I’ve been trying to recharge creatively lately. By lately, I mean the past several months. As much as I hate to admit it, my output has been on the lower side. It’s been nonexistent here. Throughout my day to day, it’s been present, but not as much as I’d like. The recharge has been real, though. I’ve been reading, going to movies, making playlists, taking walks, and trying to bulk up. If my output is not going to hit the mark, at the very least, my input could be expansive.
I started thinking more about input and output this past week, as I was listening to an interview between Zadie Smith and Ashley C. Ford from the fall of 2020. When answering a listener question during the Q&A portion, about how isolation during Covid-19 has affected her creative process, Smith commented:
I just don’t recognize creative process as something that has anything to do with my life. I recognize time. How many hours do I have? When do I have to do other things? How much can I get…what’s the ratio of reading to writing because I’ve got to read a lot. These are the things that bother me.
Her emphasis on “because I’ve got to read a lot” stood out to me for several reasons.
My first thought was Stephen King’s line from On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all else: Read a lot and write a lot.” It’s something I’ve heard from various other writers and artists as well since then, and now here was Smith, a very successful writer and literature professor, and one of my very favorite authors, also admitting to concerning herself with this ratio on a regular basis.
Usually, when I go through these slumps in output, I do turn to reading and watching movies. It is of course, a writers dream to essentially be let off the hook for procrastinating because you are reading, even if that is a huge part of the work itself.
I often struggle though with determining what the proper balance is, and with feeling guilty for picking up a novel or doing more research instead of just getting to work on whatever project I’m trudging through, and vice versa. Then there are so many times when I question whether my slate of reading and watching has had any apparent impact on my work at all, or whether my work is lacking because of a lack of input. Words like this from Smith, and similar words of advice from King, make me feel better about my constant battle with this ratio, but I’m not sure I fully understood the reverberations of it until this most recent bout of reading v. writing I’ve been doing.
Since re-reading Frankenstein last year, I’ve been obsessed with the Romantics, particularly Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont and the rest of their crew. After Frankenstein, I picked up a biography about Mary, which then led me to another biography about Percy, which then led me to not only a batch of other books about the time period, their journals, etc., but also, classic novels of the time I’ve never gotten around to.
I was just following my current interests, with no specific project in mind, not thinking any of this would be relevant at all to my two rom-com like feature scripts. Yet, the works themselves as well as the amount I’ve been consuming have had an impact in ways that surprise me when I am working. Not only has this burst of reading done things for my current projects, but has spawned a couple ideas for future things, and made me want to get to work more.
And even if it did none of these things, at least visibly, that’s almost not the point. In On Writing, King also takes the time to say “I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on.”
All that said, am I simultaneously disappointed in my lack of work produced over the past several months, and happy I’ve increased my input during that time?
Yes.
Do I feel like I’m getting back on track though as of late, with a more comfortable balance?
Also, yes.
I’ll probably never not feel guilty when I’m not writing, but it eases the concern a bit when I hear from others and see for myself that input is just as, if not much more important, than the output.
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