Going Fallow

"Write every day" is terrible advice.

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The thoughts I express in this reflection do not apply to George R.R. Martin. If you’re George R.R. Martin, then ignore what I say here, lock the door, close the blinds, write every day, and finish the damned book already. Finish it, George!

Near the end of the film Wonder Boys, based on a novel by Michael Chabon set against the backdrop of a creative writing program, the luckless, perpetually high writing prof Grady Tripp sums up his teaching philosophy for his editor, who has come to town to collect a years-overdue manuscript Grady can’t stop writing. Inevitably, hilariously, recent events have spiraled out of Grady’s control. When his mammoth manuscript goes flying off into the Monongahela River and he has to reckon with losing his grip on his writing life, Grady gains perspective and realizes his own limitations:

Nobody teaches a writer anything. You tell ‘em what you know. You tell ‘em to find their voice and stay with it. You tell the ones that have it to keep at it. You tell the ones that don’t have it to keep at it, too, because that’s the only way they’re gonna get to where they’re going. Of course, it does help if you know where you wanna go. Helping my students figure that out — that and Sara — that’s what’s made these last years worthwhile.

It may sound like Grady is shirking his responsibilities as a teacher, but he’s making a wise observation about the writing life. Whether or not you teach according to some orthodoxy of aesthetics or craft, you can’t make a writer write in a particular way.

Writers are peculiar creatures with minds very much of our own. As if by magnetism, we’re drawn to visions only we can see, and our writing lives are made up of obsessive, mostly solitary efforts to make those visions materialize, so that others can see them, too. Because so much of what constitutes “writing” is highly interior — ideas playing out in the theater of our own minds before one word ever lands on the page — only we can figure out what will work to achieve the true, complete realization of our visions.

Our teachers can really only tell us what’s worked for them. Good teachers try to mold their advice to what it appears the writers in their care are trying to achieve. But there is a natural limit to the usefulness of their advice: no writer can see the vision another writer is trying to realize until it is in fact realized.¹ And since writers can’t see each other’s visions, we’re very much in the dark too about what journey — what long-term writing practice — will be required to realize each other’s visions.

This is where a ubiquitous, universal prescription — “Write every day” — falls apart as advice for writers. It’s myopic. It pretends to be good advice for everyone, but it’s not. It’s good advice for some, but for others it’s a death knell.

The prescription appears everywhere. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard or read it — in workshops, craft books, blogs about writing, conversations between writers, and yes, in my MFA program. Stephen King stresses it in perhaps the most accessible and widely read craft book there is, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work,” King says. He has a valid point. Sitting and waiting for inspiration is indeed a fool’s errand. You’ll wait forever for perfect ideas. It’s better by far to go to work on imperfect ideas and do your utmost to improve them.

In further fairness to King, his use of the prescription “Write every day” arises from his particular practice of writing. To date, he’s churned out sixty-five novels and novellas, five nonfiction books, and over 200 short stories. Achieving that output requires great discipline. In On Writing, King says he must write every day to keep the story alive in his mind — to keep his grip on its pacing, plot, and characters. I’ll admit there’s truth to that. I struggled for fifteen months to write the first draft of my novel, Quibble, and I often had to step away from it. But writing the revolutionary fifth draft, where the story really cohered, took a three-month effort in which I wrote nearly every day.

But King has proposed a false binary. Waiting for inspiration and going to work aren’t the only two things writers can be doing.

It’s always struck me as ironic that, elsewhere in On Writing, King identifies what else writers can and should do when he observes, “Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” His point here is that we shouldn’t let a pursuit of art consume us, like it consumed him when he convinced himself that he needed alcohol and drugs to keep the ink flowing. But we can apply this wisdom to our writing practice as well. What else can writers be doing? Living our lives away from the page.

Sometimes, I believe, that’s what we should be doing exclusively — living our lives, the whole day long, away from the page. And of course that directly conflicts with “Write every day.” You can’t do both.

I’m reminded of a discussion with a mentor, Laura Newbern, during my last semester in my bachelor’s in English lit at Georgia College. At my local community college, I’d gotten deeply involved in the student literary journal, filling a gamut of editorial roles including chief editor, and at Georgia College, I won the Academy of American Poets University Prize two years running and was even given the unique opportunity to take a graduate-level course with Alice Friman, the poet-in-residence. So I was a little full of myself, convinced I was going places. I asked Laura out for lunch at a restaurant in downtown Milledgeville to pick her brain about pursuing an MFA in creative writing.

