Many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of “productivity debt”, which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It’s as if I need to justify my existence, by staying “on top of things”
Tag: quotes
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I don’t linger a lot in self-delusory exercises in control — don’t describe too much or even have to have an objective idea of what a scene is about. My only responsibility to an active imagination is to submit myself to a state of being where characters other than I move around and I try to serve that process. I just get to that — I don’t plan scenes. I don’t outline. I feel my way along because I have come to believe everything you believe about writing instead of writing is bullshit. It doesn’t apply. You can make an outline but an outline is not going to work because it doesn’t apply to what is actually written. I am content to work in uncertainty much more than I used to be — content to not know where I am going.
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No one’s looking for what you can do, they’re just looking at what you do.
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For me, writing a book is not about knowing something and then conveying it. (…) It’s a struggle with something so difficult that it takes all of my resources, and some I didn’t previously know about. Mostly, I don’t know what it’s a struggle with – that’s what I’m trying to find out.
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I feel fraudulent giving advice. I’m a writer narrowly focused on the page in front of me and then the page after that. But maybe that is advice in itself: focus on the page in front of you. That’s what I see in a writer like Toni Morrison. A fierce, unyielding work ethic, focused on the page. She was on a mission from the beginning, to complete this cycle of books and set down her ideas, impressions, and memories, both personal and historical. You can’t distract her from this task. For me, a living example like that was always more useful than “advice”.
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Maybe you don’t know how to do the work in question, and you’re hoping relentless effort might serve as a substitute for that knowledge. Maybe you don’t really want to do it at all, but just think you ought to want to do it, so you’re using “productivity” to try to force the missing desire into being. Or perhaps you think you need a flawless record of achievement in order to justify your existence on the planet – and if the stakes are that high, clearly you can’t afford to put a foot wrong.