. I was thinking about Narelle’s post about scheduling creativity. I was thinking of those writers that recommend forcing yourself to write every day, even if you don’t feel like it.
And then I read a book called How To Be Idle (highly recommended!) and I learnt how in pre-Industrial Revolution times, people worked at home, and worked just long enough to earn what they needed – and only that. They worked to their own schedule, and arranged their time to suit themselves. And then the Industrial Revolution came, and people had to work to others schedules, to suit other people’s times – and their leisure time was stripped away, because that was time they could spend working for their boss.
And as this continued, we all started to believe all those work-ethic ideals – such as ‘early to bed early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’ and ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’.
But of course, the writers and poets escaped this. They seemed to spend all their time drifting about lakes and fields just idling. But in time, the work ethic drifted in here too and writing, instead of being an inspirational act, done only at the right time and place, became just as much a job as standing on an assembly line in a factory, referred to as ‘work’ not art, scheduled for set hours, not when the time was right.
But if Blake had written by the hour, could he have produced his wonderful visions? If Wordsworth had worked to a schedule, when would he have seen those daffodils?
When I force myself to write, I produce tired, dull dross. My words are staid and awkward, my phrasing clumsy, my dialogue cliched, and I end up throwing my pen down in disgust. But if I allow myself to idle, somewhere in the back of my mind, my story grows and changes and forms, until it is ready – and only then, when it’s announced itself to me, do I write – and I produce something I can be a little bit proud of.
So – which is better – a work-like schedule of dull, repetitive prose forced unwilling out of you, or lovely lost moments of idleness building up to a perfect piece of writing?
I know which I would choose.
4 responses so far ↓
Postscript « The tip-tap of monkey keyboards // November 15, 2008 at 5:40 pm
[...] less, then I’m reading random blog entries (obviously following my own advice here) and someone else has just posted an entry saying we should all be more inclined to sit back and let the muse find us [...]
Georgie B // November 15, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Hands down, lovely lost moments of idleness building up to a perfect piece of writing.
Certainly makes my life easier.
Jean Henry Mead // November 15, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Good advice, but for some of us who started our writing careers in journalism, the urge to write happens as soon as we sit at our computers. I recall that Hemingway once said, “Stop [writing] when you are doing good. If you do that, you’ll never be stuck. And don’t think or worry about it until you start the next day. That way your subconscious will be working on it all the time. But if you worry about it, your brain will get tired before you start again. You have to work every day. No matter what has happened the day or night before, get up and bite the nail.”
The reason I remember is that I wrote an article about Papa Hemingway recently for my blog, http://advicefromeditors.blogspot.com/
globalwrite // November 17, 2008 at 8:04 pm
Michelle, this is my favourite post of all time! Thanks for countering my left’s compulsion to make demands on my right. Am going to look for and buy that book. Narelle