On Setting Goals, Being Honest

One of my big soapbox issues (as my students will attest) is the need for writers to be honest with themselves. I've had the opportunity to earn two graduate degrees in writing, which means that I've been fortunate enough to meet a number of great writers (some of them with books, most of them working toward that goal), as well as some not-so-great writers. In my opinion, the difference between these two camps rarely has anything to do with talent or skill--as Steven King once said (and I'm paraphrasing here), any hack can hack out a decent story every now and then--but with discipline and perseverance.

When you are disciplined, productivity comes along for the ride. This is what separates the wheat from the chaff, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his essay "Creation Myth":

The psychologist Dan Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn't necessarily that he had a greater ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. "Quality," Simonton writes, is "a probabilistic function of quantity."

Gladwell also goes on to point out that the person with far more ideas than the rest of us will not only have more successes, but also more failures (as stands to reason). 

So what does this have to do with writing? I've known a lot of people who call themselves writers, yet do very little writing. They are not being productive enough to give themselves a fighting chance at success, and that's a point that I am continually trying to make with my students. It's vital that we walk the walk.

To be clear, this is not a stand-on-my-high-horse moment. Okay, it is a little, but the truth of the matter is that I don't write as often as I should--very few of us do. Even the most productive writers have bad days--find themselves watching TV or washing the car, actively avoiding their novel or poetry collection, when they should be typing away. It happens. We're human, imperfect. And I've never been interested in [A] beating myself up over it, [B] making excuses for it. To me, not writing (when it occurs) is a fact--like the weather or taxes. Your feelings about it after the fact do not change what happened (or didn't happen, as the case may be). And so, as I see it, it is the writer's job not to flagellate him/herself for every mistake, but  to take efforts--sometimes drastic efforts--to avoid making these mistakes often, or worse, habitually. The same can be said for any activity or obligation that requires discipline. Working out. Dieting. Learning a language. Taking a class. Doing your job. Reading. Sending out for publication. . . . All of those New Years resolutions!

Occasional lapses are one thing. If you want to get hung up on them--by all means, be my guest--but the habit of not writing, specifically among so-called writers (we could call them the post-MFA crowd, though that's neither entirely true or exclusively true), is what I am really talking about here. Go to any bookstore, and you will find books on dealing with writers block. Go to any major writing conference, and you will find panels about "recovering" from the MFA (which really means, how to motivate yourself to write when you are no longer receiving a grade for it). Spend any time with a group of fledgling writers, and talk will eventually turn to how much or how little the members of that group have written lately (often qualified by a list of other obligations and priorities, sometimes tinged with self-loathing).

Not writing is practically an industry.

About a year ago, I was invited to join a support group of post-MFA writers who wanted to gather regularly at a bar to talk about how hard it was now to find time and motivation to write. As we know, statistically speaking, most MFAs give up writing within 5 years of their graduation. There have been plenty of explanations for this--including that MFA programs are often the place where writers discover that they are not actually as interested in writing as they thought they were--but as you've probably guessed, the reasons for this don't interest me much. If a person discovers he or she doesn't want to write, he or she shouldn't write. You don't always realize such things until you try devoting yourself to them. And I'll be damned if I'm going to be one of those snobs who casts condescending looks at a person who says, "You know what? It turns out writing just isn't for me. I like it, but I don't love it." Far better to realize that and then dedicate yourself to something that you are passionate about, something that you do love, a field where you can make a real difference (not to mention, a little money). Keep writing as a hobby. Or reading for that matter. God knows, the world needs readers. I'm that way with music (I'll never be a musician. I didn't love practicing scales enough, didn't take it seriously enough. I've accepted that. It doesn't stop me from tinkering with a song every so often. Or singing along--albeit poorly--with the radio.)

No, the group of people I am referring to are folks who take a lot of pride in calling themselves writers, even though they kill very few trees over the course of a year. If you are currently in a writing program, you'll identify these people from among the folks sitting next to you in your workshop because they are the ones who don't read the work and never provide useful feedback. They are more interested in their new aviator sunglasses or the ironic sculpting of their facial hair than they are about revising their work or helping you to revise yours.

If you are out of a program, these people look a lot like the folks who approached me for their support group. As you can also probably guess, I politely declined their offer, wishing them the best of luck. I made some lame excuse about other obligations. I didn't tell them what was actually going through my mind, which was this: Why not use that time to write? Or even to get together at the library to write as a group, if it'll help keep you honest?

Why didn't I say this? Well, first, because I didn't feel like being a jerk. And, second, because I already knew the answer: The group's purpose was not to help these people write more; it had a two-fold mission: [1] to absolve these people from writing by showing them that they aren't alone in their plight and by providing a space for them to collectively farm excuses, and [2] to provide an occasion to drink beer on a Thursday afternoon.

To me, what sets these kinds of writers apart from those who are truly successful (those folks Gladwell is referring to) is that the wannabe writers are not honest with themselves. They are too comfortable with their own excuses, too quick to commiserate over their communal lack of productivity. It's not that their reasons for not writing aren't valid enough--work, family, exhaustion, other obligations. From time to time, we all let these kinds of things interfere with our creative work. Life happens. Some days your car won't start and you spend the whole day replacing the radiator. Other days your dog dies and you just don't have the emotional wherewithal to work on your novel. There are times when writing won't be an option (at least, not an easy one). And, as I've said already, I believe it's okay to cut ourselves slack in these circumstances.

