Tag Archives: prolific

Procrastinate to be Prolific?

Been meaning to blog about this, but kept putting it off. This article by Loizos Heracleous and David Robson cites studies claiming procrastination can benefit creativity.

The authors quote Agatha Christie as saying she often thought of story ideas while bathing. I suspect many writers have experienced a similar phenomenon. You’re writing and get stuck. You take a break and turn to some dull activity, such as mowing the lawn, cleaning the house, showering, etc., and Bang! The solution comes to mind. Often you don’t even realize you were thinking about it.

The article discusses several studies that bear this out. Researchers found that taking a break from a creative task and performing a different, humdrum task allowed participants to return to the creative task and perform better. Oddly, those that rested instead of working on a humdrum task did not do as well.

Odd that the human mind works this way. I’ve blogged before about how weird that is. You could spend time puzzling about it or analyzing this brain quirk, but perhaps your time’s better spent accepting it and using it to your advantage. When the words won’t spill out, back away and pursue some mundane chore for a while.

However, I urge you not to draw the wrong conclusion from this discussion. You’re thinking, “Well, if procrastination works that well, I’ll spend years putting off writing and end up a best-selling author.”

Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. In fact, I wish the article hadn’t use the term ‘procrastinate’ at all. The word means to postpone, to delay, like when you have homework due and you watch YouTube videos instead.

We’re talking about something different here. When you get stuck while writing and choose to do gardening instead, you’re not really postponing anything. You’re still writing in the sense that your brain is thinking of creative solutions.

To paraphrase the math genius, Yogi Berra—writing is 90% mental; the other half is physical. Your body may have walked away from the keyboard, but your brain still writes.

Put another way, if you aim to be a prolific writer, you must write a lot. But not all writing time involves stringing words together. An observer might think you’re washing dishes, but you’re really stringing ideas together. Just tell that observer you’re not procrastinating, you’re writing in your mind, just like—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 6, 2023Permalink

6 (or 7?) Secrets to Being a Prolific Writer

Would you like to write as many books (over 500) as Dr. Isaac Asimov? Let’s find out how he did it.

Writer Charles Chu studied Asimov’s autobiographies and distilled six habits Asimov developed and used to write so many enjoyable books. Below is my summary of that list, put in my own words. I’ve added a seventh bonus habit as well.

  1. Read to Learn. Don’t stop educating yourself, even though you’ve finished formal school. Take Mark Twain seriously, and “never let school interfere with your education.” Read a lot, and on many different topics. You never know what will spark your muse.
  2. Bypass Writer’s Block. Sometimes you might get stuck, either because you don’t know what to write next, or because you’ve been over and over your story so many times you can’t stand it anymore. When that happened to Asimov, he shifted to a different writing project. When you return to the project that gave you writers block, you’ll approach it with a fresh perspective, and you may find you’re now ready to finish it.
  3. Ignore the Mental Antibodies. Within you dwell antibodies whose job is to identify, attack, and eliminate bacteria and viruses. You have mental antibodies, too, and they ‘protect’ you from ideas that are different or scary, notions that might get criticized by readers. This causes insecurities and fears. These antibodies can turn you into a perfectionist, forever editing and never submitting, or cause you to abandon a writing project altogether. Asimov never became a perfectionist. Aware of the danger of mental antibodies, he just forged ahead and wrote.
  4. Lower Your Bar. As mentioned, Asimov wasn’t a perfectionist. He loved to quote Robert Heinlein’s phrase, “They don’t want it good. They want it Wednesday.” Asimov developed confidence, then pride, in his writing. (Perhaps a bit beyond pride.) His self-assurance enabled him to rise above doubts, to avoid over-editing. Obviously, this is a learned skill. Don’t put trashy first drafts into the marketplace and expect them to sell.
  5. Don’t Take Breaks. Maybe your first story failed to sell, and you think it will help your writing if you take some time off. Or maybe your story did very well, and you feel you deserve to rest on your laurels awhile. Asimov never did that. He kept working, always concentrating on the Work in Progress (WIP) rather than the work most recently published.
  6. Stuck for an Idea? Think Harder. New writers and non-writers often ask authors where they get their ideas. Asimov got asked too, and his answer was, “by thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to kill myself…Did you ever think it was easy to get a good idea?” Note the adjective ‘good.’ Like most people, he probably got many ideas to write about, but found a low percentage worthy of his time. More thought generally solved that problem for him.

Charles Chu ended his list at six, but hinted at a seventh Asimov habit for being a prolific writer, so I’ll state it outright:

  1. Write Every Day. Maybe you can’t equal Asimov’s work schedule—eight hours a day, seven days a week. But if you adopt the previous six habits, you’ll achieve a reproducible process where more time writing results in more publishable output.

