Creative fury

The easiest way to make something is to be angry that it doesn't exist

I asked a friend to describe what I write, and he described it thus: productivity advice, but from like the sort of person least likely to write productivity advice, and in an almost comically erudite style.

This is, I must reluctantly concede, at least partly accurate. This is unfortunate, as one of my earliest posts on the newsletter was about how I don’t want to become a productivity guru.

Anyway, let’s talk about productivity.

How do you produce things?

Two great books on productivity that I really like are Hillary Rettig’s “7 Secrets of the Prolific” and Mason Currey’s “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work”.

The first book says the secret to productivity is having good habits and structuring your time, untangling the emotional and practical problems that lead to your blocks, and letting go of your perfectionism and grandiose goals so that you carefully and systematically produce work every day and steadily work towards achieving your goals.

The second book says that the secret to productivity is alcohol, coffee and, occasionally, meth.¹

In truth, the books don’t actually contradict each other. “Daily Rituals” has plenty of examples of people who work more or less exactly like Rettig is arguing for, and even most of the ones who are clearly coming from a very different emotional place have many of the features she suggests, especially around structured schedules.

More, I think the sort of advice you need to hear as someone with writer’s block is very different from a description of what people who are successfully producing already do.

But the contrast sure is interesting.

This piece is, to a large degree, positioning itself against “7 Secrets of the Prolific”, and before I go any further I do want to emphasise that I think the book is very good, and I highly recommend it to almost everyone who is likely to read my work. I don’t agree with all of its advice, but I do think that most people would be improved by reading all of its advice and following some of it. It has very much informed my thinking on procrastination, and feeds into a lot of my general attitude towards process, problem-solving, and creation. It describes the problems it’s trying to solve excellently, and provides some good tools for dealing with them.

But also it’s missing something, and the something it’s missing is the same something that most sensible modern therapy-informed content is missing. The ideal artist described seems, to me, lacking. They are balanced, sensible, unconflicted, and wholly without fire. They might experience intense happiness at a job well done, but generally intense negative emotions are treated as somehow inappropriate and something to avoid. I think this is a mistake.

The approach is very “writing is just a job and you should be able to treat it as one”.² I don’t think this is wrong, and I think you should be able to write this way, but also I think if you only write this way you are losing out on some of your best work.

Why write?

In contrast to Rettig’s sensible methodical approach, you cannot read “Daily Rituals” and help but feel that many of the artists³ described are very unhappy people who have clearly not done any sort of therapy to their problems at all.

Rettig’s solution to writing problems is to figure out what stops you writing and fix it, but many artists don’t do that, they just bulldoze through those problems as irrelevant because writing is important.

Rettig’s book is full of contempt for people like this:

Grandiosity is a problem for writers because our media and culture are permeated with grandiose myths and misconceptions about writing, which writers who are undermentored fall prey to. Red Smith’s famous bon mot about how, to write, you need only “sit down at a typewriter and open a vein,” and Gene Fowler’s similarly sanguinary advice to “sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead,” are nothing but macho grandiose posturing, as is William Faulkner’s overwrought encomium to monomaniacal selfishness, from his Paris Review interview:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies.

Many of the most famous quotes about writing are grandiose. I’m not saying that all of these writers were posturing—perhaps that’s how they truly perceived themselves and their creativity. What I do know is that, for most writers, a strategy based on pain and deprivation is not a route to productivity. In fact, it is more likely a route to a block.

I actually find quotes about how awful writing and the writing life are to be not just perfectionist, but self-indulgent. No one’s forcing these writers to write, after all, and there are obviously far worse ways to spend one’s time, not to mention earn one’s living.

Firstly: Rettig is right. If you’re not already writing, make no attempt to follow a strategy based on pain. Follow Rettig’s advice. It’s better for you and your writing than trying to emulate anyone who writes because they have to.

But those writers do have to. I think that if you believe that no one is forcing them to write, you have greatly misunderstood. It’s practically a trope that the most common reason to be a writer is that you can’t not write: You feel a burning need to get something out on the page.

I definitely experience this. Not with most pieces, but some things demand writing. This is important came that way. So did The first hard choice and a few other things I’ve written, mostly privately, over the years. But separately from individual pieces, I do actually feel forced to write overall. I’m OK with that, but I do think it’s worth understanding that for many people writing is not, in fact, a voluntary process, and it’s pretty consistent that they find it both mandatory and awful.

