I’ve been so used to priming myself to be as efficient of a content machine as I could possibly be while working in a traditional newsroom for four years that this whole creative writing / literary career I’m embarking on makes me feel so. damn. unproductive! What am I really measuring at the end of the day? Number of words I’ve written? Pages? Pitches I’ve sent? $$?
The problem with using any of the aforementioned as viable measuring tools: I can and probably will delete some of those words and pages; I will definitely have more rejected pitches than accepted and it’s naive to believe all of my invoices will even be paid on time.
And the thing is, when it comes to making art I’m truly proud of, the more I think of my workday as requiring a tangible output, the less inspired I am to actually put pen to paper and let my brain do its thing. I’ve been so deeply conditioned to measure success by the minutes, page views, clicks, ad revenue. And that unyielding pressure to produce in numbers is what I wanted to leave behind when I decided to step away from the newsroom, right?
As I try to figure out how to go to bed without a storm brewing in my head, one way I’ve adopted more arbitrary (intangible?) ways of finding fulfillment in writing is through a short story writing class. The online course assigns me all kinds of written tasks—to wake up before dawn and write about the light, to write 10 paragraphs about an uncanny object (I wrote about some ugly curtains) or to burn through a first draft of a single scene in 45 minutes.
I initially approached the class as just something to learn from on the side, something that might lead to a few submissions down the road. But the assignments have actually introduced me to corners of my mind you can only really uncover with patience and quiet detachment from reality, locked up in a room of one’s own. There’s little room or time left to think about the number of words or pages or any other kind of measurable output.
I’m grateful to be free of data analytics and the pressure to beat last month’s numbers, but this is slow, slow work, this craft tuning thing. I’m learning—and unlearning—how to measure a good day’s work.
So far, I like to end my day by asking: Have I written a sentence or paragraph I’d want to share with the world? Have I read new writing that made me want to grab a pen for annotating? Have I improved at any writing skills, and if so, how? If not, why and how do I plan on changing that? Did the process of writing excite me today? Did it get me down instead? How can I change things up, reel that excitement back in tomorrow?
Slow, slow work.
—fiza