Entries from March 2009 ↓

    There are times in life when it’s all just too much.  You’ll know these  times because they’re usually accompanied by tightness in the chest or another manifestation of anxiety.  When this happens, you have two choices.  You can kill yourself trying to do everything, and in the process you’ll probably end up screwing up a couple of things. Or, you can cut a few things out of your hectic life and focus on those that are really important.
    The same can be said in writing.  Chances are if you’re a writer, you have a million great ideas, and if you’re like me, you try to cram them all into the same page.  Unfortunately, you end up doing none of them justice, and your piece ends up reading like a schizophrenic’s flow of consciousness.  That’s when you edit, and as hard as it may be, you cut some things out.  It may have been your favourite part of the piece before you put it to paper, but once it got there, it just didn’t fit.  It feels like leaving your child behind, but for the sake of the piece, you know it has to get cut.
    In life and in writing, you need to make decisions to cut things out and focus on what’s most important.  There will always be those that seem to manage to do it all, but they are either superhuman, or they’ve cut things out that you just haven’t noticed, like family, friends or sleep.
    So, take an inventory of all the things in your life, or take a look at whatever piece you’re working on, and see if there aren’t a couple of things that you can’t cut out.  The end result will be better for it.

Photo courtesy of DG Jones.

Anyone who keeps track of the progress of 52 Short Stories will have noticed that it appears to be taking me far longer to finish a story these days than it did at the beginning of the year.  Similarly, anyone who follows me on Twitter will have noticed that just about every time I tweet, I’m in a different city (for what it’s worth, I’m the world’s worst Twitter user, and don’t tweet very often to begin with).  There is definitely a correlation there.

Over the past couple of months, I have been in Toronto twice, Vancouver twice, Boston several times, and in Montreal in between. Next week, I will be in San Francisco.  I enjoy traveling, whether it be for work or for pleasure, but it has definitely affected my writing output. 

Why Writing is Affected by Travel

It is my belief that in order to be able to produce consistently, you need to write consistently.  As such, I advocate writing every single day.  In order to write consistently, you need to make it part of your routine.  You need to make it habitual.  I do not go as far as saying that writing needs to become ritualistic.  You don’t have to do it at the same time every day, in the same chair, with the same tools. I believe that this can help, but I also don’t think that it’s realistic in any kind of normal lifestyle.

The problem is that the further you stray from the ritualistic, the more difficult creating that writing habit becomes.  In other words, the easiest way to create a habit is to write at the same time, in the same place, with the same tools, enjoying the same ambiance, every single day.  The more of those factors change, the more difficult it becomes to stick to the habit.

Traveling inherently screws up all of the above factors.  Writing at the same time becomes impossible, to the point where some days you simply cannot write at all.  You are not in the same place by definition.  While traveling, it becomes difficult to control your environment and your ambiance. Finally, not everyone uses writing tools that are portable.

You lose your habits and your routine, and in many cases your concentration and your focus.  This makes writing that much more difficult, and you start to experience something that feels vaguely similar to writer’s block. This can lead to a vicious circle of self-recrimination and despair.

How to Fight Traveling Writer Syndrome

In the past few weeks, I’ve come up with a few ways to deal with the perils of writing while traveling.  At this point, call them experimental.

1. Retain as many habits as possible

If you write in the evening before going to bed, continue to do so, even while traveling.  If you write in a notebook (longhand), or on a laptop, bring it with you while you’re traveling, so that you’re using tools that are familiar to you.  If you usually write in a cafe when in your hometown, write in a cafe while traveling.  The idea is to mimic your existing habits so as not to disrupt them.

2. Adopt new travel-friendly habits

As much as I dislike ritualizing writing, I find that I do my best fiction writing in my favourite chair. Non-fiction I can write at any desk, but fiction, for some reason I feel the need to write in my chair. As you can imagine, traveling with a chair is impractical, so I’m trying to get used to writing in other spots – beds, floors, desks, cafes.

Similarly, if you’re used to writing on typewriter or a desktop computer, consider moving to a more portable medium if you foresee doing a lot of traveling. 

3. Get used to writing in loud places

The hardest thing to find is often peace and quiet. As such, you should train yourself to be able to create while in a noisy environment. There is never a shortage of noisy environments, no matter where you go.

4. Take what you can get

Sometimes, no matter how much you’d like to, you just can’t get the circumstances right to write.  In cases such as that, instead of giving up altogether, see if you might not be able to do something else related to your writing.  Perhaps you do have the necessary focus to edit some of your writing.  Or perhaps, with just a pen and a few scraps of paper you can begin to outline your next piece, or brainstorm ideas for your next several pieces.

