prolific vs. precious

In 1931 Isaac Asimov noticed something. He was eleven years old, and he had an urge to write.

Asimov’s first piece of original writing was published in 1934 and his urge to write was turning into a compulsion.

His father owned a candy store in Brooklyn, New York, and was kind enough to dip into the cash register, pulling out enough money for his son to buy a secondhand typewriter.

In May of 1937 he started his first science fiction story, Cosmic Corkscrew, and he also started to think that writing might be a career.

A year later, in June of 1938 he gave his first piece of professional writing to John Campbell, editor for Astounding Science Fiction. The piece was declined, quickly, but Campbell gave detailed notes.

Two days later Asimov sent in his second professional story, Stowaway, which was also rejected. It also came with notes, encouraging the young writer to continue trying. The note from Campbell said Asimov might make a professional writer with another year of practice, and suggested he write another dozen articles for submission.

Isaac was a quick learner. In October of that same year, he submitted Marooned of Vesta to Amazing Stories, it appeared in the March 1939 issue. Asimov was paid $64 for the piece.

He was nineteen years old. And he was a professional writer.

You could claim that he was a genius. A prodigy. But the truth is he was obsessed, hardworking, stubborn, coachable, and prolific.

He was just nineteen, but he was eight years into his writing journey.

Broadly, Isaac Asimov is known for his largest commercial success, the Foundation Series (adapted by Apple) and the I, Robot Series.

But amongst his fellow creatives, he is known for his daily practice. He is known for the prolific career that his daily practice provided for him.

Asimov once said, “The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write… That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter, and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.”

He would spoil himself with that “pleasant time” every single day.

Around 10:00 a.m., he would make his way to the attic, sit down, and type for six hours.

He wrote or edited more than five hundred books, along with hundreds of short stories and essays.

He is widely considered the greatest science fiction writer of all time and his stories were the basis for a number of science fiction works that came after (ever heard of Star Wars?).

None of that happens if Asimov spends 17 years in the attic toiling away on Cosmic Corkscrew.

He needed to be prolific.

The Precious Trap:

“It is mine, I tell you. My own. My precious. Yes, my precious.”

― Sméagol

What happens when you fall into the precious trap?

You become obsessed about the wrong thing.

In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Sméagol is obsessed with the One Ring. He referred to the ring as “my precious,” and was willing to follow it to the ends of the earth. The One Ring had powers, extending life. But what kind of life? Sméagol, in his pursuit of the One Ring’s power was left twisted, corrupted by the ring, and eventually died trying to keep it all to himself.

Very precious behavior indeed.

Don't be like Sméagol, keeping your precious work to yourself.

The ring had another profound power though. One that translates to you and your precious work.

The power of invisibility.

To avoid invisibility, we need to steer clear of the precious trap. Instead of keeping that precious work to yourself, you need to set it free. You need to let it go.

Awareness:

I first heard of Asimov and his incredible production from another prolific writer, Seth Godin. Godin started his journey in publishing as a book packager. A book packager is like a movie producer, but for books. You come up with an idea, connect with authors, find a publisher, and manage the process.

Godin was a young man and took on a project with Asimov.

Asimov then infected Godin with an idea. An idea about being prolific. At anything.

But how?

Godin said, “If you know that tomorrow morning you have to start typing, tonight when you go to sleep or today when you’re walking around, you will be noticing things so that you have something to type.”

Awareness.

That is the first lesson in being prolific.

Hustle culture might lead you to believe that a 4:00 a.m. wakeup call followed by a cold plunge will help you bang out three chapters of your book.

But what is that book about?

So, it starts with awareness and noticing, and it starts with telling yourself you’ll be sitting at the typewriter tomorrow.

If you are a painter, you’ll notice that the bottom of a cloud is the darkest part. You’ll see that the sky is brightest on the horizon. Now that landscape is really taking shape.

If you are a chef, or cook, you taste foods differently. Salt, fat, acid, heat. You’ll smell mint in the garden, an annoyance for many, but an idea — an inspiration — for you.

And if you road bike on the weekend, every trip during the week is a scouting expedition for the next great ride.

When you elevate your awareness, when you pay attention to your surroundings, you have no need for a single precious idea. You’ll be swimming in them.

Perspective:

Author Steven Pressfield says a career in creativity requires that you sacrifice everything, but he does not want you to be precious about it. That is what he calls “self-constipation.” Instead, he wants you to be productive.

Difficult work is about suffering. Practice. And repetition.

That is how you’ll find your voice and your perspective.

But Pressfield couldn’t find that voice right away.

