That was a very rewarding discussion yesterday about "process vs. project," and I'd like to thank JH again, as well as Nick Hartmann and everyone else who commented, whether featured or not. As you can probably tell, I've been trying to figure out what kind of writer I want to be for the rest of my life.
Very interesting that our friend* Kirk Tuck said, "I have to be the most project driven person I know." Kirk is just the nicest and most considerate guy, and I think I'm pretty friendly too, and when he and I talk on the phone the conversations are very warm and tend to go on for quite a while. Yet there is an undeniable tension in our attitudes to each other when we're discussing ideas in writing. I think we may have just hit on the reason, because I can echo what he said, but in the opposite direction: I have to be the most process-driven person I know. JH said, in a private email, "It’s not binary but a continuum, however most people are not in the middle." I'm way over on the process side. I don't even like "closure" at all: to put it bluntly, I dislike finishing anything. I like things to stay open-ended, because that way they're still alive; change is still possible, they can still evolve, you can still think about them some more, still be creative, still catch and fix your errors, and so on. It's only very reluctantly, and with disappointment and misgivings, that I will come to a hard stop and concede that something is done.
It's possible that the reason I liked being a magazine editor so much is that it counteracted my process-driven tendencies. Each issue was a project. There was a series of defined hard deadlines for every issue (I still dream sometimes of missing them), and there were people to help get each deadline met. Then, when the issue was printed, it was done: there was no more possibility for change. I could let go of it because I had to. If all of it had been up to me, on the other hand, every issue probably would have been late and half of them wouldn't have gotten done at all!
It's not that I can't work. I've told this story before, but when I was a freshman at Dartmouth had the honor of attending a meet-and-greet with Saul Bellow, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I waited in line after the breakfast to ask him a specific question, but I didn't get my chance, because the guy in front of me asked the exact question I wanted to ask: what's the best way to become a writer? Mr. Bellow didn't hesistate: "Write three million words." The guy who asked the question argued with that, but Mr. Bellow gave his reasons and didn't budge on the concept. The requirement was practice, and lots of it.
I was disappointed, because of course I was eighteen and wanted to be famous yesterday, but I headed right back to my dorm room, counted the words on a typed page (about 400), did some calculations, and determined that if wrote two typed pages a day, I'd be at three million words in slightly over ten years. I got right to work. Writing became a daily habit, and has stayed that way.
But then there was another problem. What the heck was I going to do with all that writing? I certainly didn't want to be responsible for it—keep it, catalogue it, store it. (Three million words with 400 words on a page is 7,500 pieces of paper, for one thing.) So I started writing letters. That way, I figured, each day's work was done and out the door in a day or three, and I didn't have to worry about it any further. It allowed me to get on to the next one.
I also wrote a lot of short stories, having the vague idea that that was how writers got started, and I might have made the switch to another kind of writing at a certain point. My girlfriend in art school wanted to get married soon and have six children, which greatly worried me. At that time in my life, I couldn't even support myself, much less myself and seven other people. (Ah, feckless youth—it never occurred to me that I could stay with her and not necessarily go along with her plan.) I knew enough about writers at that time to know how they work: John Camp described it in his comment two days ago. I had already met Larry McMurtry, and Larry's method was to write five new pages a day and revise the previous fifteen, meaning that he went over everything three times after composing it. I figured at the time that if I married Gina, I could pick a type of book, keep writing my two pages a day and revising six, and just keep letting them add up into books until the books started doing well. That was the wild card, though—I had no idea if, and when, they would ever start earning money. It got me no further toward a solution to my immediate problem. I honestly had no faith in my ability to earn a living at that point, and instead of courageously devoting myself to the one I loved and shoving off into the unknown seas of a great adventure, I broke up with her—a despicable, defeatist, cowardly thing to do, because I really did love her. (Although very bright, she's dyslexic, so there's little chance she'll ever read this.) Something I still deeply regret, all these years later. (Everything bad that happens to me in my romantic life I ascribe to karma, repayment for my perfidy. I'll either forgive myself someday, or else someday I'll die.)
I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that I've easily averaged 800 words a day, lifetime, even if it's a thousand words one day and six hundred the next, or whatever. (This post is about 1,500 words.) If I do the arithmetic for the 47 years between the day I met Saul Bellow and today, that's about 14 million words in my lifetime, give or a couple of million. Even if we put it at 500 words a day, which I think is too conservative, that's still 9,500,000 words since I was 14. So I surpassed Saul's Dictum a long time ago. Put in my 10,000 hours, in Gladwell-speak.
But you've probably detected already that "writing letters" is something I'm still doing, more or less.
Because that's another thing I learned too late: only practice exactly what it is you want to do, because that exact thing is what your practice will train you to do. Practice by writing letters, and you won't get good at writing novels; you'll get good at writing letters. Blogging is perfect for me because it's just an eternal flow of process. There is no project.
Even my photography is all process. I once got an introduction to John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, and instead of taking a finished portfolio to show him (I had several), I opted to maximize the opportunity by taking a bunch of bits and pieces of things I was still working on, along with some interesting failures. Very much the wrong move, highly transgressive in light of expected behavior and protocol when an artist is granted an audience with a top curator. But I was much more interested in trying to engage him in a discussion about process than I was in showing off finished work and trying, like everybody else, to entice him to buy something for the Museum's collection. That didn't seem nearly as much fun. Big mistake, but the impulse was a reflection of who I am and the way I think.
You know, what should happen is this: Kirk and I should write a book together. Call it Game Theory for Photographers, the art of the medium from the divergent perspectives of a highly project-oriented professional and a highly process-oriented teacher-type. I'd be the one to slow it down and chew on all the gristle and edit and rewrite until it's all shiny, and Kirk would be the one to slap it into shape (an outline? What's an outline?) and keep it moving forward and and to drive us up to and over the finish line. (While I wail noooooo!) The only thing is, pace Charlie Ewers' comment on Saturday, it would not be good if Kirk and I ended up killing each other!
Mike
*Just as an aside, according to The Gotti Wars by John Gleeson, in the old Cosa Nostra, introducing a guy as "my friend" meant he was just a schmoe, but if he was introduced as "our friend" it signaled that he was a made man and couldn't be messed with.
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Featured Comments from:
kirk: "It's wonderful that good friends can disagree so much and yet really enjoy the process of it all. I'm too reactive by far but I can't tell you how much I appreciate MJ's patience with me. It's comforting. And the fact that he's produced wonderful writing for me to savor (and sometimes disagree with) over coffee each morning makes me happy day by day (bird by bird?). Thanks to JH's comment I now get it. There is no right or wrong on the subject of writing. I need to stop believing that there is. Maybe that's the secret to enjoying both process and closure. Thanks Mike!"
Andreas Weber: "I'm leaning far to the process side as well (and a mechanical engineer with quite a lot of projects under my belt...). I may have found the ideal hobby in growing bonsai—they're never finished (unless you manage to kill one)."
Aaron: "You and Kirk would not end up killing each other. Rather, he would accomplish killing you because you would never get past chewing on how and whether to actually do it. Process can get you killed. :-) "
John Krumm: "Wonderful and slightly heartbreaking story. I almost succeeded in breaking up with my future wife when we were 21, telling her I wanted to end it after a summer romance. I returned to college 100 miles away, thinking I might get back together with a former girlfriend (shameful, I know). Fortunately, the former girlfriend had transferred, and intense loneliness, a phone call, and a bus ticket intervened, and we are still happily together. I chalk it up to dumb luck more than anything else. Sometimes the process works."