the productivity glide
Last year, I wrote 35 short stories, 83 essays, and 4 novellas.
I finished writing a new novella this morning. Last week, I published one of my favorite essays. The week before that, I wrote a different novella. The week before that, I finished the sequel to my most recent novella Howl.
During the last month, we’ve brought the kids to the doctor three times. My wife has been sick with a virus for two solid weeks. I seem to have the flu even as I type this.
I also have a day job.
I play videogames. I read books (according to goodreads, I’ve read 100+ books per year every year for the last ten years). I get together with friends usually once a week to hangout and play boardgames.
When I watch TV, it’s usually a sitcom that I’ve seen ten times because my wife doesn’t like watching movies or taking the effort to getting into a new show. And so for the last few months, I just keep cycling Seinfeld, though we’re now back to The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
People often ask me, How do you write so much?
I never have an answer. The truth is, there is no answer. Or rather, the simple answer is that I don’t do the things you do to fill up your days.
But here’s a look at my morning routine:
I wake up because my toddler’s right in my face saying, Wake up, daddy. Get up and follow him to his room to change his clothes for the day. Head downstairs. Make him breakfast. Maybe find the time to brush my teeth and take a shit. I hear the infant waking so I hop upstairs, grab him, change his diaper, get some new clothes on him. Whole time, he’s screaming because, probably, he’s hungry or he shit himself or just because he’s a baby who hates having his clothes changed. Bring him downstairs and give him breakfast, too. A bottle. Maybe a banana or a bit of oatmeal. While the kids are temporarily occupying one another, I make them both lunch. Look at the clock and I’m already late getting them to daycare, getting my own day started, so I load them up in the car. It’s winter and I live in Minnesota so this takes about ten minutes. Once in the car, the toddler has opinions about the music so I put it on because who cares. I’m still barely awake as I drive to daycare.
If one or both of them are sick, that’s my whole day. Or if my wife’s sick, well, everything’s on me too.
I don’t make enough money to be one of those guys who meditates and centers himself before the day begins. My day begins because the little people in my house need something and they need it every second they’re in front of me.
You want to shower?
Fuck you.
You woke up hungry and want coffee?
Your kids don’t give a shit.
You want to take a shit with the door closed and read a book?
Buddy, you’re gonna be lucky if you even get to finish shitting before they need you again.
Because of this, I’m sympathetic. Really, I am. I know the hardest thing in the world to do is carve out time for yourself to write. Especially because you’re exhausted and you hate your job and your shower drain’s mostly clogged and the lawn hasn’t been mown in three weeks. Somehow the floor is always dirty and you’re always cleaning the kitchen and everyone is always hungry and there’s never anything to eat in the house.
It’s hard.
What makes it harder is that no one cares if you ever finish your book. Even if you do finish it, probably no one will read it.
That’s the literary life, buddy.
Easiest thing in the world is to just quit. Spend your time playing videogames or watching netflix or scrolling instagram. I hear tiktok is all the rage so you could just do whatever that is.
But if, like me, you’re an idiot who actually enjoys writing, you’ll find the time. How do you find the time?
Most of us aren’t Brandon Sanderson, who, by his own admission, just dumps parenting on his wife. If you have kids and a job and a romantic partner and friends, how do you find the time to write?
Like I said, if you love this, if you care about it, you’ll find the time.
It really is that simple.
There’s no magic productivity trick or app that’s going to make you sit down in a room by yourself in front of a glowing screen and start typing up a story or a novel instead of twitter or netflix.
How do I do it?
My wife says I’m a very disciplined person, though I’ve never felt that way about myself.
I sneak in writing wherever I can. When work is slow, when the kids are napping, when my wife is napping, after the kids go to sleep, after my wife goes to sleep (other people sleeping is probably the real trick), when we’re rewatching The Office for the hundredth time, when my wife is watching Call the Midwife, when my wife goes to pick the kids up from daycare, and on and on.
The trick is to treat every month like it’s nanowrimo. If you write 500 words a day, you’ll have 15,000 words by the end of the month. If you write 1,000 words a day, you’re onto 30,000 words. Do that for six months and you’ll be coming up on 100,000 or 200,000 words already.
And, yeah, sure, feel free to miss a few days. Feel free to take the weekends off. Shit, take a whole week off here and there.
The goal isn’t to make a new obligation on your already busy life.
The goal is to form a habit. The goal is to get a short story or novella or novel finished.
The other trick to my productivity is that I’ve been at it for almost twenty years.
For most of those twenty years, I’ve written between 100,000 and 400,000 words per year. Before I was married and especially before I had kids, it was a lot easier to get the words in and I’d regularly write a short story more or less every week.
I used to just shotgun a novel in a week. Hole myself up and write nonstop for days at a time. But life changes and you change with it. I couldn’t disappear for a week when I was dating my wife or after she became my wife.
And so I learned to fit the words in wherever I could.
Write on the couch. In bed. On the bus or on a plane. I’ve written at Panera and McDonald’s while driving cross country and waiting for the meeting I have to be at for my real job.
Fortunately for me, I learned to write fast. Or at least relatively.
I usually tell people I write 1,000 words an hour.
That’s only 16 words a minute. One or two sentences. Maybe three or four short ones. Does that seem that fast? I’ve seen you argue on the internet, typing away furiously, so I know you can get there.
It really isn’t that hard or that fast.
But it also means that all you need to do is carve out one hour out of every day.
Is that so hard?
Try this: keep track of how many minutes (or hours) you spend staring at your phone every day. How much time do you spend scrolling twitter or instagram? How many hours do you spend watching TV or playing videogames?
Subtract an hour out of all that a few days a week.
Just an hour.
Do you have an hour?
There’s no trick. Really, there’s not.
No one is going to make it easy for you because no one really cares if you write at all.
Writing is a solitary activity. There are ways to make it less so, but ultimately it’s something you do by yourself and for yourself and, hopefully, maybe some day, there will be people on the otherside of a screen who do care, who are waiting for your next story or book to drop.
But they won’t be there if you don’t sit down and start writing.
The more you do it, the easier it gets. You’ll become faster and you’ll become better so that you only need to do a few drafts instead of ten, so you can jam in 2,000 words in that hour instead of 300.
But you need to sit down and get to work.
When you're writing in "found time" (in between other things) what do you compose on? Paper? Phone? Or do you keep a laptop handy at all times?
If you make it a priority, it'll happen.