He said, “For me, the first seven or eight books that I wrote were in character as somebody else. So, it wasn’t at all finding the voice of Steve Pressfield, it was almost like an actor getting into a role and that worked for me, that freed me from that self-constipated, super self-conscious, precious writerly crap that everybody goes to. To write in the voice of somebody else. And the voices I was writing were like, way away from who I am as a person. But somehow, they were truer to me than my own actual voice.”

In the same podcast, Shawn Coyne (Pressfield’s long time editor) added, “Why not pretend? Let me pretend and write in somebody else’s voice and see where that takes me. Let me rewrite this scene from the point of view of the dog. I wonder what that would do for me? I’m just going to do it as an exercise. My intention is to rewrite this scene from the point of view of the family dog as the husband and wife are breaking up and will never speak to each other again. What would the dog experience?”

It is a lot like Hiro’s New Angle. Try and see things from a different perspective to better understand the truth. Break your lens or borrow someone else’s.

A new lens, a new perspective can release you from the heavy chains of your precious work. It can help you to see a new way forward and become more prolific.

And once you get the ball rolling with improved awareness and perspectives, it might be time for the scary part. Going all-in.

All-In:

“How bad do you want it? Are you willing to sacrifice, basically, everything else in your life to have that? Because that’s what it’s going to take.” Pressfield has a firm stance on the commitment needed to create great work. “Think about Mark Twain. Think about Ernest Hemingway. Think about Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, anybody. Now, obviously people have marriages, they have happy marriages, and they manage to live their lives. But if you’re gonna really succeed at something, at anything, it’s a heart and soul kind of a scenario.”

Mark Twain was a prolific writer and had amazing hair

When you put it like that, the whole thing sounds rather precious. But is putting your heart and soul into something really that big of an ask? To me, finding that thing is more of a luxury.

If you are writing a book, a short story, a blog post, or an article for the New York Times, it starts to sink into everything you do. You’ll sit straight up in the middle of the night and jump out of bed with an idea. An idea that needs to be captured. As you drive to the office, you’ll franticly search for a scrap of paper, sloshing coffee and crossing lanes, to jot down a thought. You’ll run home from the park, pulling your kid by the arm, because an idea, a moment, strikes you as transferable and important and worthy of sharing.

So yeah, it takes heart and soul, but most good things do.

Acceptance:

Do you know what’s almost as hard as writing a book?

Guessing what will be meaningful to people. Guessing what book will sell and spread.

John Grisham was using leftover copies of A Time to Kill as doorstops and paperweights. He couldn’t give them away.

Tim Ferriss, J.K. Rowling, Andy Weir, and the Fifty Shades of Grey lady, all had hits that nobody wanted to publish.

Same with another author that I love.

Hugh Howey told himself he’d “write two books a year for 10 years.”

That was his commitment. Prolific for a decade. If it worked out, great. If not, at least he gave it a try.

Acceptance.

He knew that being self-constipated, writing and rewriting the same title for 10 years and hoping to find an audience would be a blueprint for precious invisibility. It would be holding onto the One Ring.

Instead, he got busy publishing.

First up was the four-part Bern Saga, released throughout 2009 and 2010.

Half Way Home was also released in 2010.

The Hurricane and The Plagiarist in 2011.

And then, in July 2011, he released Wool. A $0.99 novella. Just 36 pages.

High Howey, prolific, and awesome, and a hero — Hugh and Rebecca Ferguson on the set of Silo

By October he noticed Wool was outselling his earlier work and was on pace to sell 1,000 copies by the end of the month. Howey thought, “this is going to be the pinnacle of my career.” He put aside the book he was working on and set out to finish Wool.

Wool: Proper Gauge was released as part two of the series in November of 2011.

Wool: Casting Off & Wool: The Unraveling in December 2011.

And finally, Wool: The Stranded in January 2012.

The five-part series of novellas was now Wool: Omnibus, a full-length novel, and Howey was now a bestselling science fiction author.

I started reading Wool in 2014 after hearing an interview with Howey. The serialized approach, releasing parts 2-5 in quick succession, was anything but precious.

I loved the book and was excited to have more of his work to enjoy after finishing.

I can’t say the same for another favorite, Robert Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a classic. I’ve reread it more than any book outside of The Cat in the Hat. He published ZMM in 1974 and didn’t follow up until the publishing of Lila in 1991, a book he toiled with for 17 years.

Pirsig was as precious as they come. A self-proclaimed perfectionist. I guess that is only fitting for a philosophy professor writing about the “metaphysics of quality.”

But what is quality? Nothing more than hitting specifications and meeting expectations. Coca-Cola has quality standards. Tiffany & Co. does too. Sugar water and precious stones. But what quality means is they provide what they say they will.

Pirsig’s quality exceeded all expectations, and most of his readers would have traded out a handful of perfectly polished phrases, for a few more of his ideas to ponder.

That preciousness is a loss for all of us.