Archive for April, 2010

Over the next few weeks, while other things are taking up all my time, this spot will be filled with selected chapters from my 2005 book Writer at Work. If you somehow failed to read this masterpiece, here’s your chance.

“Work expands in order to fill the time available
for its completion.”
C. Northcote Parkinson

Every writer should have Parkinson’s Law displayed in a prominent place on his or her desk. It applies to writers with special force because our work is open-ended and unlimited and, unless we are working to regular deadlines, there are no time limits. Any piece of writing, however short, can take forever.

Time has always been my enemy, and I’ve always envied the writers who grasp it and use it with effortless efficiency. Anthony Trollope, who worked all his life for the post office and wrote on the train, produced forty-six novels and an autobiography. Shakespeare was a busy actor/producer, but found time to knock out a few plays and sonnets, and Julius Caesar wrote the massive Gallic Wars while holding down a full-time job in the Roman government. One modern writer of successful thrillers, Martin Clark, is a busy circuit court judge, and writes his bestsellers from 5.30 to 6.30 every morning. People like this are very annoying to the rest of us.

Virginia Woolf once famously wrote that: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” A room of one’s own is certainly useful for a writer, but no more useful by itself than a blank sheet of paper by itself. Money is useful too, and so is the urgent need to earn money. But what a writer really needs is time – a commodity that the wealthy Virginia had in such abundance that she didn’t even think it worth mentioning.

Time, that’s the precious, infinitely scarce resource: time for thought, time for careful writing, time for re-reading and rewriting. Nothing can be achieved without time.

Most of us, I believe, waste a lot of our precious time. It’s tempting, and self-serving, to say that no time wasting is ever wasted, just as no writing is ever wasted. This allows us to count everything in our lives as “material,” no matter how effortless or trivial it may be. But wasted time usually turns out to be just that. The Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, of which Virginia Woolf was a part, wasted enormous amounts of time just expressing their emotions and falling in love with each other, and with themselves.

Efficiency is not my greatest gift. My writing timetable is never fully under control, although I try. I waste far too much time standing in line at the supermarket behind irritating people with the wrong coupons, or trying to use the always-broken copiers at Office Max. I waste more time at the post office, at the bird feeder, and at the coffee shop. An efficiency expert would reorganize my entire life, and make me twice as productive. The catch is that I would have to earn enough to pay a good efficiency expert ($175 an hour), which I can’t do until I become more efficient.

Most writers work alone, without staffs or secretaries to do all the trivial stuff. I look back with some nostalgia on my days as a professor, when I could just hand a big photocopying or filing job to a secretary, and forget about it. On the other hand I think I would be fooling myself to pretend that I was any more productive back then. I just had more time to waste. Office workers can while away idle hours in useless meetings. They have water coolers to stand around, and office politics to discuss. With luck, an office worker can get through the day without doing any work at all, yet feeling quite exhausted. A solitary writer has no such excuses. When s/he hasn’t done anything, due to laziness or incompetence, the fact is obvious.

E-mail is the greatest time-waster since the invention of knitting, and perhaps the biggest block to writing ever created. Computers made writing easier, and then e-mail made it almost impossible. Right now, as I type, I’m conscious that lurking under this page on my screen is another page with about fifty unanswered e-mails. I only have to click the little minus symbol, and there they will be – easy and relaxing, mindless and enjoyable, friendly and engaging. Here’s another “message waiting” and a harmonious chime. Perhaps it’s my agent, it could be important. Relief from the agony of writing is only a click away…

Click.

Sorry about that. I’m back. It wasn’t important..

People at writers’ conferences sometimes ask: “So what does a full-time writer actually do every day.” This is impossible to answer because every writer’s schedule is different, depending on their commitments and deadlines. But we can be sure about two things.

First, there’s no such thing as a literally full-time writer. Nobody can write creatively eight hours a day, five days a week, as if it were a routine office job. Most writers actually write in short bursts, and do other things in between. Also, the vast majority of writers actually have another job, very often teaching.

