Recently, one of my writing professors said something like, “I know a writer who sits down and writes for four hours a day.” He followed that shocking statement with, “I wish I could do that!”
This prompted the class to discuss valuable writing and the many stressors of our daily lives that may prevent us from spending our days doing what we love most.
One girl commented, insightfully, thinking about the time and energy that goes into writing something quality, “But how much of that writing is usable?
My professor nodded, understanding that she meant to ask whether or not they’re writing just to write or writing because their ideas burn so brightly that they must get them onto the page.
He then shared another anecdote of a writer who “Writes until noon, then spends the rest of the day recovering.”
I share this not because I am jealous of those writers. They are successful professionals who probably don’t have to teach a class, or catch up on their homework at the end of the day.
I also don’t share it to comment on the glaringly obvious class inequalities, within this conversation. Most of us, students and graduates alike, have day jobs; most of the writers in the world don’t make money from writing alone. To spend four interrupted hours of your day sitting in front of a computer, notebook, or phone, spilling words and ideas onto the blank pages takes some financial security or some serious denial of one’s financial situation.
What I do share this for is to open a discussion on productivity, on “I wish I could do that!” and the value we place on ourselves in terms of “producing” and creating “usable and sellable” products.
First off, what is writing? It seems like a simple question, most would say it’s the action of putting meaningful words down on a page. I disagree.
To me, writing can be done anywhere, with anything. True, to paraphrase my professor, “You have to get something down on paper,” but that’s not all of what writing is. Writing is anything from thinking about your latest plot thread on the way to work to typing a few sentences into a google doc you might not ever open again. Writing is sharing your ideas with friends, storyboarding, and character worksheets. Writing, to me, is anything and everything that contributes to that end result of getting something on the page.
Often I feel like I don’t write enough. I don’t have a three-hundred-page manuscript for my novel as some do. I haven’t been published; sometimes, weeks go by when I don’t write anything except what I must for class.
Except, that’s not true. I may not have found the time to sit down and type on my Official Word Document this week, but I do have several hundred words of character work on my phone. I may not have started my short story, but I spent time today working out how it will start. Are you seeing a theme here?
To the outside world, writing is measured by word and page count. The longer that count is, the more worthy you are of the title of “writer.” In other words, to be productive, you have to be able to present something.
It’s a trap I often fall into. Feeling worthless about yourself is easy when you haven’t technically touched the “Official Doc” in a month. When the Capitalist society we live in (and I am talking specifically about America and my experience here) says you must produce something you can sell to be worth something, then those “unproductive” weeks can become a crushing weight against your self-esteem.
The crux of the matter, however, is that, as I was sitting in class, thinking about the project I “hadn’t touched in months,” I remembered what I had done. There are thousands of words, mostly backstory, and a few future paragraphs in my phone. I’d spent two hours explaining the plot to a friend the other day. And from November to February, the direction of the plot and the nuances of my characters had changed and improved so drastically that I found I couldn’t reasonably say I hadn’t touched it.
To use a cliche: people are not machines. We don’t always have the time — let alone the energy — to expand on the bigger parts of writing. That doesn’t make us any less of a writer. While the physical words on a page are worth a whole lot and are the end goal of anyone who wants to publish, they are not the only valuable thing. That is writing. We shouldn’t discredit ourselves when writer’s block, or life, stops our fingers from moving on a keyboard; we should celebrate that our idea is still alive in our minds.