There is a time to count and a time to be counted; the work is to know when that time comes
'Writing too brilliant or fragile to be written at all isn’t art; the work is to find and make the forms of brilliance and fragility.' Photograph: iStock, how the counting of calories eaten and expended can destroy pleasure and instinct and damage our relationships with our bodies and our habitats. I sometimes use this harm as an analogy when talking to students about writing.
New writers often come to the making of literature with ideas about productivity founded in industry. They are afraid of wasting time, of making mistakes, of failure, as if there’s an overseer standing behind them with a whip or the sack. They ask me: “I have an idea, do you think this will work?” I always say, “try it and see”, because though after publishing some dozen books I can often foresee pitfalls, all writing takes risks, if only the boring risk of being derivative and formulaic.
Counting words can be as bad for you as counting calories. It’s an industrial way of thinking about art. The suspicion can go both ways: there’s a feeling that people who write a lot, fast, can’t be doing it properly, aren’t suffering enough or working hard enough to be serious. On the other hand, people who write little, slowly, maybe aren’t trying hard enough, aren’t being productive, need to spend more time at their desks. The truth is that there isn’t a rule.
At the same time, writers write. Writing too brilliant or fragile to be written at all isn’t art; the work is to find and make the forms of brilliance and fragility. I’ve always been suspicious of “writers’ block”. Administrators don’t get administrators’ block, nurses don’t get nurses’ block, they show up and do what they said they would do when they said they would do it.
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