Laura had a lot of faith in me, I knew, so what she said shocked me: “Don’t go after an MFA, Josh. Not yet. Give it ten years. Keep writing, but just live your life right now.”

This was obviously not what I wanted to hear. I felt belittled. But I tamped down my inner roar of objections long enough to hear Laura out.

She expressed the opinion, earned by both attending and teaching in MFA programs, that most students enter them too young, with too few hard knocks, with not enough experiences and epiphanies to write about. To her way of thinking, it was a mistake to assume taking an MFA was only about acquiring a skill set. I should come to such an intensive period of work armed with more knowledge than I yet had about what life is really like — and probably, too, with much more writing under my belt.

At almost twenty-six, I thought I was wise enough, practiced enough. Thanks to other travails, it would be three more years before I began the MFA at Maryland. But now, if I’m honest, I wish it had been ten. I put my nose to the grindstone in grad school, and I got a lot out of it. Looking back from the vantage of forty-three, though, I could have gotten more if I’d had more to write about. If I hadn’t been in such a damned hurry. If I’d just taken my time and accrued a lot more experience on and off the page.

“Write every day” doesn’t explicitly tell us not to live our lives, but it implies the lack of value in doing other things than writing. It suggests the writer ought to force whatever out of the pen, never mind how little reflection lies behind it. Daily acts of production matter; the quality of what’s produced doesn’t. Or, if quality does matter, it’s assumed to mean good style, good form, good construction, good characterization, etc., and to have nothing much to do with the depth which emerges from lived experience. Or it’s assumed, maybe, that depth occurs spontaneously, not as a result of lived experience. However you dice it, “Write every day” masks a glib claim: “If only you write every day, you can’t avoid writing well!”

But what if you’re coming to writing in midlife or even “getting up there in years”? I hear you object. You’ve got a lot to say, and the time you have left to say it is running short!

True. Even so, “Write every day” may not work for you. You may just not be built for it. And if you aren’t, that doesn’t mean what a lot of people seem to think it means.

Almost every time I recall hearing or reading the prescription, there’s been something hard-nosed, nigh elitist or authoritarian, about it. Something like gate-keeping seems to lurk under the surface: “Until you write every day, you’re not a real writer. If you’re not trying to write every day, you’re not really trying at all.”²

More than myopic, this is a bit mean-spirited. For one thing, there’s the everyday need to put food on the table. Some people just don’t have the luxury of spare time for such a financially fraught pursuit as writing. Beyond this, accusing those who can’t bring themselves to the page every day of a lack of seriousness has probably discouraged any number of would-be writers who do have the time to spare but who just can’t chin-up to this arbitrary bar.

It is arbitrary. Many writers, myself included, go through extended periods of writing little or nothing at all. And we are no less writers for this.

Since I grew up in the country, amid farmers, I call my periods of not writing “fallow.” Picture a field, normally under cultivation, that’s instead going to weeds and whatever else wants to invade and live there. Deer come to graze. Birds flit about, weave nests in the fencerows, mate, and raise their young. No human is being fed by this.

Now, it may look like nothing useful or purposeful is happening there. But for writers like me, this “nothingness” is a vital part of the writing process.

Fallowing is an ancient sustainable farming practice, and the reason for this is that it’s observably good for the earth. It increases concentrations of carbon and nitrogen, the organic compounds that plants need to grow. After fallowing, plant a cover crop like alfalfa to fix nitrogen in the soil. The following year, plant an organics-intensive crop like corn, and then just watch those plants shoot for the sky.

That’s a pretty metaphor, you may say, but how does it translate to writing?

Some writers can’t constantly churn out new material, day after day, year after year, without major problems rearing their heads. These are the ones I’m familiar with:

• A prisoner to this plodding, our writing grows samey, boring. This is particularly a problem for writers motivated to invent on the page, those not satisfied with getting just anything out. Spinning our wheels and breaking no new ground, we start to lose interest. When our lack of enthusiasm shows up in our writing, we grow overly self-critical and lose more interest. A vicious cycle ensues.

• Faced with the blank page and unable to come up with anything at all, we end up banging our heads against the wall in utter frustration. (What’s the point of this? “Suffering” for our art?)

• We just burn out, trying endlessly to sustain a pace we’re not mentally built for. When this happens, we may still be pushing ourselves to write, but something we consider to be a vital spark has disappeared. At best, we slip into a sort of lifeless auto-writing where we feel disconnected from what we’re doing.³

The saying “different strokes for different folks” applies here. If these problems don’t beset you, if you can write every day and if you want to write every day, then go for it. Write your over-productive little heart out! But if you can’t, then don’t sweat it. Don’t beat yourself up or believe anyone telling you that you’re not “a real writer.” Trust the page to call you back when you’re ready for it.

