-working: oddly, it works for academic/non-fiction writing, at least some of the time, but I really cannot write fiction alongside someone else doing the same, and I have no idea why that might be the case.
It should also go without saying that displacement activities, e.g. writing blog material when you know you should really be doing something more substantive, are a thing, but not a totally meritless thing, in that they can help you get to do something rather than doing nothing. The trick, then, is to have the strength of will to recognise that the engine’s running, to work the clutch, and bring the gearbox into play…
[ * I remember very clearly various public appearances by Doctorow back in the late Noughties and early Teens, back when he was still the most obvious living template for Manfred Macx from Charlie Stross’s Accelerando, the paradigmatic and perpetual liveblogger of All The Things. The one I recall most sharply was his being on a panel at Picocon in London, during which he was busily typing away even while contributing to the discussion; I remember also that a friend I was sitting with proposed—in jest, in case it’s not obvious—a cruel experiment in which one would place Doctorow in a Faraday cage that blocked all electromagnetic contact with the outside world, and then place bets on how long it would take him to have some sort of breakdown. It’s worth noting that a lot of folk in that era used to argue that both Doctorow’s pedal-to-the-metal productivity and his insistence on effectively open-sourcing everything he did, fiction included, would prove unsustainable in the long run; it’s further worth noting that most of those people dropped out of The Discourse a long time ago. Point being, I suppose, that you either find what works for you, or you don’t. ]
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