I wrote this in November 2002 but it's worth digging out an re-stating
Quick!
Quick!
Today is November 18th 2002. On October 13th
I made a bet that I would write fourteen stories in six weeks and that at least
ten of them would place in decent outlets. So far I have written nine short
stories, three new articles and one piece of creative non-fiction, thirteen pieces. This
is at the same time as running two Boot Camp writing schools with approximately
one hundred posts a day.
I have six days to write my fourteenth piece (and I’m writing
it now!)
So the work is rushed, yes? Rubbish, yes? You can’t write
quality at ninety miles an hour! Wrong!
William Saroyan shot to fame with his story The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,
published in Story Magazine. Saroyan then told the editors he would write
thirty short stories, one a day for thirty days, which he would send to them to
illustrate the problems of the short-story writer. On one of the thirty days
Saroyan wrote three shorts and in the month he wrote thirty-six stories. All
rubbish? No!
Bennet Cerf of Random House took twenty-six of the thirty-six
stories and published them as a book to critical acclaim. (Saroyan was annoyed
they didn’t take all thirty-six!)
Speed of writing does not necessarily mean poor quality. In
fact, I contend that the faster we write often the better the quality. It’s by
the letting go, by rushing past the psychic guards that we best access the raw
and bloody, the deep inside stuff, the true meat of writing, the soul.
Matthew Arnold said “Produce,
produce, produce, for I tell you, the night is coming!” Georges Simenon
must have taken that advice! Allegedly he lost count of the number of lovers he
had, but in ten years as a young man he wrote 200 pulp novels and countless
short stories before settling down to write the Inspector Maigret series. It
seems Simenon was slowing up by then. In the period 1931-1972 he averaged a
mere two-and-a-half novels a year. Perhaps those lovers were keeping him busy.
The beat writers like Jack Kerouac wrote quickly, unplanned,
spontaneously. Sometimes it was raw, some critics thought too raw, but works
like Visions of Cody; Doctor Sax; Maggie
Cassidy; Pic, and The Subterraneans still
grace our bookshelves alongside Kerouac’s classic On the Road. Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL, utterly honest, rushed from the
gut, was so stunning it exploded on to the market and still sells steadily
today.
John Creasey wrote a dizzy 562 books under 28 pseudonyms.
Were they classy literature? Well, no, but most of us would die to produce such
slick, readable, interesting stories. With such an output, Creasey barely took
breath writing 10,000 words a day, and it has been said, he wrote formulaically
and often riddled his work with clichés. Awful, yes? Well, he sold eighty million
books worldwide and has books on HRF Keating’s list of the 100 best-ever
crime novels. Some failure! And by the way, before selling his first book,
Creasey had 743, yes seven HUNDRED and forty-three rejection slips.
Prolificity doesn’t mean lack of quality, nor need writing
fast preclude art.
Joyce Carol Oates doyen of the short-story in the US has
written 45 novels, 9 non-fiction books, 8 books of poetry and 26 collections of
shorts in a career only just about to reach its fortieth year. J G Ballard
wrote 26 novels as well as over a hundred superb short stories; in twenty years
Harlan Ellison wrote forty-two books, three dozen scripts, and eleven hundred
short works.
Boot Campers are required to produce a short-story every two
weeks. When we first started, an incredible six years ago, one writer argued
that it was impossible to produce a decent story in six months. Her most
prolific year had produced three unsold stories. A year later she won a first
prize of $2,000 for a "two-week" Boot Camp story.
It can be done. Working hard and under pressure, can, in and
of itself, produce a special kind of mental energy, a stirring of the deep
juices, a buzz, a rush to make more words appear. No, not every story is
destined for The New Yorker, but then how many are when you plod out two or
three a year?
When we set goals, tough, almost impossible goals, the goal
itself can be a motivator, the mere finishing of a draft a reward in itself.
Simply doing can bring its own
rewards and doing it intensely changes the way we think and see the world.
Writing intensely we become fired up, magnetic, eager, and it’s as if the world
knows we are a vessel. Stories come to us. Ideas fly in the window. It’s tiring
but it’s exhilarating, and the words just keep coming!
And it really, really can be art. Ginsberg said, “Ageless art
has always been spontaneous. Ozymandias,
Shelley’s poem about time and eternity, was written in ten minutes as an
exercise to show that he could do it right.
