Prolific
“You cannot write well or much (and I venture the opinion that you cannot write well unless you write much) unless you form a habit.”
-W. Somerset Maugham
I’m on vacation on an island, writing, but not a bit of it feels like work.
I’m averaging about 4–5 pages per day of quality material, annualized at about 1,200 - 1,500 pages, but I’d be happy with 900, wouldn’t you?
I start with a stack of books to grab from on the table: poetry (Levine, Gluck, Howell), short stories (McGuane, Helprin), memoir (Mary Karr). I keep dumping clothes out of my rollerboard suitcase during my travels, and replacing them with books. The books are my seed corn, both kindling and accelerant.
Secondly, I have mastered the capacity of capturing and rendering what I observe and remember. There is no subject off limits (football placekickers, ditch diggers, Ebola ambulance drivers), so I always accommodate an initial thought and find a way to elevate it.
I often do this by speaking into my phone on the Temi app (at the pool, on the beach, at the grocery store), uploading the audio file, ordering a raw transcript and editing it later when I’m back home with some quiet solitude time at my laptop.
Finally, I am comfortable with re-purposing my creative work, cross-pollinating incessantly, where a poem becomes an essay, or the most lyrical parts of a short story might inspire a poem. I own the rights to everything I write, so why not find the genre that best serves the idea?
Since I have multiple books in the works (90 pages complete in my 15th poetry collection, 120 pages in my 4th essay collection, 72 pages in my 6th short story collection, plus, a professional how-to guide), my daily output (low-key grind) slowly builds out a significant library, but does it incrementally.
It’s like a city skyline (for a new city) going up so subtly that you don’t notice until you drive to it.
I’m not a novelist. I accept that. I’m a poet at my core, and I specialize in short-burst nuggets.
As a golfer, I am always short driving the ball off the tee, but excellent on sand saves, green-side chipping and lag putts.
In baseball, I’m not the home run slugger, but I do know how to get on base more often with walks, bunts and little dinks that never leave the infield (cue Moneyball).
But what about the quality you may ask?
I’m a three-time finalist for the Applewhite Poetry Prize, sponsored by North Carolina Literary Review, a triple accolade in a very competitive environment.
The Northern Virginia Review published a poem of mine three years in a row, and named my poem “The Wasp Nest” the best poem in Issue 33.
Santa Clara Review, the oldest literary journal in the West, recently published all three essays that I submitted to them in Volume 111, which is quite an accomplishment.
My main issue is that I don’t teach creative writing, so I’m not part of the ecosystem that produces many of our published authors.
For 40 years, I’ve chosen to keep my day job, and independently publish my work on Amazon, which means I don’t benefit from having a publisher-assigned developmental editor, but most published authors don’t either (publishers do not financially support an author’s book tour, not unless you are a blockbuster true-crime or detective fiction author).
I write, and when I’m done with a book, I format it and publish it (using my own photographs as the cover image).
Look for Captions (poetry), Migratory Patterns (essays), Tide Pools (short fiction), plusThe A to Z Guide to Nonprofit Formation and Growth, later this year.
Not bad, as I’m turning 66 in mid-August, and I’m just getting started.
