Writing Is about the Right Words, not the MOST Words
Why are we more comfortable talking about output than art?
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Look, I have nothing against NaNoWriMo. My attitude is always that whatever process works for a given writer (or given project) is great. No process is better than any other, and many people seem to genuinely be helped by a vomit-it-up-and-edit-later approach. But I’m starting to think that the general “NaNoWriMo culture” is giving people some weird ideas about art. Because a whole lot of writers seem to think that writing isn’t about artistry and creativity, but drudgery and output.
The above exchange is funny because John Scalzi is a bestselling and award-winning author who is famous for signing a multimillion dollar 10-year contract with Tor, and the people who he is anonymously screenshotting are, well, not. If Scalzi can earn both a lot of money and critical acclaim by only writing a few hours a day, you’d think that would be a point in his favor. “I work way harder for less result!” is not exactly a flex.
But the general attitude is one I see all the time. Writers are often less comfortable talking about aesthetics than productivity. They’ll brag about the years they worked on something or the number of drafts they’ve done. It’s as if they aren’t making art but operating a plastic pellet factory. “Check out this optimized output!” And I get it. Art is hard to talk about. Plus, America is a country that hates “pretentiousness” even when the pretention gets get results. (See, for example, the wild reactions to the profile of Jeremy Strong. Yes, Strong is a bit out there… but he’s also a star on one of the best shows on television. His process works, isn’t that what matters?)
Anyway, isn’t it a little weird to talk about the creation of art like an economist calculating rates of return. Who cares about an author’s Gross Domestic Pages or fourth-quarter wordcount increase? Tell me if the words are worth reading or not.
On one level, I think this is part of the general anti-artist bent to American life. Most people love to consume artistic “content,” but equally love to mock artists. If you’re going to love Jeremy Strong on TV, you still want to be able to hate him on Twitter. It’s kind of amazing how often artists are told to “get a real job” by people who spend most of their day watching TV, reading, gaming, or listening to music.
Some of this is just capitalism brain. But it also feels like a shift has happened.
Most of the internet has been buzzing about The Beatles documentary for the last few weeks, and it’s hard not to think there was a time in America when the rock stars everyone looked up to were, well, rock stars instead of business leaders whose horrible companies are destroying the world. I’m not personally the biggest The Beatles fan, but they’re certainly better role models than Musk, Jobs, and Zuckerberg.
More relevant to this article/rant: the awe people felt at seeing The Beatles write a song on the spot.
It’s hard for me to imagine someone replying, “Pssh, I spent 500 hours on my pop song no one listened to! The Beatles aren’t real musicians.” Why is this impressive but writing a great novel quickly is not?
It feels like there’s something particular about writing as an art form that makes people want to dismiss it as art, and thus makes writers defensively describe it like day job drudgery instead. If people won’t respect your qualitative creativity, maybe they’ll at least respect your quantitative output?
My suspicion is that writing is more dismissible because it lacks the “technical” side of other art forms. Even the staunchest anti-art bore knows they can’t pick up a guitar and play “Get Back” without any training or practice…. much less sculpt a perfect figure out of marble. But most everyone knows how to type words, and so they imagine they could write a novel if they had the interest or time. (I think this is also why people openly mock abstract art—“my five-year-old could paint that!”—in a way they don’t mock Renaissance paintings or Roman sculptures. You have to respect technical skills, but you don’t have to respect creativity.)
Anyway, this is a much more rambling post than I normally write here. So let me bring this back to writing.
I do think it’s important—at least for most of us—to “put the butt in the chair” as they say. The muse comes when you are putting in the work, at least in my experience. Personally, I do a timer instead of a wordcount goal. That’s just what works for me. At the same time, it’s important to remember that time spent in front of your computer, the number of drafts written, the number of words written… none of those actually mean anything by themselves.
A short story written in 20 drafts is not necessarily better or worse than one written in 3 drafts. The same story might even be worse on draft 11 than it was on draft 10. One of my favorite stories of all time, Kafka’s “The Judgement,” was apparently written in a single sitting with minimal revision. Five hours at the computer writing unusable material isn’t better than spending your day taking a stroll while your mind, as it inevitably does, continues to think about the material.
Writing is art. It’s not a plastic pellet factory. What matters is finding the right words, however you define those, using whatever process works best for you. Everything else is noise.
In personal news, my novel The Body Scout, was named one of the Best SFF Books of the Year by both Tor.com and The New York Times. And, if I may say so, it would make a good xmas gift for the noir / science fiction / baseball lover in your life.
The most baffling thing about the reaction to Scalzi's post was that 4 hours of real work and an hour or two of answering emails is, like, a typical 8-hour day for any American office worker once you subtract pointless meetings and frittering around on the Internet. And this ratio of writing to business/correspondence seems incredibly common among full time fiction writers.
So I have a slightly different theory. During the pandemic, I've gotten really into following visual artists on Instagram, and it's striking to me how much more interesting their "progress" posts are than writers'. When I see a prose writer post a line of dialogue or description out of context, usually with the hashtag #amwriting, my eyes basically glaze over. I have never once been tempted to share one of these, or to seek out more work by the poster if I wasn't already familiar with their stuff. However, a photo of a painting detail or a short video of a deftly embroidering needle or a spinning lump of clay on a potter's wheel frequently captivates me.
I think for many unpublished writers, or even published writers far from the completion of a new project, word count updates are one of the few offerings they can give to the world to get any kind of validation. So when a writer with more sources of validation, like Scalzi, downplays the importance of that, they get massively defensive. It's a dumb reaction (and actually can reinforce bad writing habits you've written about before, like pushing through to finish a draft that doesn't have the potential to work), but it does come from a place of wanting to legitimize a largely invisible and uninteresting-to-others process.