5. Whenever possible sit in an exit row

Frequent flyers know that the emergency exit row of a plane comes with a tad more responsibility, but a lot more leg room.  Aside from the additional comfort, the extra space is just what’s needed to comfortably type on a laptop.  Sitting in most regular economy seats, you’re often too crowded, and if the guy in front of you leans back, forget it, you probably won’t even be able to get the lid of your laptop all the way up.

6. Accept that you simply might not be as productive as you could be

No matter what I do, I know that I can write more over the course of a week in my home than I can bouncing back and forth across the continent. However, if I use the time while traveling to lay the groundwork for some future writing, I can often return home with enough ideas to start furiously typing away. Perhaps with enough momentum, I can even make up for my lessened productivity while traveling, but maybe not.

Sometimes, you just need to accept that there are things that will negatively impact your productivity and travel might be one of them.  Once you’ve accepted that, adjust your expectations accordingly, and you’ll see, it’s not the end of the world if you’re producing a few less words.

Photo courtesy of caribb.

Earlier this week, Lateral Action – one of my favourite blogs about creativity and making a living off of it – had a post that discussed Elizabeth Gilbert’s recent talk at the TED conference.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love.  Her talk was about the enormous pressure put on creative types to produce good work, and her suggested method of dealing with this.  Gilbert takes the audience back to before the Enlightenment when people believed that artists had a daemon, or a genius, that lived inside their studios and gave their work a creative flair.  The result of this thinking was that all creative works were a collaborative effort between the artist and his external genius.  At some point, the idea of the genius was internalized, and artists started being referred to as geniuses, and the work was no longer a collaborative effort, but a solitary undertaking.

Gilbert argues that this puts an inordinate amount of pressure on artists and creatives to produce good work, and that by returning to the idea of an external genius, artists can relieve some of that pressure.  The artist’s role becomes to simply produce.  How good the end result is largely the role of the genius.  All the artist can do is create, and if a piece does not turn out, it is simply because the genius did not show up that day.

I have to admit, the idea appealed to me for about a split second after I finished watching the clip.  No more agonizing over bad work?  I’m sold!  Unfortunately, once I started to mull it over, I decided that the idea of an external genius was wholly unsatisfactory to me.

First off, buying into this idea does require a certain extent of belief in divine intervention.  Even if the genius is not strictly a deity, or a spirit, there is something mystical about it.  If you believe in that kind of mysticism, then that idea is fine. However, if you don’t generally believe that sort of thing, then choosing to project all your creativity onto an external genius is simply an act of self-delusion. It becomes a conscious choice to create something apart from yourself that will carry all of this responsibility. The moment you make that conscious choice, you are defeating the whole purpose of the genius. The responsibility of a thing that you have created is ultimately your responsibility, therefore bringing you back to square one.

The second issue I have with Gilbert’s idea is that the whole notion of putting less pressure on the artist feels like a cop out.  Creating something is not an easy task, and no one expects it to be.  However, that doesn’t mean that the person who tries and fails to create something good should not take responsibility for that failure. I have often said that failure is part of the process, and in order to take advantage of it, you need to own up to it and accept it.  Blaming your external genius for your bad work is too easy, and creating isn’t supposed to be easy. 

Tied to that point, is the opposite perspective.  Gilbert also says that accepting an external genius is a good way to prevent an artist from getting arrogant, because he can’t take full responsibility for his success.  While that may be true, I think the better way to prevent an artist from getting arrogant is to remind him of all the failures it took before he achieved success.  Besides, creating something good and having success with it is possibly one of the best feelings in the world.  Why would anyone want to give that up? 

If we take away the responsibility for the quality of the artist’s work, and leave him only with the responsibility to produce, then creating becomes as mundane as digging ditches.  Successes and failures, peaks and valleys, are what make anything in life enjoyable.  Everything that is enjoyable in creating, the energy put into making something good, is lost the moment you give that responsibility to someone else.  A writer becomes just a typist.  A photographer might as well just use a point and shoot disposable camera.  A painter is just putting colours on a canvass.

Now that I’ve wailed against Elizabeth Gilbert, I will say that despite my dislike of the notion of an external genius, I agree with what I believe to be her underlying point.  Gilbert’s entire talk, in my view, is a roundabout way of saying that for any artist to succeed, what he needs to do is produce.  Everything else is a secondary consideration, because no matter how much talent, genius or whatever you have, none of it matters unless you produce.

Then again, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote an international bestseller, and I’m still trying to figure this whole creativity thing out, so what do I know?