Second, there are plenty of other things to be done. I call these “The bureaucracy of everyday life.” A working writer will have a horrendous load of correspondence and e-mail, plus filing and accounting chores, planning new work and speaking events, publicity, research, and reading. On a very good day s/he may even find some time to think.

This multitasking can take over your life, and the routine jobs (relatively easy) can very easily squeeze the time spent on the main creative task (much harder).

Those of us who work at home also have to cope with the near-impossibility of separating our domestic lives from our work lives. Spouses, children and pets (especially cats) demand attention, urgent jobs around the house seem to come up every day, and the routines of cooking, shopping and cleaning infiltrate themselves insidiously into our “work” time. Time, unlike love, is a limited resource. Every moment you give to one activity is subtracted from another.

We want to be nice, we want to be sociable, but it all takes time. Even a little celebrity is a dangerous thing. As a local “mini-celebrity” I get asked to give lectures and dinner speeches, and attend all kinds of unlikely events. I can’t image what it must be like to be a real celebrity: no wonder they go into hiding.

There is such a thing as creative time wasting. I walk alone for at least an hour every day, and that’s when I get all my ideas. Without those walks my mind would be entirely empty, so I feel I can legitimately count those hours as work time.

Many famous writers were ruthless about guarding their writing time. The poet W.H.Auden would leave the dinner table at 9.30, even when he had guests, and go upstairs to write. This was “his time.” When Edith Wharton had a house full of visitors she would simply ignore them until noon every day, while she stayed in her room writing. Of course it helps to have servants. Vladimir Nabokov’s wife protected his every creative moment, leaving him no everyday tasks or worries. But nowadays few women are willing to sacrifice themselves on the alter of a male ego – and when it comes to men sacrificing for women, forget it!

All this seems to lead to the unpalatable conclusion that we all need to develop the art of selfishness, or we will never get anything done. But no, it’s not that bad. The critical phase in Parkinson’s Law is: “…the time available.” The time available is, in theory, limitless, which is exactly why we fill it extravagantly with other activities. The question, then, is not how to make time for writing but how and whether to limit the time.

Every working writer I know uses one or both of the following two simple techniques, either consciously or unconsciously.

The first technique is to define writing projects in a definite order and with a definite timeline – in other words to create deadlines. Real deadlines from magazine or newspaper editors are even better, of course. But personal deadlines, perhaps with a personal reward attached, can be almost as powerful. If you believe deeply, profoundly, passionately in your writing you should at least be able to take your timetable seriously.

The second technique is to reserve certain definite times for writing, and make those times as sacred as you can. They can be quite short, like an hour a day. But that period must be totally dedicated to your current project – no E-mail, no domestic chores, no dreaming, no excuses. It seems incredible, but you will find that a limited writing time, strictly observed, will be more productive than a disorganized effort to “fit some writing in somewhere” during the day.

If you have the right temperament you can save a lot of time by organizing your physical workspace. There’s no mystery about this, but it may be hard to do. Chaos is romantic, and also addictive. Separating projects into properly labeled files, keeping a clear desk, shelving reference books neatly, and so on, will make any writer more efficient. But can we do it? Looking around at my exploding office and I have to admit: not this writer.

If these techniques sound artificial and mechanical, it’s because they are. But, when it comes to managing time, most of us need artificial aids.

I have discovered over the years that there is a catch to organizing your time in a rigorous and logical way. The catch is that deadlines, real or artificial, always take precedence. After a lifetime of writing to (real) deadlines I’ve learned that the deadlined piece always pushes in ahead of anything else I want to do. If the deadlines fall regularly, you never get to write anything else. There’s no time. Deadlines are a stimulant, but they can also act like a guillotine on the imagination.

There is another way, which is not to worry about time at all. Marcel Proust spent a dozen years writing In Search of Lost Time, which is all about trying to take control of time and life. Some people just work much more slowly than others. Simenon could turn out a novel in a couple of weeks. But Thomas Pynchon wrote V in 1963, followed by Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. He then took twenty four years to produce his next novel, Mason and Dixon (1997). Pynchon denies any suggestion that he had writer’s block. His attitude is that a piece of writing takes as long as it takes.