What’s forcing me to write? Righteous fury.

More on that later.

Is grandiosity worth it?

it’s grandiosity that causes the shame and low self-esteem by constantly setting goals and conditions the writer can’t possibly live up to.

Skill issue.

Let me tell you about Maurice Hilleman. Here’s Wikipedia’s description of what he was like to work with:

Hilleman was a forceful man yet at the same time, modest in his claims. None of [discoveries] are named after him. He ran his [group] like a military unit, and he was the one in command. For a time, he kept a row of "shrunken heads" (actually fakes made by one of his children) in his office as trophies representing each of his fired employees. He used profanity and tirades freely to drive his arguments home, and once, famously, refused to attend a mandatory "charm school" course intended to make […] middle managers more civil.

Hilleman seems like a complete asshole to be honest, the epitome of toxic workplace culture. I wouldn’t want to work with him, for sure.

Hilleman is exactly the sort of grandiose driven person that Rettig thinks is a bad role model. He’s an incredibly angry person, which drives his work, and rather than carefully an patiently untangling his issues in order to become a more balanced and happy person, he bulldozes anything that gets in his way with the strength of that anger.

This is, we are told, not something to valorise, glamorise, or emulate. This is probably true. Most people who behave like this are just terrible people with no redeeming qualities.

Also, there is a decent chance that you, personally, are alive today thanks to Maurice Hilleman.

Hilleman wrote, certainly, but he wasn’t a writer. He was a microbiologist. He made vaccines. A lot of them:

Maurice Ralph Hilleman (August 30, 1919 – April 11, 2005) was a leading American microbiologist who specialized in vaccinology and developed over 40 vaccines, an unparalleled record of productivity. According to one estimate, his vaccines save nearly eight million lives each year. He has been described as one of the most influential vaccinologists ever. He has been called the "father of modern vaccines”. Robert Gallo called Hilleman "the most successful vaccinologist in history". He has been noted by some researchers as having saved more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century.

Of the 14 vaccines routinely recommended in American vaccine schedules, Hilleman and his team developed eight: those for measles, mumps, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, chickenpox, Neisseria meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae bacteria.

(wikipedia again)

I don’t know much about Hilleman’s motivations⁴, but if I may project wildly, he strikes me a man who was personally offended by the preventable deaths of millions and who made it his life’s work to make a dent in that.

Would it have been better if he could have done all of that nicely? Without shrunken heads of his subordinates, angry shouting, and generally messy personality. Yes, probably. Could he? I don’t know, but I doubt it. You don’t get outlier results like this without outlier drive, and I’d much rather traumatise a couple dozen microbiologists than lose an additional 8 million lives per year. Maybe a nicer Hilleman only saves 4 million lives per year. Or maybe he doesn’t make it at all and saves zero. That’s a pretty high cost.

In contrast, in the early days of the COVID pandemic, I remember seeing a bunch of tweets⁵ complaining about the work-life balance of the people working on the vaccines. It took a colossal amount of self-restraint on my part not to tell them where to shove their work-life balance.

As a writer, you are very unlikely to save 8 million lives per year, but I want you to allow for the possibility that what you are doing is actually important, and I want you to take that seriously. There are good reasons to follow Rettig’s advice of valuing process over product, and not treating achieving your grand ambitions as the only benchmark for something being worthwhile, but those reasons are that you want to change the world (if only by putting something new into it), and you’re allowed to want to change the world a lot.

There will, of course, be consequences for this. I’d be very surprised to learn that Hilleman experienced no downsides for his behaviour, and I wouldn’t want him to. You don’t get a free pass for being an asshole if you’re brilliant, and I don’t want you to. What I want is you to do things that are important enough that the costs you pay are worth it.

Advice for weird nerds

I am a huge fan of

Ruxandra Teslo

’s recent writing about Weird Nerds:

• The flight of the Weird Nerd from academia

• The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

It ties in very closely with my previous thinking:

• How do we treat unique talents?

• Heterogeneity

One of the reasons I want to move past advice like 7 Secrets is that I think its advice for Weird Nerds is “don’t be you”.

There is an implied morality in a lot of advice (especially a lot of therapy-shaped advice) that feels like it’s centred around a morality of be harmless rather than do good. This is a bad morality. Every action you can take comes with downsides and trade offs.⁶

It shows up in both how we advise people to be - work on your problems, don’t be difficult, pursue equanimity, don’t make people uncomfortable - and also in the advice we give on the way to that. We’re not going to advise people to behave in ways that are harmful (to them or others) because then we are in some sense culpable for those downsides too.

