On how to write too much

By Murdoch Stephens (editor of the Lawrence and Gibson publishing collective and the author of Rat King Landlord)

Whenever I talk to people who want to write but have not found a way to dedicate themselves to it, the sticking point is always the question of time. When to write? How to find the time? How to make that spare hour truly one’s own? How to even start?

Whenever I talk to people who do write, I learn that they do so for many reasons and these reasons colour the way that they make time for writing.

For example, I’ve known writers who have such a heightened sense of mortality that they feel compelled to write to just get in as much as they can before their faculties fail them. Other writers are just as haunted by the grim reaper but instead of writing non-stop they spend decades crafting a single monolithic work that is to be their literary mausoleum.

I’ve long been fascinated by writers who exclaim how many years it takes them to write a book – “this book took 18 years of my life!” Isn’t there something in these announcements that echoes the resentment a parent might have for a child that doesn’t sufficiently love them back? For eighteen years I gave you everything!

Others make a craft out of telling others exactly what it takes to succeed in writing: you must write every day. You must write like any other worker, nine to five. Or, you must complete a short story collection before writing a novel. Or, you must craft an entire world and live inside it to write. You must sacrifice life, love, liberty for the singular pleasure of being an author. I’ve even heard these requirements repeated by people who have never written, but repeat these recipes for success with a unique deference.

Writers from my generation seem to have few grand accounts of writing as an all consuming vocation and more of fitting creative output around family and work. Maybe it has always been this way. Pip Adam recently noted how one of her books was written in fifteen minute bites around other pressing morning routines. Brannavan Gnanalingam told a writers festival crowd that he wrote the majority of Sprigs on his lunch break; listeners were appalled at how easy he made it seem.

From a publisher’s point of view, things are a lot clearer: a brilliant writer should deliver a new manuscript every eighteen months to two years. This time allows the business cycle to process one book before devouring another, but also ensures the reading public doesn’t forget a writer exists. For writers who aren’t considered so hot, a new book should be produced less often, say, once every five years just to see if fortunes have changed. For writers who are completely out of favour, publishers would prefer even fewer attempts.

My personal fascination is with excessive authors. Excessive authors are writers who defy time by writing far too much. In the age of the self-published eBook, there are almost no restrictions on the writer who can’t help but write. But my personal favourite of this type is Georges Simenon.

Simenon is most famous for his Inspector Maigret detective novels, but was also a master of the psychological literary novel with books like The Man Who Watched Trains Go By and The Engagement. At one point in his life, Simenon would write two books a month, taking fourteen days a piece, dictating the words to, first, his wife and, then, to a secretary. Writing more than 200 novels in his life – and hundreds of other shorter works and pup fiction – he created scores of pseudonyms so as not to (further) saturate the market for his works. So far I’ve only published works under three names, so I’m really a baby author.

Many other writers are suspicious of the Simenon-styled production of literature. In my experience there is a ripe suspicion that the excessive writer can’t possibly be doing anything other than littering the world with undercooked and unremarkable thoughts. Vladimir Nabokov was perhaps the most cutting when he wrote, “slow minds, hasty typewriters” though this was aimed at overeager literary critics rather than contemporaries like Simenon. If slow minds really do make for hasty typewriters, is the reverse also true? Would we say “quick minds, slow typewriter”? A more charitable interpretation might suggest quick minds can do as they please.

In The Argonauts Maggie Nelson wonders, “Can it be that words comprise one of the few economies left on earth in which plenitude—surfeit, even—comes at no cost?” Does Nelson mean that we can indulge in as much word making as we want without it doing any damage whatsoever? It is curious that writers pay so much attention to the phenomenon of writer's block, but so little to the writer of excessive quantity.

Perhaps my example can help because I consider myself to be at least inspired by the frenzied passions of an excessive writer. I’m not yet 40, but have been a little excessive by releasing a dozen books and having around the same number drafted on old hard drives. Rat King Landlord was drafted in seventeen days; Doing Our Bit: the campaign to double the refugee quota took eight days.

I’m not proud of the speed at which my works get written and when talking about them, I’ll throw in the caveats of the months before spent thinking through the concept and the months afterwards editing the book into something more readable. Nor am I as ashamed as Mr Nabokov might have me feel with his ‘slow minds, hasty typewriters’ quip. Writing at a gallop is just how I do things.

So as a final point I would like to point out to the would-be writer that excessive writing is the spirit that drives National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) every November. In NaNoWriMo, the would-be writer sets aside a very explicit amount of time – 30 days to write 50,000 words. No pondering a sentence for days at some writing lectern. Just making a go of it and giving ourselves the license to use a skill many of us already have.

Spending a month dedicated to some task whether it is writing a first novel or to not drinking or to growing a Movember moustache has become a popular pastime. Making this time to write is a simple, low-stakes way of trying a different way to live. After giving it a try we might realise we do not wish to live like an excessive writer every month of the year. But if we give it a try and we succeed (whether it be sobriety, writing or moustache cultivation) then we at least have the pleasure of knowing the task is within our capacity.

I know that excessive writing probably seems like a steep gradient for people when they’re starting out as a writer. One would hardly tell a builder to knock together their first house in a couple of weeks. But there is something about writing that makes it different from most other crafts: many of us are already sufficiently versed in our languages to be able to write a novel. Don’t let your fears or the judgements of others prevent you from doing it.