I’ve been reading two books, one called Great at Work and the other The Good Enough Job. Both business books, but they highlight the toxic nature of our work culture. And I don’t mean just the day job culture, but how it also filters into fiction writing.

This is all with the caveat that if one of your strengths needs to something specific to help it with writing, then that’s what you need.

When I was growing up, my father worked for the aerospace industry. In those days, you worked for a single company and they paid for your retirement (clearly the cost of living was quite different). But there was a change in the industry, and my father was laid off. He went to work for another company for several years. Eventually, they also laid him off, and he considered working for the federal government—a huge salary cut—because they paid and had health insurance. He also considered a job in Colorado, a big move, and expensive. Then the company hired him back, laid him off again and went out of business. He eventually went into business for himself.

His comment I heard growing up: You can’t let your job define you. What if you get laid off or fired? Your whole identity is gone. (It’s not an exact quote, but the gist of what he said).

Curiously, despite all the changes in the work industry, this piece of your job as an identity hangs around like a cat digging her claws in. The passion stuff showed up possibly because of the book What Color is Your Parachute? (I haven’t read it; I may have to). It’s become this thing where you’re “supposed” to find passion and fulfillment in your job.

Usually, that translates into working more hours. Everyone repeats the mantra of “more is better” without realizing that they’re giving up their agency to serve the god of productivity.

The work part has infiltrated writing fiction everywhere. I’m finding it hard to find workshops that aren’t focused on productivity or how to market. Dean Wesley Smith considered, briefly, creating a beginner course, though I wasn’t sure if it would have been craft or in the direction his workshops have gone more recently. People posted alternative classes online, including a free  course I visited—production and publishing.

Not about actual writing.

Production goals come straight out of the work culture. A boss type can see that you’ve physically produced words and say you’ve done your job. And we absorb this thinking into how we write.

It’s especially troublesome when there are other aspects of writing that don’t involve the counting of groups of black marks on the page:

Revision: I don’t revise, but other writers need to. A writer struggled with the idea she couldn’t count words doing revision.  

Copy editing: Most of this is going through changes your copy editor suggests. It’s not all accepting all changes, but looking at each one. Most of the time when I do this, I’m using accepting all the changes. But I always run into a suggested change where I have to think about the comment and make the decision.

Cycling: I hated doing this in Scrivener, especially when something was coming out. Then, I was more messy with my process—a lot more messy—so cycling often involved taking things out and shuffling chapters around to get the right flow. If you take anything out of Scrivener, it deducts it from your day’s word count. You can end up in negative words. That’s demoralizing if you’re counting words and trying to make a daily goal.

Thinking: This is the most problematic of the bunch; the others have aspects of being work you can see. If you sit back in your chair, prop your feet up, and think about your story, anyone who sees you will be convinced you’re loafing (and maybe try to put you to work). A writer sneered at me and said that I was not doing writing correctly because I needed to think about it first.

Learning: Learning something new can’t be measured. You have to practice doing it. Businesses doing a lot of talking about continual learning, and it sometimes feels like they’re simply throwing classes at employees. It certainly isn’t enough to learn how to write by reading an article or a book. You have to do something with it. I’m currently working at adding the season to every scene. How would you measure that? I suppose you could count and track the number you do…but why?

The business world has a love-hate relationship with creativity itself. They want new shiny ideas that will make them a lot of money, but they also give creativity the side eye. You can’t measure it, and it doesn’t look like actual work. Years ago, a major business magazine blog posted an article from a manager on working with creatives. It was the equivalent of “Give them a cookie and they’ll be happy.” The blog still had comments then, and it lit up with outraged creatives. (The post has been taken down, along with the comments).  

Psychology Today offers reasons companies crush creativity, including this:

The Focus Mindset: Establishing rigid time, place, and setting parameters for “creative work” seldom works. Creative thinkers oscillate between periods of focus and un-focus. Creativity seldom happens in confining circumstances.

This hits on some of the areas that both books above discussed. Production goals—the visual aspect of working at writing—neglect the creative side. It’s not enough to simply sit down at a computer and start making black marks on the page.

I did that in the days when I was trying to write for Hollywood. Someone well-meaning told me I needed to write a script a week, so I did. The scripts ranged from sitcoms to moves. As soon as I finished a story, I launched on the next story. By the time I reached ten, I’d burned out.

Because I never fed the creativity.

Too much productivity is not good for us, and the tools have made it possible for us to push to do even more. To the point where every writer is assumed that they must write full time. Psychology Today comments that the pandemic increased toxic productivity.

But there’s also been an anti-productivity movement. You might not have seen it called that, but you’ll recognize all these terms:

  • Self-care
  • Resilience
  • Mindfulness
  • Gratitude Journals
  • Boundaries
  • Habits

All of them are disturbing because we shouldn’t need someone else explaining that we need to do self-care or be resilient. This trend has risen because of all the focus on working harder, doing more, and not spending time on ourselves.

When I wrote all those scripts, it was like being on a never-ending hamster wheel. In a day job, especially if you’re sharing your writing with one on your off time, you finish work fast, you get praised for it and then get more work. And another hamster wheel that burns up energy pennies like crazy.

How do writers step back from all this? The emerging trend of productivity now is that you must be a well-rounded person with interests outside of work. Even with writers who write outside of a day job, you also have to take time to have other interests.

Consider:

Visiting friends and family—you know, people things.

Taking your dog to a water park (we have such a thing). And since I mentioned it, a video.

Taking a walk at a nearby park among nature.

Birdwatching.

Knitting.

Attending a lecture.

Learning ball room dancing.

Watching a documentary.

Watching the dolphins. I did this for a trip to Virginia Beach. I did not take any pictures because my goal was to actually watch the dolphins.

Going to the beach.

Pretty much, something you enjoy that is not about writing.

These do not include doing these things while buried in a cell phone. I watched a woman walking her poor dog. She walked briskly, probably multitasking to get her 10K of steps in. But she couldn’t just walk the dog and get her steps; she was scrolling through her cell phone (email?). She towed the dog like he was a cart of groceries (dogs lose their ability to see the world through their nose when owners do this: How the Dog Became the Dog).

I used to choose places to go on the weekend based on if I could apply it to a future writing project. I’d got to a Civil War site and take notes. The trips rapidly became tedious and unpleasant because they became “work.” I did the same thing with learning; everything I learned had to be about writing fiction. My input was most unhappy with me, and I burned out on learning about writing for a while.

It’s easy to fall into this because it’s embedded everywhere in our culture.  So much so that influencers sell us apps and systems to make up the difference. There’s a whole note taking culture that proposes that you can follow a system and creative connections will magically appear. The problem is that if your creative brain is already starved from too much work, you won’t make creative connections with anything.

Dean Wesley Smith has talked about the creative side being like a two year old. It wants to have fun. Keep the two year entertained by doing fun things that might not seem all that productive.