H is for Hurry

Hurrying has been on my mind awhile as I look at my writing habits (another H word) and where they could use some improvement. But it struck me anew, when I recently watched all of Downton Abbey in a back-to-back marathon, that hurrying can make or break a story for me. I love Downton Abbey, don't get me wrong, but I began to notice some scenes were nothing but a few words, a few glances, very little in the way of story imparted. I assume the scenes accomplished what the writer intended, but left me as a consumer not quite satisfied.

I've noticed this happening quite often in TV and movies. It's almost as if the creator was hurrying to get to what came next in order to avoid losing the viewer's attention. This is probably not the case at all. It's just the evolution of fast-paced entertainment and the consumer's focus being split a million different ways. Twitter here, Facebook in this window, text messages chiming, story soundtracks playing, the TV as ambient noise, or even as a focused noise holding a portion of our attention – and often all of this going on while we write. Some creators are obviously able to function this way, switching between tasks, but I've learned this doesn't work for me. And I imagine it doesn't work for a lot of others, some who may not have discovered the difference it can make in quality to be present in a scene without hurrying to get back to Twitter.

I've been guilty many times of hurrying through a scene to get to the next. Because getting to the next means I'm that much closer to the end. And getting closer to the end means I'll meet my deadline and be free to move to my next project because the deadline on that one is looming. But the last couple of years I've learned I can't write that way, or think that way. Not anymore. I look back at certain books and cringe when I think I may have shortchanged a scene by not being fully present, which means I shortchanged my readers, which means I shortchanged myself. I'm in awe of authors who can write at this sort of consistent pace and still give their all to their books. But for many of us, the hurry, hurry, hurry mentality our industry has come to demand, works against us. To build a name, we need to put out multiple titles a year, and yet putting out those multiple titles is really a career strike if hurrying from one to the next means the books aren't all they could be, all they should be. And honestly, how can we know if that's the case without taking the time to make sure they are?

Taking time, in this context, doesn't mean time literally. I'm not advocating spending an hour to find the right words for a sentence, though I admit I've done this because I needed there to be no doubt as to its meaning, and I also needed the rhythm of the sentence to sound right to my ears. In an early episode of Mad Men, Don Draper tells one of his copywriters to stop writing for other writers. I understand the argument, that wordsmithing is about ego and showing off to our peers. But I don't think taking care with our words and sentence structure is about anything but giving our stories our best, and our readers our best. They don't have to know the time we took to make a sentence work on three different levels, for example. But they'll know that it did.

In this post at Writer Unboxed describing the stages of the author's career and a recent outstanding success, agent Donald Maass asked the author:

Maybe you could do the WU community one big favor: tell us what, apart from following your heart and passion, has been the biggest breakthrough for you in terms of technique?

Her answer was:

I also think it takes time to fully apply the principles. We think we are drilling deep, but initially it isn't as deep as it could be. So it takes drilling down in small incremental steps that allowed me to acclimate to the sense of exposure gradually.

I can't imagine any author ever saying they know all there is to know about craft and are so comfortable with their work that they have nothing left to learn. So maybe there is something to this time thing, that it's a matter of taking more of it, and spending it applying what we've learned as we learn it, but also digging deeper with each pass, and not hurrying from one scene to the next, one book to the next, but giving full due and being present in the moment of creation. We're only there once. And what comes into our head at that moment, might never come again. I do a lot of my plotting in the backyard away from any sort of noise (save the birds and the local lawn services), and the things that reach me have me chuckling, literally, because they are so damn good (in my head, anyway) that I can't wait to commit them to the page. None of this would happen were I hurrying, writing in one window in a rush while waiting to get back to a conversation on Facebook. But as always, YMMV.

Bottom line, at whatever speed we write, we should never hurry, but give every scene our full attention. As this article says:

No matter what you do – your first priority should always be the work that you do. Your creativity, your productivity, DOING what you LOVE must always come first.

Social Media is the the process of sharing what you love with others. Love first, share later.

Otherwise we end up talking more than we are doing and we become unauthentic. We lose the authority in our voice through talking too much.

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