Some of us would lose our way in such great stretches of time. But it may be that true wisdom is to understand your own tempo and temperament and ignore all other advice. In other words, to take your time.

Copyright: David Bouchier 2005

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The desire to make things clean and tidy in the springtime seems to be an almost biological urge. Like most biological urges, it should be resisted. Spring may be the season of renewal and new beginnings, but there’s no point in going mad about it. The energy and optimism we feel at this time of year shouldn’t be wasted on cleaning.

Only a few hundred years ago spring was a season of joy and happiness, music and dancing, not domestic labor. The Romans had a great festival in honor of Flora the goddess of springtime and low-cholesterol and, in primitive countries like England, the annual spring ritual would be the Maypole Dance, in which young virgins, youths and maidens, would dance around on the village green, holding long ribbons attached to the top of a pole. As they circled the ribbons would wind around and get shorter and shorter until the dancers were all very close together. Obviously, this sort of thing couldn’t be allowed in these puritanical days, even if we could find young persons qualified to take part.

Naturally there were accidents during the celebrations – drunken falls, heart attacks, and inappropriate liaisons. Nobody cared much about that. But now we have legal liability, and political correctness, and the health police. A bit of wild partying can easily land you in court. The maypole dance might get you sued for discrimination against the disabled, or the merely dizzy. Excessive drinking will lead to huge medical bills. It’s safer to stay home and tidy the closets.

Another dismal modern phenomenon is what we might call springtime double jeopardy. Not only are we expected to clean, we are also expected to diet. In fact the quest for domestic order is very like dieting. It’s easy to achieve some short-term success, but almost impossible to maintain it. We are seduced by the many forms of disorder, just as we are seduced by the infinite varieties of food. The habits of a lifetime are just that – the habits of a lifetime.

I feel the tug of the spring-cleaning disease myself, but only very faintly like the gravitational pull of a distant star. I never have any trouble ignoring the symptoms. In fact I can allow my mind roam over the many possibilities that present themselves to my imagination as the weather improves. There’s outside painting, of course, and some power washing would be a good idea. The bird feeders need cleaning, the garage is a mess, my car is a disgrace, and there must be a hundred small odd jobs waiting for me to attack them with a hammer, or a chainsaw or a screwdriver, or a power drill. I have a lot of tools in the garage, because I like tools. But I don’t like using them, in case they wear out

The good news is that there are more and more specialized services out there to take over these tasks and allow us to enjoy our lives. Domestic cleaning is a whole industry, and even the traditional handyman is back in the form of a franchise operation. Thousands of “professional personal organizers” are poised to sort out our messy paperwork for about $200 an hour. It’s only a matter of time before we can look forward to dieting services – offering a range of large people who will lose weight on our behalf.

But the best and cheapest solution to springtime madness is just to wait it out. Once the weather gets really warm all these labors will become humid and unpleasant, the great outdoors will pull us away from domestic concerns, and weight loss will come as nature intended: through exercise, heat exhaustion, and plenty of sweat.

Copyright: David Bouchier

From time to time, and especially in April, most of us have wondered why taxes exist. The answer, of course, is that we must have taxes in order to support the government. This leaves us with the question: why does the government exist? That’s easy. If we didn’t have a government, who would collect the taxes?

In primitive societies, there were no governments, and therefore no taxes. But as soon as kings and chiefs and emperors appeared on the historical stage they acquired an exaggerated sense of self-importance, and a taste for expensive things like gold and jewels, fine foods, rare fabrics, and huge palaces. Naturally, they soon ran out of cash. These important people certainly didn’t want to work, so they had to find a reliable source of unearned income.

About five thousand years ago, some early financial genius noticed that the peasants sometimes had a bit of food to spare, or a few pennies hidden away, and that it was child’s play to take it away from them. If you could relieve a large number of peasants of small amounts of goods, it could add up to rather a pleasant lifestyle for the people at the top of the social pyramid. Thus taxation was born.

