A Few Thoughts on Productivity (Patreon)

It’s been a while since I’ve talked just about writing itself on here, so I thought I should give a little insight into how I work.

Inspiration is a fickle thing. Sometimes it hits, and it hits hard, and sometimes it never comes. Some writers have fixed schedules for doing their writing, and that’s great. That’s not how I work. I seem to have an ebb and flow approach, and while the tide is sometimes out, sometimes it comes crashing in, demanding I respond to it. The result is I’ve written stories that have taken me weeks to draft only to be unhappy with the result, while I’ve also written stories in just a few hours I’ve loved.

I never know if an idea will grab me and make me run with it or if I’m going to have to drag it out of myself. Next month’s Patreon story I drafted last year, and I was didn’t think it worked well. I was recently prompted to go back and work on it. I rewrote the beginning, completely changed the ending, and the story became a Christmas story before I was happy with the concept. The Patreon story I posted on Thanksgiving, “Emotional Support Wolf,” I wrote and edited in twenty-four hours. I was chatting with a friend about some of my frustrations with family, and suddenly I had a story idea. The first draft only took an hour to write. The whole thing is just under 1,000 words, but the idea came tumbling out. Wanting to put the story out on Thanksgiving certainly helped with making it happen, but I remember when a 5,000-8,000 words story would take me all month to write.

The truth is, it still might take me that long to write a short story. While I wrote two stories this month, my productivity is not consistent. It’s taken me years to realize that’s okay. Sometimes the ideas come quickly like a speeding train, and sometimes I slog through a story only to let it sit for a year or two before I finally go back and clean it up. The key is to keep sitting down to putting words on the page, and when something comes to me that demands I write it, I do my best to answer that call. And if I can’t, some quick notes might be what I need to get me going later.

I will say that the more I’ve written, the easier it has become for me to summon that tide of inspiration. I’m sure some writers out there would tell me I’m fortunate I get these bursts, so I try not to take them for granted when they come.