Perhaps you won’t write 500 books, but there are degrees of prolificness, so you could end up further to the right on that spectrum than you expected. Thanks to the wisdom of Isaac Asimov, that’s the aim of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 13, 2022Permalink

The 4 Stages of Writing Productivity

If you write, you’d like to write faster. But how? On October 20, I attended a webinar by prolific author Vi Khi Nao, and she said some things that might interest and help you.

Vi Khi Nao

She titled her talk, ‘How to Write Effortlessly and Quickly,’ and I was struck by her four ‘productivity techniques,’ called Inflexible, Exact, Flexible, and Ideal Muse.

When she declared that last one, Ideal Muse, as her favorite, I figured I’d skip to it. Then she said you can’t skip. You must work through each technique in order.

Dang. That makes them more like steps or stages. You must go through them in order, she stated, because you will learn something at each stage that helps you in the next one.

I’ll outline each stage in my own words. What follows is my interpretation of what she said. If I got it wrong, it’s my fault, not hers.

Inflexible

Determined to write more, Vi Khi Nao put aside as much of her non-writing life as possible. She limited her interactions with others, devoting herself to writing. She filled her days with writing, and became ‘inflexibly disciplined’ about it.

Her output grew. She wrote a lot. However, she considered most of the resulting manuscripts bad. Her own prose bored her, and it required heavy editing. In the end, after many drafts, she ended up with a tiny amount of quality writing. Practicing this technique, many of us might find our health suffering, along with our relationships with friends and loved ones.

Still, she learned writing discipline, the value of daily ritual. She experienced writing in the flow, without self-editing.

Exact

She tried something else, setting a more modest goal of 10,000 words every two weeks. This time, she strove for quality as well as quantity. She decided any kind of writing counted as part of her 10,000 words—short stories, novellas, screenplays, and poems. She worked on bits of everything, alternating, much like a farmer rotates crops.

With a variety of projects going at once, she found her creativity stimulated. Although she didn’t mention it, I suspect her relationships with others improved after stopping the previous Inflexible technique. The new, modest, 10,000-word goal helped relieve some mental pressure, and her product required less editing. However, I suspect most of us would gravitate toward short and easy projects to meet the word count goal.

From this technique she learned a better balance between quality and quantity.

Flexible

Still seeking a way to produce high-quality writing faster, she set precise end goals (a novel by this date, a screenplay by that date, etc.) but allowed time for flexing. She wrote based on the momentum of the moment, when the mood struck. While maintaining the discipline of writing each day, if she entered the flow zone, she went with it.

The emphasis on quality helped her writing. Having established good writing habits in the earlier techniques, she got quantity along with it. However, I suspect she still felt guilty when not writing, and she still wasn’t in tune with her muse, her inner creativity.

The Flexible stage teaches the elasticity of time itself. All hours are not equal for a writer. All days are not equal. Quality writing requires time, but cannot be created in a linear way.

Ideal Muse

Knowing now that her muse didn’t clock in and clock out at specific times, she merged all previous techniques and allowed her muse to schedule her writing. When the muse struck, she dropped everything and wrote, no matter what. If shopping, she wrote in the store. If driving, she pulled over and wrote. She set product-driven goals, not date-specific ones. Sometimes she wrote for five minutes, other times for five hours. She monitored her health, knowing she couldn’t write in an unhealthy state.

At which stage are you right now? If increasing my productivity means I must start with the Inflexible stage, I’m not ready to sacrifice everything else in life for my writing. Still, I believe I’ve gone through a lesser version of the first two stages, and am in the Flexible stage now.

Whoops. Hang on. The muse is calling—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 31, 2021Permalink

Write More or Write Better?

Choose one: you could write the most novels ever by a single author, none of them great; or you can write only one, but it’s the best novel ever. Most of us would choose to write one standout novel.

It’s not a realistic choice, though, in guiding how you should write. A novel doesn’t get to become a classic until after its publication, and often not until after the author is dead. In other words, at the time you’re writing it, you don’t know whether your novel will stand the test of time.

But we do face the real problem of deciding whether to spend our limited time being prolific (writing a lot), or polishing a small number of stories.

We need to manage what I call our 1/E Ratio. The ‘1’ is the time we spend writing first drafts, and the ‘E’ is the time we spend editing those drafts.

At one extreme, 1/E could be very small. In this case, you might spend twenty years polishing a novel, editing and re-editing draft after draft. Your final product might be very good and might become a classic, but you couldn’t repeat your success too many times.

Or your 1/E could be very large, nearly infinite. You could spend all your time writing first drafts and never editing them. Just self-publish them immediately. You’d be very prolific, limited only by the number of story ideas you have and your available time.

