This post doesn’t relate directly to Demon Muse’s guiding theme of creativity as a muse/daemon/genius-powered phenomenon, but it does add to the advice I gave in “Advice for Writers: Dig Deep into Your Passion.” Someone recently posted a message to one of my favorite online hangouts for writers, editors, and readers to ask about 1) what sort of output, in terms of length, most writers aim for or achieve on a regular basis, 2) the degree of difference between the first drafts and final drafts produced by most working writers, and 3) advice for overcoming the “inner editor” that can lock down the creative drive by emasculating it at the inception point. This elicited a flow of words from me that’s reprinted below.
Which — as I add before turning you over to said flow of words — means there is indeed a crossover value with this blog, because my demon muse was clearly involved in the writing of this advice. When I clicked the “reply” button to contribute to that online conversation, I was expecting to write two or three sentences. Roughly a thousand words and 25 minutes later, I realized that I had slipped quietly into a flow state. Something had wanted to be said, and I was in the right place at the right time with the right attitude of receptivity. This is one manifestation of the inspired creativity we’ve been exploring here for the past several months. To be gripped by a sudden upsurge and outpouring of unexpected words and ideas is definitely a genius/muse driven experience. So is the sense of A) not knowing exactly and consciously where it’s all going, even as b) you’re intensely aware that it’s all guided by a coherent overarching energy that will make it all make sense in the end.
Yes, the writing of a single blog post or message board response is a rather minuscule example upon which to hang the principle. But it works the same in both microcosmic and macrocosmic fashions — in both short and long works, and in seemingly minor and seemingly major ones. As above, so below, and so on.
For a longer — and quite rambling — and thoroughly fascinating — look at the ins and outs of living a muse-driven life, see Jonathan Zap’s uber-essay “The Path of the Numinous: Living and Working with the Creative Muse.”
In the meantime, consider this combination of practical and attitudinal advice about the writing life:
Setting your output goal
It is indeed important to set some sort of minimum goal for daily output if you’re going to write a long (book-length) project — unless you find that doing this makes you freeze up, in which case ignore the idea of a minimum regular output completely, and simply proceed on the power of pure inspiration, since this means you’ll at least produce something. That’s the underlying principle: Discover and do whatever works for you, and immediately and unhesitatingly drop what doesn’t. The only proper rule is the one that works.
The important thing when deciding your minimum output goal is to pick a length, whether a word count or a minimum number of pages, that you know you’ll feel comfortable producing consistently. For me, that’s 500 words per day — which of course comes out to roughly two pages, if I want to count them that way.
Discover and do whatever works for you, and immediately and unhesitatingly drop what doesn’t.
For me, recognizing this has been an act of self-affirmation in my creative maturation. I absolutely love reading Ray Bradbury’s writings about writing, for example, but if I tried to follow his advice to produce 2000 words a day, I’d never write, because I wouldn’t be able to stand the feeling of regular self-failure. Many times — a great many of them — I have in fact written 2000 words per day, and even considerably more than that. But I can produce 500 words per day every day, even when I’m not particularly feeling like writing. For me, for some reason, 500 words just conforms to a kind of natural rhythmical wave in my writing process. I can get there without exhausting myself, and in fact any single unit of progression on any project I’m currently working on — whatever idea, project section, etc., that I set out to tackle on any given day — will almost invariably and organically come out to 500 word or more on its own, simply because that’s the minimum space I find necessary to express it. And in fact I almost always overshoot that mark by a little or a lot. Or if, as sometimes happens — very seldom, but sometimes — I finish saying what I had set out to say, and then discover that it has come in at less than 500 words, it’s quite easy for me to dig back down and find something else to add, or to find some part of what I’ve written that could stand some expansion. In other words, the 500-word marker can be a great indicator that I haven’t sufficiently expressed what I set out to express.
So in sum, for me 500 words is a good choice. For other people that number might be ridiculously small, or, I suppose, ridiculously huge. But I think the principles involved in my choice of that length are valid for other writers who are seeking to discover their own natural production goal.
The only standard you can rationally have
Regarding the attempt to silence the inner critic, I’ve long found a lot of help in William Stafford’s wonderful essay “A Way of Writing,” which I might well choose if I were allowed only a single essay about writing and creativity to read and reread for the rest of my life. Among the mountain of additional shining insights contained in it, there’s Stafford’s pointing out of a crucial self-attitude and self-understanding that allowed him to continue writing for many years:
Most of what I write, like most of what I say in casual conversation, will not amount to much. Even I will realize, and even at the time, that it is not negotiable. It will be like practice. In conversation I allow myself random remarks — in fact, as I recall, that is the way I learned to talk — so in writing I launch many expendable efforts. A result of this free way of writing is that I am not writing for others, mostly; they will not see the product at all unless the activity eventuates in something that later appears to be worthy.
Then there are Stafford’s oft-quoted, life-transforming, print-them-on-vellum-and-mount-them-above-your-writing-desk comments about writer’s block, which are included in one of the essays reprinted in his Writing the Australian Crawl (which also reprints “A Way of Writing”):
I believe that the so-called “writing block” is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance….One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing….I can imagine a person beginning to feel he’s not able to write up to that standard he imagines the world has set for him. But to me that’s surrealistic. The only standard I can rationally have is the standard I’m meeting right now….You should be more willing to forgive yourself. It doesn’t make any difference if you are good or bad today. The assessment of the product is something that happens after you’ve done it.
This idea of “lowering your standards until there’s no felt threshold to go over in writing” is positively alchemical in its ability to transmute a mass of formless thoughts, insights, and urges into the honest-to-God act of writing. And I say that as somebody who suffered from writer’s block for a six- or seven-year stretch.
On revision
Regarding the amount of difference between my first and final drafts, I’m somebody who actually enjoys revising, because that’s the stage of the process when what I’m writing becomes what I wanted it to be when I set out. The old dictum that “all first drafts are shit” isn’t absolutely true, but for me it helps to keep thinking that it is, especially when a first draft is feeling intolerably awful (at which point the “lower your standards” advice reenters as crucial).
My final drafts sometimes turn out to be virtually unrecognizable in comparison to their first drafts. The level of revision that’s necessary to make them be what they’re asking to be is just that extensive. But I’ve also discovered that I’m one of those writers who’s liable to get far too wrapped up in the nitpicky end of improving the specific language of my writing, probably because I enjoy wonderful language as both a writer and a reader (as in the work of Thomas Ligotti, for example). So I have to reign this in, and that’s where I find help in, e.g., Stephen King’s advice in On Writing about being aware of and avoiding this type of thing. I heartily recommend it.
The bottom line
Again, it all boils down to the fact that you need to write a lot and then use this experience to take stock of exactly where and how you’ll have to calibrate your efforts, as the writer and person that you uniquely are, in order to make sure that you actually get something done.
Writing, especially in the long term, is a continual process of self-discovery, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the mundane act of establishing wholesome work habits. For a discussion of how such things are directly related to ongoing goal of making friends with your deep daemonic self, see “Stoking Your Creative Fire: Identify Your Daemon’s Work Habits.”
BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:
IMAGE CREDITS:
“to my chicago pen pal,” used under Creative Commons from aye_shamus
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