And if that’s not happening? Still don’t sweat it. Just live your life. Pursue other art to keep yourself buoyant and attuned to artistic possibility.⁴

Of course, you should be honest with yourself about whether you’re just being lazy. If that’s going on, nip it in the bud and get back to writing — the longer you let it go, the more you’ll atrophy and grow inclined to laziness. But only you know if that’s the case. No one standing outside your skin can tell you.

For many writers, fallowing is natural and necessary. Far from impeding our progress, it gives us the materials to progress. For poets, it’s a chance to refresh our capacity for paying close, loving attention to the world (perhaps our most important capacity). For storytellers, it’s a chance to step out of the quagmire of one plot so that we can cook up another. Personally, fallowing has often helped me turn a corner and try something new in my writing, something I never would have thought to try before.

No matter how long I’m fallow, sooner or later I always sit down and pick up the pen again. This brings me to another metaphor for what happens when my writing stalls out — and to another, healthier prescription for coping with it:

The well is dry. It needs time to refill.

It will refill. Have faith that it will.

When it does, be ready to draw water.

Some folks may argue you can’t be ready unless you keep yourself in shape with daily practice. Well, I just don’t find this to be true. I get rusty, yes, but when I sit down to write with an idea on which I’m keen, I manage to scrape off the rust in practically no time. How to do it all comes back to me, like making love or riding a bike.

So I’ve learned not to worry about it. And now I’m considerably happier in my writing life, not worrying about how often I write, than I was in my twenties, when I thought I had to write every day and I was a failure as a writer — or no writer at all — if I didn’t.

rem

One is welcome to comment.

rem

rem

Earlier in July, I published a think piece called “The MFA Discourse Is a Hopeless Mess.” It was up for about a week. Then I unpublished it, having realized a few things about what I did:

• I wrote pretty condescendingly, for instance about the quality of Substack writing. I have seen plenty of bad writing on Substack. But I think my piece implied a 1:1 correspondence between bad writers and writers who “throw stones” at the MFA. A Venn diagram probably does exist there, but a 1:1 correspondence is a stretch. Ultimately, it’s an unfalsifiable claim. (How do you find the statistics to prove it? And whose writing is “bad” is rather subjective, isn’t it?)

• All my evidence about the value of MFA programs was anecdotal. Actually, I don’t think this is uncommon at all in “the MFA discourse.” Practically every piece I’ve read on the topic is informed more by anecdotal evidence and personal experience than anything else (including one piece published after mine). But it’s one thing to offer up a personal story, and it’s another to claim the story represents something broad and generalized. I only think I got an average MFA experience. I don’t know how my time at the University of Maryland compares to what people experience in other MFA programs because I didn’t attend the other programs.

• Early on, I went out on a tangent about issues which sit largely to one side of “the MFA discourse.” I think what I said was fair; I stand by it. But I don’t like how I front-loaded those issues as if they’re such a big deal in this discourse. And many other factors, besides MFAs, are at play in them.

Sometimes I must remind myself there’s no line of folks stretching down the block, all waiting to hear Wise Old Joshua pontificate. This was one of those times. Something as experience-based as what I wrote can be valuable if offered as mere advice. But as a diagnosis of problems besetting a wide-ranging discourse and especially as a basis for decrying the discourse writ large, it smacks of arrogance.

However, one section in my piece relates to why I think “Write every day” is terrible when given as a prescription for writers. Also, honestly, I just like my writing in this section, and I want it to remain public. So I salvaged it to kick off this reflection.

1. Not to say their advice is worthless! As I said, writers are obsessive and solitary. We need guidance. When guidance fails, we need moral support. (Oh, do we ever!) Other writers are uniquely equipped to give us both.

2. I hate the conceit of “a real writer” more than I hate any other snooty thing in the literary world. There are enough things standing in a writer’s way. None of us need an aristocracy of “real writers” telling us, for this reason or that, we can’t join their club.

3. By “auto-writing,” I don’t mean a “flow state,” where we’re most fully engaged with writing and what we write. I mean its polar opposite, which is not “not writing” but alienation from our writing.

4. For me, this is woodworking and, occasionally, sitting with the guitar or at the piano and writing a song, which exercises me in the writing craft but with a different set of rules than when I’m writing a poem or a story.