On Taking a Break from Writing
When you’re writing a first draft, it’s
true that between 1-2k words daily gets you the best possible first draft. I’m
not comfortable with writers saying their first drafts are shit. I’ve noticed
that I don’t change that much between first and last drafts in order to
confidently call the first draft “shit.” In which case, I don’t easily overcome
the upset of writing something that doesn’t work one day. I’m really supposed
to write 2k words a day for, what, 8-12 weeks it could be? Every day? I don’t
have the mental stamina or objectivity required. I take breaks.
Imagine you wrote 2k a day for 365 days a
year. Were it possible, it would produce an unwieldy amount of writing: when
are you supposed to sit and edit all this stuff you’re making? If writing was
your only job, you could… William Goldman said if you write between something
like 6 or 10 pages a day, push for 10 because that energy gets transferred to
the reader. This at least means you have to accept that first drafts are not as
shit as they are made out to be.
The writers who so gleefully advocated
their first draft’s shitness, well I’ve read some of their final drafts and I’m
not sure they were always so aware just what was shit and what wasn’t anyways. I
like the “polished diamond” analogy: many times I couldn’t find the diamond for
all the shit that remained, when I was so confidently assured of its acknowledgement
and subsequent removal.
You can take a one-day break if you can’t
write anything, but more than one day in a row and things get rusty. If indeed
there is rustiness after a more-than-one-day break, it peaks pretty quickly: you’re
about as rusty if you return after a week or a month as you are after a two-day
break. But you might need a long time to recuperate your mental energy. In
which case, if you go beyond a one-day stretch, fuck it: take a month. Who
cares? It gets done. You might as well ensure it gets done in the least painful
way possible. No matter what you’re doing, the one sure thing is that it takes
longer than you think it will. Also, no matter how long it took doesn’t seem to
matter once it’s done.
When I get to editing, all my time goes
into it and I don’t write new material. Writing new material would create this
unwieldy effect and make me feel a bit hopeless. One bloody thing at a time,
right? Editing is not writing so much as it is reading. So maybe you’re reading
and evaluating your own work and reading novels and such with the rest of your
time. Then maybe you have the next story idea you’re super excited about but
you can’t write it yet because you’re still editing. Maybe, since the last
story you wrote, you’ve read tens of books, maybe even a hundred plus: man is
your head ever full of stuff! In which case, you feel absolutely certain that once
the thing is edited, and you return to writing new material, you will fly
through it, and it will be the best quality thing ever and you’ll have it done
super quickly.
So one story is edited and out there, and
you’re starting the next one: that first day you write beautifully, for hours
on end! You get like 5000 words, and you are so enthused about the project, and
it’s off to a wonderful beginning. You go to sleep ecstatic to wake up the next
day and start again. You sit back down and- huh?! Have you been writing for a single
day or are you into week 8 of your 2k-a-day stretch? Makes no difference to
your brain, that has left you without motivation, confidence, stamina. This is
the second curious property of “taking a break.”
To summarise:
-
If you take a break from your writing
project for more than a day, when you return it doesn’t seem to make a
difference if you’ve been away from it for two days or two months. So, if you
need two months or longer to want to return, to do some research, to read other
books with a similar intent to your project’s, just do it. You deserve to enjoy
the creative process. Lack of enjoyment of anything is no guarantee that doing
the thing is worthwhile. I used to operate on the converse of that principle
and it just made me miserable, and it’s no one else’s need or desire to prevent
someone from their self-appointed and unnecessary martyrdom.
-
If you are about to return to
writing and start on a new project, you might think that a long break gears you
up for it, supplies you with enough fuel to reach the end at full pelt. It
does, for about a single day. Thus, long breaks with this intent don’t give you
enough payback to be justifiable.
Essentially, the detriment of taking a
break during a writing project is overrated, as is its perceived benefit
between writing projects. While I do think that writing quality varies
proportionally with the dedication of daily routine (and this has been proven-
somewhere), if you can’t keep this momentum up, as I mentioned in my last post
you can re-type the entire thing one day after another, and supply Goldman’s
daily energy that the first draft was lacking, and overcome any rustiness
induced by a necessary break.
Write or don’t. It gets done. From my
experience, unforeseen delays have done nothing but improve my writing because
they provide an objectivity that my impatience wanted to take away from me.
The project can achieve its maximum quality
in many ways, at any time, but a lack of kindness to oneself cannot be undone.
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