True productivity leaves less time for talk
Last April I mentioned that I wanted to spend more time writing fiction. Since then, I’ve spent almost every day working on my novel. I’m now at over 10,000 words into it, which makes me proud. It’s not novel length yet, but it’s my longest work of fiction so far.
Ever since this started, though, I noticed that I haven’t been on Twitter much, and I haven’t written about how productive I’ve become (except this one I suppose). Maybe because I’ve actually been doing things rather than just talking about them. From one of my recent tweets:
This, my friends, is a great thing to realize. But the strangest thing about this realization is what actually caused it – fear.
Fear of the Undone
Here’s what was scary to me: the idea that everyone has a novel inside them. While this adage is used to motivate (or mislead) aspiring writers, the more you think about it, the more depressing it seems because it implies the following:
- You have roughly six billion competitors.
- There are much, much fewer novelists than that. This means that not everyone actually wants to write a novel. Those who want it don’t always get around to doing it. And out of those who eventually finish a novel, even fewer have it published.
- I just want to reiterate the sentence “Those who want it don’t always get around to doing it”.
In other words, by merely wanting to write a novel, I run the risk of becoming one of those people who always talks about her novel but never actually gets down to writing it. I want to be a real novelist, dammit! Not some person at a party going on about how I’m gonna-maybe-someday write a novel about everything and it’s gonna be the best thing ever. Even if I don’t have any of my final drafts published, I’ll still have more practical experience than that guy.
Come to think of it, I never discussed my novel with anyone except my partner. Even then, the only thing she knew was the fact that I’m working on it. When friends or family would call and ask what I was working on, I’d say “stuff” and move on to the next topic. I couldn’t risk discussing my work or even my methods. I felt like I was saving all that enthusiasm for my writing sessions. I couldn’t risk letting any of that leak out just by talking about my work. Subconsciously, I knew that everything I had — and I had very little — must be channeled to the act of writing itself. That was my priority.
With that in mind, this is the part where I shut up and go back to work.
8 July 2009
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