The idea that spontaneity is something that’s new-fangled, or
the abstract expression of strange modern ideas is ridiculous. It’s the oldest
thing in poetics, just like vocalisation is older than print.”
So, I argue, writing quickly, can unleash energies and power
you didn’t know you had. But on top of this, fast, spontaneous writing
unleashes an original, unfettered, closer-to-the-truth you, the magical, the
surprising, the special, the art that’s in us all.
Saroyan said that when he was seized by a story he needed to
write it quickly. If he didn’t do it there and then, it might leave him. He
took less than a week to write each of his plays. In an interview he smiled
when describing a play The Paris Comedy
he wrote for Darryl Zanuck. “I took thirteen days because there was so much
partying going on at that time.”
Boot Campers are put under pressure, not merely to write, but
to read and critique other stories. It’s an impossible job and some fall away.
So why volunteer for such pressure? Saroyan: “Sometimes, without pressure, work
doesn’t get done at all. You abandon most readily those works which have no
destination other than your own wishes. There’s no editor or producer standing
there waiting to make you see a job through. In fact many writers are held back
by setting themselves too-high standards. They get a novel one-third done and
give up because they think it’s not good enough.”
We should welcome pressure, set ourselves goals, achieve
those goals. We should write every day in a fervour, a fever, and grow that
self-awareness, that comes from writing all the time. We don’t write all the
time? Yes we do. When we are not writing we are still writers, looking,
thinking, smelling, sucking in the world, and in the lesser moments (between
those glorious hard-working, passionate spurts) we should live off the magical,
inspired, near-ecstatic times when we are typing.
To access the demons, the angels, the truth, the real core of
being, we must have lust, utter, racing passion. Quicker, quicker, deeper, hotter.
Tom Robbins said, “Get yourself into that extreme state of
being next to madness. You should always write with an erection, even if you
are a woman.”
A good story, a great story, when it comes, is an outpouring
of the soul. The connection is made, the dam is breached. Stop and the
connection will be broken, the dam repaired. James Dickey the poet and also
author of the superb Deliverance
talked of his seventeen hour stretches at the typewriter.
“I want to go full blast towards the light at the end of the
tunnel. I want to get there. Sure, when I’ve got there I may sit on what I’ve
got or fiddle with it, but if the essential of it is out, all is down on paper,
wow is that a great feeling. When you’re writing like that you know the work
has the potential of being good right the way through.
“With luck and all that work, you can get the thing to where
no word can be changed without diminishing the piece. When you sense this
opening, this situation, you have to push. You want to get there because you
know it, smell it. It can be done.”
Dylan Thomas may have spent days, weeks, worrying over the
placement of a comma, but great songs have been conceived and written in ten
minutes, just like Ozymandias.
Wonderful stories have not existed at breakfast and been part of our literary
history by tea-time. Try it. Let rip, change. Lock the doors, turn up the
music, rock the house and write, write, write! Unleash!
*
Two hours ago, this article didn’t exist. My target of
fourteen pieces in forty-two days was still to be achieved. I have six more
days to go and this, my fourteenth piece is done. Now tell me dear, reader,
what are you reading?
1,500 words
Postscript.
When I wrote these pieces I was under merciless attack on a
daily basis. I was managing to run Boot Camp (a 25-Hour a day job) and was
running another ten writers trying out the BC system. I wrote:
Topless Beach
Dee, a Dancer, Too Blue
There Was a Time
From the Tenth to the Eleventh on the occasion of my Passing
Seven Hills, a Postmen, Silly Money
Miguel Who Cuts Down Trees First Prize, Cadenza
Officiate
Ugly
Jacob Perry
Admin
Crash
Edwin Sly's Last Letter
Marmalade Dear?
Night Out
A Bad Man Tapping
Judgement Day
How to Steal Stories
The Novice Screenwriter Refuses to Conform
Quick! Quick!
There are two first prizes in there, a $200 second prize,
three articles that placed twice and one that placed once. In all 16
publications. There are three unpublished pieces which I still rate in my best
work and will win a prize somewhere. IMO it's not difficult to write a 1,500
worder a day, if that's where you want to write. Waiting for the muse is
nonsense. The muse lives inside every one of us and is tempted out by work.
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