Despite my best intentions, there is still always so much going on. It’s true that there is still less going on than in past lives (for example, when, in my early twenties, I was running an ultimate frisbee team, coaching fencing, singing in the St. Louis Symphony choir, playing in bands, working full time, trying to plan a long road trip, and maintaining an over-full social calendar), there’s still somehow a lot going on. As many people have put it to me, for me, "time is the most precious resource."
And so I think I mentioned that I’ve recently resubscribed to The Millions email newsletter and today I was compelled to click on "What Dickens and Prince Teach Us About Creativity". It’s a book review, and it’s good. But it (like all good book reviews) also has its own argument, perhaps augmenting[1] the argument of the book itself. Some things I liked:
Hornby quotes some typical advice for writers about the “right way” to approach the craft: “Cut until you can cut no more”; “Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away”; “Proceed slowly and take care.” Hornby’s book, written in his characteristically entertaining and conversational style, reminds us that not every writer embraces such maxims: “Dickens, one must presume, given his schedule, did none of these things.”
Hornby notes that people close to Prince described him as “addicted to the creative process.” He shares a telling observation from Prince’s engineer, Susan Rogers: “He wouldn’t have had that output if he’d been a perfectionist…It just poured out of him—he couldn’t wait on perfection.”
“Only a fool would argue that great literature is only produced quickly, and through financial necessity,” Hornby writes. “But the opposite argument—that great literature is only produced slowly, and with no consideration for money—is even madder. The truth is that nobody knows anything.”
I mean, the argument is easy to sum up. It’s not particularly ground-breaking, but useful. Especially for time-crunched me, who, after spending much of my early writing life sending things out like scatter-shot, have very much retreated to the "obsessive, borderline-ridiculous perfectionism that we expect from our literary heroes." In part it’s because I very much am interested in "the perfect order of words in the sentence." And I really do enjoy that work.[2] But also I haven’t fucking published anything in ages, or even really tried to have anything published. And sure, it’s not a "financial necessity," but I also don’t write the kinds of fictions that will ever make any money. Still, it’s a good reminder that I needn’t be so obsessive. Rather —
Let’s get away from the writing and talk about bikes.
I volunteered this week at the Somerville Bike Kitchen.[3] I went partly because I wanted to trade my 16T cog for an 18T cog (which I meant to write about, how this article got me thinking and also excited for the randonneuring season all over again), and partly because I fucking miss working on bikes. I can only rebuild my own so often.[4] But the thing about me working on bikes is that I was only briefly a real "mechanic" and so much of the work I’ve done has either been when a customer couldn’t wait or on my own stuff in between shifts (or these days: in the minutes between I get home and when I need to go inside). So I tend to work fast. I always check for safety and all, but when I was helping someone learn how to true a wheel I realized that I needed to really slow the fuck down, ditto helping the guy put a cassette on.
And it’s kind of like that with programming, too — you slam things together and make them work, and half the time when I’m doing the weekly pairing session I’m talking more slowly than writing the pseudocode I’m talking about (and since it’s mostly Python or Ruby, half the time the pseudocode "just works"), but there’s a certain joy in that: the "minimum viable product."
Of course, the converse can very much be true, as when, for example, the MVP becomes the product and we never go back and make it even "moderately viable." But that’s a different complaint for another, much later day.
But I’ve been doing a lot of single-shot writing lately (another, different complaint), and one part of me has been worried that I’m not taking enough time on it, but another part of me has been thinking that, at least in this case, the volume is mostly the point, and I know that I’m at least good enough (no genius) to get away with it in most cases, and so moving quickly is not only fine, but probably preferable.
I mean, I’m still laboring over each sentence of the novel I’ve meant to have finished a year ago, but —
The point is "more time creating" (emphasis mine). Especially given that these days a good deal of my work is (we’ll say) intangible," created or build or put together things — words on the (digital)[5] page, new cables running from the shifters, a very cool LEGO typewriter that I got as a birthday gift but still haven’t finished — become all the more important.
(And to that point, this whole post was very much shot from the hip.)