In the beginning, the collection system was pretty basic. When a king or a great lord ran out of cash, he would send out a raiding party to strip the nearby villages of everything they had. There were no thirty-day extensions. Anyone who objected to the assessment was simply killed. The taxmen would ride back to the castle with their booty, and that was that.

This slash-and-burn system of tax collecting had many advantages. It was nasty while it lasted, but it was soon over. The king’s men might come at any time, but they might not come for years, so April wasn’t always ruined. There were no forms to fill in, and no audit to worry about, because there was never anything left to audit. And these episodes of random violence induced a healthy respect for the power of government, something that seems sadly lacking nowadays. Above all, primitive tax collection was cheap. There was no huge bureaucracy, not even a computer network, if you can imagine it. A few thugs, a few swords and a few horses accomplished what the IRS struggles every year to accomplish – the traditional transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

By contrast, the modern system of tax collection is a masterpiece of waste and redundancy. Governments have learned to confuse the issue by creating such an intricate smokescreen of rules that we spend all our time worrying about the “how” of paying tax, and never have time or energy to ask “why?” One reason why, of course, is that like the peasants of medieval times, we don’t have much choice. America’s most famous tax rebel, Henry David Thoreau, hid in the woods to avoid taxes. But he was hauled off to jail anyway.

Thoreau had the right idea. He thought that taxes should be voluntary. Citizens should pay for what they want, no more and no less. So April 15 would be like a gigantic charity appeal, with every arm of government bidding for your dollars: the Pentagon would like lots more missiles, the three million federal bureaucrats would like higher salaries, NASA would like to drop more space probes into deep holes on Mars, and so on. Alongside each item, we could choose to contribute $5, $10, $25, or nothing. That would be a truly democratic tax system.

Governments hate voluntary tax schemes, of course. They have an irrational fear that, given a choice, citizens might choose not to pay up. But we pay for HBO, we pay for the Disney Channel. Who would begrudge a dollar or two, freely given, to sustain the greatest show on earth?

Copyright: David Bouchier

I see I haven’t posted anything here for a couple of weeks, but that’s ok. There are periods in life (sometimes they last for decades) when nothing much happens, in your head or anywhere else. This is one of those times. I must say I admire those folks who can find something to blog or tweet about every day, or even several times a day. Their lives must be so rich. I read about someone who tweets the news of all her shopping trips, and another who posts details of all his meals. I suppose I could try that. Yesterday I had healthy cereal for breakfast, a flatbread pizza with mushrooms for lunch, and chicken Marsala and fettuccine for dinner, with a red wine from Languedoc. How interesting is that?

The only real even in the past couple of weeks was a non event. A concert and reception I had been organizing on behalf of the local literacy volunteers had to be cancelled because so few tickets were sold. This was depressing, because it seemed to show that some people are using the recession as a reason or excuse to cut down on their support for charities and non profits, just when these organizations need their support most. Gloom all around.

A corner of my mind has been occupied with a more optimistic task: collecting and organizing about a hundred and fifty essays I’ve written over the past three years into the semblance of a book. The texts were scattered over three computers and five zip drives, so simply collecting them was a chore. Now I have to come up with some principle of organization. Any collection of essays begins with two big questions. Should I collect them at all? And how on earth am I going to present all these different essays in a way that makes sense?

Having got over the first hurdle I am stuck on the second. In the past I’ve used various cute structures: Life; Liberty; The Pursuit of Happiness for example, or Spring; Summer; Autumn; Winter. This time I have no cute idea, yet. Watch this space.

My few remaining brain cells have been cautiously circling around the subject of wisdom. I have rashly agreed to give a talk to the emeriti (retired faculty) of the local university on May 7, and wisdom is my chosen subject. This may be an early sign of dementia. Eventually the talk will be posted here, so you can judge for yourself.

It’s not much to blog about, but such as it is there it is.