“This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.”
-Umberto Eco
A few years ago, during one of those frequent periods where I was suppose to be working on a piece of writing but was in fact doing anything in order to escape said work (including Googling various apps and resources intended to “increase productivity”), I stumbled upon an app called LeechBlock, which I thought was guaranteed to help me get some work done.
This was only the latest in a long line of applications and self-inflicted programs designed to help me reach some of my word-goals, but nonetheless I spent a happy afternoon carefully setting up LeechBlock’s filter system and time schedule so that whenever I tried to get on facebook or any of the dozen or so news media or web comic or funny-image sites that I always find myself browsing through if I let myself drift off in front of the screen, I would instead be directed to a large desktop image where softly fading white letters on a black background reminded me: ‘YOU SHOULD BE WORKING’. No exclamation mark. No angry eyebrows or frumpy fonts. Just a gentle reminder. You should be working. You should always be working.
This phrase has become a self-chastising mantra of mine. One that is often found in the speech bubbles above the cartoonish figures that I doodle in my workbook or on various post-it notes scattered around my desk like the remains of a sticky-confetti explosion. Always one prone to travelling the long way around to a simple solution, I sometimes leave myself these sorts of notes in various crooks and crannies of the house. On the TV screen, in the fridge, inside the cupboards where I keep my caffeine supplies, the wall in the bathroom where my eyes rest when I sit down for a contemplative minute. It originally comes from something my friend and fellow struggling writer Bram Gieben said once. We were sitting in his living room sipping mugs of tea and moaning about how lazy we both were when he said, with a self-mocking chuckle: “I think being a writer probably means that you constantly feel guilty because you are not writing.”
Now, Bram has less justification for feeling like a lazy writer than anyone I know. He cranks out music and gig reviews and other articles at a rate which is astonishing considering how conscientious he is in giving the material at hand his full attentions. He pays his rent with writing and still somehow finds the ability to work on his novel when he’s finally gotten everything else out of the way, not hesitating to pull an allnighter and redrafting and retyping entire chapters in order to find that one little thing that just isn’t working right. When he’s at work on a piece of text it’s like watching a mechanic making an engine roar so he can listen for the faintest tinkle of a busted part, a sound so delicate that no one else can hear it even though we all know the car doesn’t work. Out of the three of us in Bram’s living room, there was only one who was allowed to call himself a lazy writer, and it wasn’t Bram and it certainly wasn’t Mr. Kitty, his highly suspicious black and white cat. And yet he, with a novel under his belt and countless stories and volumes of journalism, felt just as guilty as me about not writing enough. Not working enough.
You should always be working.
You won’t be, but you should be.
Umberto Eco says that he does most of his writing while swimming. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed to work even in his sleep. I, myself, can’t sit still for a few moments on the bus without flicking on the screen of my phone and finding something to distract myself with. I once lived for a year without internet because I didn’t trust myself to get anything done if I had it in my house. If I go swimming I usually get a song stuck in my head instead of trying to figure out how I can make something happen to character A that will make character B see them in a new light. In short, I have almost no self-restraint and am quick to run off and reward myself with a cup of coffee and a biscuit if I manage to scrabble together even one measly sentence.
That’s why I need reminders.
That’s why I need to constantly remind myself:
You should be working.