This isn’t a bad default - it’s better to try safe things than dangerous things - but it results in a pervasive delusion that there are no downsides to niceness, and that therefore the Weird Nerd just must not be trying hard enough.

What I want is advice that will help the Weird Nerd to flourish, and for those of us on the Weird Nerd spectrum to be able to move as much in that direction as we need to to find something that matters enough to us for us to be able to succeed.

And, as per Ruxandra’s observations, we sure seem to be moving towards a world in which they’re (we’re) not able to succeed. Katalin Karikó is pretty close to being another Hilleman, and she nearly didn’t make it, and Ruxandra is largely responding to people saying That’s Good Actually.

This is an attitude that I think you can only adopt if you ignore the fact that what you do actually matters.

Why do people do anything?

If you’ll pardon the following extremely crude and oversimplified theory of behaviour, people choose to do things for roughly the following reasons:

1. To see what happens.

2. Because they enjoy doing it.

3. Because the world is not as they wish it to be.

All of these are good reasons to create, but I think if you look at really successful artists and writers and scientists and anyone who produces anything truly remarkable, they engage in most of them from time to time, but the third one usually dominates: They are creating to fullfil some purpose for the world.⁷

And to continue the crude generalisations, there are roughly two ways the world can be not as you wish it to be: It would be good if something new existed in it, or because a present and active sense that something is profoundly wrong and you need to change that.

The latter seems very powerful.

I think a lot about this passage from Neil Gaiman writing about Terry Pratchett:

Terry was silently furious: with himself, mostly, I suspect, and with the world that had not told him that the distance from the bookshop to the radio station was much further than it had looked on our itinerary. He sat in the back of the cab beside me white with anger, a non-directional ball of fury. I said something, hoping to placate him. Perhaps I said that, ah well, it had all worked out in the end, and it hadn’t been the end of the world, and suggested it was time to not be angry any more.

Terry looked at me. He said: “Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens.” I thought of the driven way that Terry wrote, and of the way that he drove the rest of us with him, and I knew that he was right.

There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing: it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld.

Pratchett was prolific, and is one of my favourite authors. He wrote with intelligence, wit, and a deep appreciation for humanity. And, yes, fury.

I hear this a lot from other people I know who write too. One of the most common reasons to write is some variant on anger. Hillel wrote “Are we really engineers?” out of spite:

Even the Crossover Project comes from spite! I read "a bridge to nowhere" (http://thecodelesscode.com/case/154) and thought "Wow this guy is really condescending." Two years and 17 interviews later, I had my 11,000 word response. Hooray for spite!

This is a pretty heroic level of motivation honestly, and I think it would be hard to do it without some specific drive. The drive to show those fools is a pretty strong one.

David Chapman

and I have frequently talked about how a lot of our most popular writing is driven by a sort of frustration of “This is obvious! Why don’t you understand it!”

And, for me, as I mentioned a lot of my nonfiction writing is driven by a sort of righteous fury: Things that are, now, obvious to me, that I really wish had been obvious to me 10, 20, 30 years ago, and that I’m absolutely livid that nobody explained to me. I write because this is unacceptable and I want the next person in my situation to not have to deal with it.⁸

So what are you angry about here, David?

The same thing I’m angry about every day, suspiciously-convenient-anonymous-interlocutor: Mediocrity.

I am a big fan of many of the ideas in modern therapy culture, and self-help books like 7 Secrets of the Prolific are steeped in these ideas. It contains many useful tools, and many individual therapists are excellent. To the degree you have therapy-culture shaped problems, I recommend learning about and adopting therapy-culture shaped solutions.

And if you live your entire life by therapy-culture-shaped solutions, you will end up bland and small and mediocre and I don’t want that for you.

Individual therapists, especially the good ones, may push you to do uncomfortable things. They should.

But therapy as filtered through the internet seems obsessed with avoiding rather than confronting bad things. It’s about “sorting your shit out”, which is apparently a precondition for doing anything important. It’s not a tool for helping you achieve greatness, it’s a tool for helping you wash the dishes and make a decent salary.

The dishes are important, and if you want to stop there and just be content with life, then do so with my blessing. You’re allowed to play on easy mode.

But if you want to achieve something great, do so with not only my blessing but also my support. To the degree that I can, I’m writing for you.