For Some Writers, ‘Productivity’ is a Dirty Word
There’s no rule telling you how much or how often to write
Many writers appear to thrive on metrics. They embrace the challenge of reaching daily and weekly page goals and word counts, pushing to achieve personal bests. On top of that, they enjoy friendly competition with other writers to reach their goals. It’s a race to the finish!
The world has invented tools for these go-getters, such as ZenPen, Focus Keeper, Ilys, and more. These programs, and the Pomodoro method, will keep them on time and on target.
To them I say: “You do you. Live your best life. I wish you all success.”
Then there are the rest of us, for whom the idea of monitoring and measuring our creative output, maintaining some semblance of a “steady pace,” or competing head-on with other writers on anything, sends shivers down our spines.
Does anyone else feel a meltdown coming on?
Personally, I can draw a straight line from my aversion to measuring my output as a writer all the way back to my aversion to taking the SAT. I do not like to be quantified, defined, or contained within a system that limits my ability to express my creativity in my own way…and in my own time.
I would argue that the writing community’s embrace of quant-focused values has been heavily, if not entirely consciously, shaped and influenced by American productivity culture. This is not entirely a good thing—or at least, not good for everybody. But we’re so steeped in these values, it can be hard to let go.
Come along with me in the way-back machine…
In the early 20th century, Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer, perfected time-and-motion studies aimed at improving the efficiency of the American industrial worker. One of Taylor’s chief aims was to “transform management, which was essentially an oral tradition, into a set of calculated and written techniques.”
In other words, he sought to standardize productivity (in terms of output) so as to help managers empirically evaluate how well their workers’ performed certain tasks. You can picture Taylor’s legacy: it’s the old-fashioned Ford assembly line, where workers were taught to bolt their widgets as efficiently as possible, striving for a tidy economy of motion.
Our culture has imbibed productivity practices codified by Taylor and others for more than a century now, and what began on the factory floor soon found its way into the white-collar organization, where fast typists and computing machinery (and now, presumably AI) helped to speed up a variety of tasks and take our productivity to new heights.
Yay?
But productivity and writing are not natural bedfellows. Maybe that’s because writers are not machines—or widget-bolters.
I’m deeply skeptical of efforts to align one’s writing practice, or process, with any productivity measure beyond the mere notion that from time to time, a piece of work is declared “finished.”
Indeed, I lean in the opposite direction. Writing is messy because it is inherently unpredictable. We write in fits and starts. We’re in the mood to write some days, but not others. We crank out two sentences over eight hours one day, pump out 15 pages, the next. But you never know which end of that spectrum you’ll perform on.
I worry about the drumbeat of pressure imposed on writers (especially through social media) to meet defined performance expectations, or else be deemed as failures. One of my favorite novelists, Edith Wharton, who by any measure was prolific, ceased to write for about a decade between 1880 and 1890.
By today’s standards, Wharton’s lack of “productivity” during that difficult period would make her a candidate for all sorts of motivational courses and NaNoWriMo-style incentives to get her going again. The implication is that not writing is a problem to be solved; and that the solution involves convincing the writer to set and meet defined goals and expectations—or at least, to reach for them.
I’m sorry, but this goes against the grain of what it means to be a creative artist. You cannot expect to summon the concentration and conception needed to make something from nothing if your mind, body, and spirit are not in a cooperative mood.
I hear the hard-core folks shouting, “Stop procrastinating and making excuses and just do it!” I myself wrote about “just doing it” in last week’s column. But I was in a frame of mind to create. When I’m not in that frame of mind, you can’t dangle page-goals in front of me and expect that I’ll rise to the bait.
It pains me to see writers weighed down by guilt, feelings of inadequacy, and yes!—doubts!—that if they cannot meet some minimum level of output, they cannot call themselves “writers” unless they add the word “failed” in front of it.
Writing is about doing, for sure, but it’s also about intentions and a mindset. And those intangible factors don’t keep time and don’t respond to dangling carrots (Oh, look! A badge!).
So the next time you come across a community of writers all jazzed up about cranking out 3,000 words by Friday and a full draft by late summer, feel free to pass them by. Feel free to affirm your own route to writing, whether fast or slow, intermittent or steady.
Refusing to bend to time-and-volume goals doesn’t make you less of a writer, or a lazy one. It makes you a writer who sets her own rhythm, her own clock, her own path toward making art.
NEXT WEEK: We explore the “wave” method of writing, for all those who prefer to stay off the clock.
I do, indeed, know a lot of writers who work this way. It has never felt comfortable to me, though I do enjoy the frantic, too-fast-to-think creativity of a free-written NaNoWriMo. Meanwhile, your way-back machine to the early days of factory moves for greater productivity reminded me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwahG1s4dqI
Amy, writing, as you suggest, is something of an enigma. I never have held myself to a per page, or per week, or per month standard, but I feel most whole when I have a project I'm working on. It doesn't have to be a novel, and these days it is often a short piece for Substack. For me the thing is that I want to go ever deeper with what I write and that pursuit of depth makes me feel more alive in and of itself. Maybe it's just one good sentence. I agree that turning writing into a factory job is a killer for creativity and Edith Wharton knew what she was doing. Thanks for the thoughtful post. SW