Writers at both extremes seem to have solid rationale:

  • For Writer One, a small 1/E ratio is best. She seeks top quality with small quantity. After all, editors always say they want your best work. Writer One finds her story improving with each draft, greatly increasing its chances of entertaining more readers. Few people remember the most prolific authors, she says, but everyone can name some great ones.
  • Writer Two keeps his 1/E ratio large and goes for maximum output. He claims he’s honing his craft with every novel, and believes it’s still possible that one of his many books will strike the right chord with readers. In fact, by writing so many books, Writer Two thinks he’s maximizing his chances of being successful.

Remember, 1/E is a ratio, and there’s a wide spectrum between near-zero and near-infinity. You don’t have to choose one of those extremes.

In my analysis so far, I’m ignoring some factors that come into play when selecting how to spend your writing time. Some authors write for their own enjoyment, and aren’t aiming for high quality prose. Others don’t generate enough story ideas to write more than a few books, so their time is best spent editing the few stories they can write.

Your situation will be specific to you and will be constrained by your talents, your preferences, your end goals, etc. I have some general advice to offer, though:

  1. If you’ve been polishing and editing the same novel for over a decade and it’s never quite good enough, try dialing your 1/E ratio a little higher on the scale. Declare that novel done, send it out, and start writing another.
  2. If you’ve written a fair number of stories that just aren’t selling, try nudging the pointer toward a slightly smaller 1/E value. Spend more time editing each of your stories before sending them out.

Helping you adjust your 1/E ratio for optimum performance is all part of the free service provided by your writing mechanic—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 24, 2018Permalink

Being Prolific — Is That the Secret?

Should you aim to be prolific?  To be prolific as a writer means to be highly productive, to write a lot, and (one hopes) to be published a lot.  Should that be your goal? If so, what is the key to being prolific?

The ultimate aims of writers vary, but a short list of such goals could include:

  1. I want to be a famous writer, popular in my own time.
  2. I want my books to be remembered through the ages.
  3. I just have an inner need to tell a story.
  4. I want to maximize my financial earnings.
  5. I want to publish as many books as possible.
  6. I seek a combination of some of the above goals.

I was tempted to set up a graph with high quantity (being prolific) at one end and high quality at the other, and plot each goal on the graph.  For example, you might think goals 1 and 2 have to do with quality, while goals 4 and 5 are more concerned with quantity.  Such an analysis would have told you whether to churn out a lot of words, or self-edit like crazy to ensure each book is perfect.

Here’s the problem.  As Joseph Stalin was supposed to have said, (even an evil dictator can utter one true statement) “Quantity has a quality all its own.”  In a previous post, I mentioned Malcolm Gladwell’s theory about becoming a genius in any particular field.  One element of that was practicing for 10,000 hours.  That implies quantity is a necessary step to quality.  To write well, you must first write a lot.

There are different ways to spend that 10,000 hours of practice, of course.  As I implied above, you might write your first draft, then do just enough editing to send it off and sell a mediocre story, then move on to the next one.  Or you could refine and polish every word, as a poet does, going over and over your story until you achieve earthly perfection.  At the end of that process, you might have a book that could satisfy goals 1 or 2 or both.

There’s a list of prolific writers and one of my favorites–Dr. Isaac Asimov–is on that list.  He’s not at the top, though.  That honor belongs to María del Socorro Tellado López, who wrote mostly under the name Corín Tellado.  She lived from 1927-2009 and wrote over 4,000 novellas.

If you hope to surpass her record, you’d better get busy.

Let’s examine the productivity of Corín Tellado.  She sold her first novel in 1946, when she was about 19.  Her publishing house contracted with her to write a novella every week.  When I read that, I thought, “Okay, I could see having a very organized schedule that results in a novella each week.”  But look closer at the numbers.  Say she wrote continually from 1946 until her death in 2009, a period of about 63 years, or roughly 3,276 weeks.  Only 3,276 weeks, and yet she wrote over 4,000 novellas.  She was cranking out a novella, on average, every 5.7 days.

Corín Tellado is the extreme example of being prolific.  You probably won’t go that far, but imagine the discipline required, the organizational and time-management skills, the need to fill all available time with writing.  Not to mention the necessity to dream up numerous plotlines and characters.  These are the keys to being a prolific writer.

Whatever your goals as a writer, whether you aim for quantity or quality, I think you’re still going to need (or at least aim for) the skills and attributes of a prolific writer.  Do you agree or disagree?  Leave me a comment.  But keep it short; I’m a busy man and have to finish my next novella in 5.7 days, or I’m not–

                                                                       Poseidon’s Scribe

March 18, 2012Permalink