Give it all, give it now
Hello, friends!
I've been thinking a lot about deep work lately: About how difficult it can be to enter any kind of focused state when life and its many obligations keep pulling at your attention.
In 2014, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote an essay about his novel The Remains of the Day—specifically about his process for writing it. The state of Ishiguro's life at the time was already different than the average artist, in that he'd abandoned his day job and was now making art full-time. Still, distractions found him:
Until that point, since giving up the day job five years earlier, I’d managed reasonably well to maintain a steady rhythm of work and productivity. But my first flurry of public success following my second novel had brought with it many distractions. Potentially career-enhancing proposals, dinner and party invitations, alluring foreign trips and mountains of mail had all but put an end to my “proper” work. I’d written an opening chapter to a new novel the previous summer, but now, almost a year later, I was no further forward.
(I'm a little curious what Kazuo Ishiguro's day job was, aren't you?)
A 2010 article in the Harvard Business Review investigated the cost of distraction, or context-switching:
Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we’re getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don’t actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.
You might think you’re different, that you’ve done it so much you’ve become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.
But you’d be wrong. Research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at doing several things at once than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this case, works against you.
Ishiguro clearly felt the pain of such distraction, because he took steps to address the issue... albeit in a rather unconventional way:
So Lorna and I came up with a plan. I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash”. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitatively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.
The entire essay is, of course, worth reading. Ishiguro describes how, with the support (and possibly concern?) of his family, he managed to produce a rickety first draft. Nothing perfect or polished, just something firm enough to revise.
Ishiguro had a few things going for him here:
- Presumably he could afford the commitment; it is difficult to imagine an author with a day job, or any other serious commitments, being able to isolate for a month to create
- He did his research before he began: "How much should one know before starting on the prose? It's damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough."
- He was comfortable writing imperfect prose: "...at the end of it I had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash."
- He had the support of his family: "By the third day, Lorna observed during my evening break that I was behaving oddly. ... Lorna was concerned I had another three weeks of this to go, but I explained I was very well, and that the first week had been a success."
The Remains of the Day is my very favorite of Ishiguro's novels. It won the 1989 Booker Prize, and regularly appears on those "These are the best novels ever" sort of lists.
Ishiguro is not, of course, the only artist whose isolation and focus led to a significant creation.
The musician Justin Vernon—also in a Guardian interview—talked about the circumstances that led to him creating Bon Iver, the band for which he's best known:
"I felt very uninspired [in North Carolina]," he says. "I needed to get back. So I broke up with everybody, I broke up the band, I broke up with my girlfriend - broke free to do that."
Vernon retreated to a cabin his father built in the Wisconsin woods in 1979, where he'd spent weekends as a kid.
"The cabin's like a little alpine-style, timber-frame cabin, used to just have a dirt floor, but the last few years my dad's made it ... maybe too nice." He smiles gently. "Like there's plumbing in it now. But there's still that ancient vibe, because you're so far away from everything."
Vernon didn't escape his life with the intention of making any musical breakthroughs, though. He spent his early days at the cabin doing chores, drinking beer, hunting for deer. Over time, though, that changed:
"I didn't go up there to make a record," he says. "But music was just part of the process of me ironing out that weird vibe inside me. I sat down and started working on the songs, layering vocals on top of vocals, trying to be a choir."
He described a moment of crisis to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
"I was definitely down and pretty confused," he said. "At 26, I was thinking about going back to school to be a music teacher. To me, that felt like giving up, even though I was excited about that prospect. There was a lot of despair. I had anxiety and depression for longer than I kind of knew about and I didn't really understand it back then."
Back to the Guardian piece:
Sometimes, the vocals were more syllables than words. "That's how almost every lyric on the album was written, in that weird, subconscious back-door way." The result is something quite otherworldly, with stacked vocals, potent imagery and Vernon's star falsetto, poised somewhere between gospel, alt-folk and a cathedral choir.
In a later interview with the AV Club, Vernon tried to demystify the time spent creating the record:
But when I left the cabin, I don't think I felt renewed or "done" or anything. I still felt sick, my liver still hurt. I was going back to North Carolina sooner than I thought, to work with The Rosebuds. It took me months and months to realize what I had accomplished up there musically, personally, all that. ... Yeah, I went up to the cabin in the woods and I made a record. It's sort of odd to look back and see it as magical, because it felt like a lonely few months at the cabin, where I plugged in the laptop and fucked around.
Vernon considered the work he'd done at the cabin to be little more than demos, but encouragement from early listeners changed his mind. The recordings went on to become the first Bon Iver record, For Emma, Forever Ago, one of the most enduring albums of the 2000s.
I don't want to overly praise either Ishiguro's or Vernon's methods, or hold them up as examples of what all artists must do. After all, most artists don't have the luxury of a father with a cabin in the woods, or haven't been sans day job for half a decade. If total isolation from the day-to-day was a requirement, 99% of all artists would fail to meet it. If a state of "flow" is necessary, we'd all fall short more often than not.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, in his magical book Several short sentences about writing, pulled no punches about the work of writing:
So why not give up the idea of "flow" and accept the basic truth about writing?
It's hard work, and it's been hard work for everyone all along.
If you think that writing—the act of composition—should flow, and it doesn't, what are you likely to feel? Obstructed, defeated, inadequate, blocked, perhaps even stupid.
The writer Pico Ayer, in The Art of Stillness, notes that we're often too tethered to our day-to-day to achieve any sort of deep focus:
We’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off—our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.
Wendell Berry had a cabin where he wrote his books and poetry, but it wasn't a total retreat from the entirety of life:
Berry, who is eighty-seven, has written fifty-two books there—essays, poetry, short stories, and novels—most of them while also running a farm, teaching English at the University of Kentucky, and engaging in political protests.
Deep work is possible—even necessary—without unplugging from the world or our obligations. Austin Kleon wrote about this in a recent newsletter, in fact, arguing that the tension between our "real" lives and the lives of our artist selves is essential to the work, and without it, something urgent is lost. He quotes Peter Senge, from his book The Fifth Discipline:
If there was no gap, there would be no need for any action to move toward the vision. Indeed the gap is the source of creative energy. We call this gap creative tension.
In the spaces we create for our art, whatever it is, we must find the energy to give the art all we have.
Write as if this were your only book, your last book. Into it put everything you were saving—everything precious, every scrap of capital, every penny as it were. Don’t be afraid of being left with nothing.
Andre Gide said that. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, said something similar:
One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.
I like the way Christopher Hitchens put it:
One should try to write as if posthumously.
It's tragic that the world is not as supportive of art and artists as we'd like it to be. But it would be a mistake to think of this solely as a tragedy, and let it impede our progress.
Give it all, give it now.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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