Lessons from Absurdity

Much as I enjoy National Novel Writing Month, I don’t for a moment think it offers a sustainable way to write or a means to get the best out of yourself. That’s not a criticism: it’s not intended to do either of those things. But that doesn’t mean it’s valuable only as a way to break out of a rut, or to force out a first draft of a project that’s been nagging at you. There are some useful lessons to be learned from this ridiculous way of writing. As much for my benefit as anyone else’s, I’m going to record the ones I come across here.

Chunking

You can call this “timeboxing” or “the Pomodoro technique” if you like, although strictly speaking those are both a little more complicated and at least one of them sounds kind of silly. It’s simply the habit of setting a small chunk of time and spending that time focused entirely on a single task. Ideally, you then repeat the process – otherwise you don’t get anything very substantial done.

The real magic here isn’t that you cut out distractions for the thirty minutes you spend concentrating: it’s that you let them back in afterwards. National Novel Writing Month has in-built distractions that this is particularly valuable for, wordcount being the most notable. Breaking up your work time gives you a nice routine to put these in: the timer runs out, and you check your wordcount, update it on the website and take a look at what that does to the graph. You don’t need willpower to keep yourself from doing that when you should be working, because it’s always on the horizon anyway.

Leave it, he’s not worth it

A classic writing tip is to avoid pausing for research. If you find you need to know when Mars bars were first produced, you don’t stop to look it up: you stick in an obvious and, ideally, searchable placeholder (popularly the journalist’s mark “TK”) and get on with business. It’s a particularly potent method when you’re in full flow or against a deadline, and it pairs very nicely with chunking your time because you can build filling in the blanks into your between-chunks routine.

Something I find comes less easy, but which is at least as beneficial, is skipping whole passages when you don’t feel you can be bothered with them. Why force them out? Will that be your best work, or would you do better moving on to something that suits your mood?

Bit by bit, I’ve been reducing my tolerance for passages that aren’t playing nicely, becoming more and more willing to drop in a little note-to-self and move on. Often, I find myself moving on to passages I set aside on a previous occasion, and which I suddenly have a much better idea of. Often, I find the scenes I write one after another are connected by something more interesting than just chronological order. It may be a cheap productivity trick, but it can naturally lead to more thoughtful writing.

Music

I used to write with music in the background all the time. No problem. At some point, I stopped because I thought it was distracting; whenever I tried it again, it really was distracting, which rather supported the theory. It was a shame, because music can have its advantages: it drowns out other distracting noise from the environment; it keeps you aware of the passage of time should you find yourself staring into space.

I suspect the real problem was that I started listening to the wrong music. Not in a way that makes sense – the old doctrine of sticking to music with no vocals, or vocals in a language I don’t understand, does nothing for me. REM seem to be the most reliable source of non-distracting music; “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” is inadvisable. (OK, perhaps that last part makes sense.)

If there’s a lesson here, I think it’s this: be wary of employing writing advice just because it sounds reasonable. It’s always better to do something silly that works than something sensible that doesn’t. That goes for life, too.