Most days, writing will be an option--if you've got time to watch TV, you've got time to write, right? Again, if I am being honest about it, I've failed here, too. There have been days when I could have written that I simply was not in the mood to sit down and work. I felt tired. Sad. Intellectually gummed up. Impotent to write anything meaningful. Mocked by the blinking cursor. Fortunately, those bad days are greatly outnumbered by the good days, those days when I get at least a few pages written and sometimes much more. These are the days where I make time for my writing--after all, that's what it's really all about, right: Making time and overcoming inertia? Furthermore, unlike the writers I've mentioned, when I screw up, I don't try absolve myself of not writing. I live with that knowledge. I've either written or I haven't--it's fairly straightforward. I'm too old now to go soft-shoeing around the facts.

In the front of my notebook, I've written the following four statements--I consider them to be all the explanation I'll ever need to offer myself when I screw up:

1. I didn't write as much as I should have today
2. The reason I didn't write as much as I should have today is because I didn't prioritize writing the way it demands to be prioritized
3. The reason I didn't prioritize my writing today is because I wasn't disciplined enough to do so
4. I don't have time to wallow in self-loathing or to commiserate with other writers who don't write as much as they should; I'm too busy becoming more self-disciplined so that tomorrow this won't be a problem

Beyond that, if you are looking for an answer to the question: "How do I keep writing?" My answer has to do with putting one's butt in one's seat. Thinking about writing is not writing. Neither is outlining and planning, conducting research, or talking with friends about your project. Wishing you were writing? Also not writing. Surfing the net when you could be writing? That's definitely not writing. Finishing is writing.

Ron Carlson says it far more eloquently:

The most important thing a writer can do after completing a sentence is to stay in the room. The great temptation is to leave the room to celebrate the completion of the sentence or go out in the den where the television lies like a dormant monster and rest up for a few days for the next sentence or to go wander the seductive possibilities of the kitchen. But. It’s this simple. The writer is the person who stays in the room.

John Dufresne puts it this way:

Understand that if you didn’t write today it’s because you didn’t want to. You didn’t have the perseverance or the courage to sit there. You lacked the will and the passion. Maybe you didn’t enjoy it enough—we always find time to do the things we love. Your choice not to write—and it is a choice . . . .

And, of course, I am put to mind of this Latin proverb:

If there is no wind, row.

So get to the part about "setting goals," you are undoubtedly thinking. How do we keep ourselves honest?

Well, I've found that the best way to combat complacency is by taking measures to make sure that you always know how much writing you've accomplished. Think about it, do you know any runners who don't keep track of how many miles they ran? Any weightlifters who don't count pounds? Tracking progress is important. As writers, the best thing we can do for ourselves is keep track of exactly how much we are writing, whether it be by time (an hour, two hours, etc.) or by word/page count (500 words, 1000 words, etc.). This is not a new or groundbreaking revelation: Darrell Spencer, my teacher when I was at Ohio University, once told us that he'd made a promise to himself when he was in grad school. He would read three stories a day and one novel a week. He would also write every day--short fiction during the week, his novel on the weekend. He'd kept that promise, even under some difficult circumstances, and he had no regrets.

That anecdote didn't sink in at first, but by the time I had graduated, I knew how important it was to set goals. I learned my particular strategy for keeping track of my progress from a good friend of mine in grad school who knew exactly how many pages she'd produced at the end of her three years. (It was staggering: over 1,700 pages.) And since then, I've tweaked my approach a bit. For example, I find it more useful to track yourself across a significant period of time--a week, a month (preferably not more than a month)--rather than living and dying over every single day. At the end of the month, one page a day is no different than thirty pages total. (Though it is worth recognizing that it is very hard to write 30 pages in, say, a week if writing is not a regular [read: daily] habit for you.)

The flip-side to recording your productivity is this: It becomes the carrot at the end of the stick. When you feel good about how much you've accomplished, you are more inclined to continue working hard. I believe that when we are being productive, it is useful to recognize the amount of work we've put into our writing, to document it, because often the bulk of our work is the only validation we will receive.

After the first month in my current creative writing class Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, I asked the students to tally how many words they'd written. As amateur writers, their goal was to have drafted between 3,600 and 6,300 words. By my calculation, that's between 12 and 21 pages--not an insignificant accomplishment! (At the top end, it would come out to over 250 pages for the year.) When the group crunched their numbers, every single member had written more than 12 and most had written more than 21. The group was, of course, surprised to learn that they had written as much as they had. And they were also thrilled about it because, as one group member said, it felt "damn good." (Far better than any support group, I imagine.)

Not one to be a hypocrite, I crunched the numbers for myself. When doing this, of course, it is important that we also not cheat by "fudging" the numbers. (Filing your taxes, for example, is not creative nonfiction--though I suppose it could feel like it sometimes, depending on your write-offs.) I counted only my novel-in-progress and the creative nonfiction essays I've been writing lately. I didn't count blogging (though I still think it's valuable, and I hope you do, too). By the end of the month, I had drafted over 23,000 words (that's about 75 pages or 2 pages a day).

I agree with my students: It feels damn good.