Parkinson’s Law and the creative hour

In the November 19, 1955 issue of The Economist, the historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson stated the law that has borne his name ever since, in a paragraph remarkable for its sheer Englishness:

It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half an hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

Parkinson’s observation was originally designed to account for the unchecked growth of bureaucracy, which hinges on the fact that paperwork is “elastic in its demands on time”—and, by extension, on manpower. And he concluded the essay by stating, rather disingenuously, that it was only an empirical observation, without any value attached: “The discovery of this formula and of the general principles upon which it is based has, of course, no emotive value…Parkinson’s Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the politics of the day. It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow.”

In fact, Parkinson’s Law can be a neutral factor, or even a positive one, when it comes to certain forms of creativity. We can begin with one of its most famous, if disguised, variations, in the form of Blinn’s Law: “As technology advances, rendering time remains constant.” As I’ve noted before, once an animator gets used to waiting a certain number of hours for an image to render, as the hardware improves, instead of using it to save time, he just renders more complex graphics. There seems to be a fixed amount of time that any given person is willing to work, so an increase in efficiency doesn’t necessarily reduce the time spent at your desk—it just allows you to introduce additional refinements that depend on purely mechanical factors. Similarly, the introduction of word-processing software didn’t appreciably reduce how long it takes to write a novel: it only restructures it, so that whatever time you save in typing is expended in making imperceptible corrections. This isn’t always a good thing. As the history of animation makes clear, Blinn’s Law can lead to the same tired stories being played out against photorealistic backgrounds, and access to word processors may simply mean that the average story gets longer, as Ted Hughes observed while serving on the judging panel of a children’s writing competition: “It just extends everything slightly too much. Every sentence is too long. Everything is taken a bit too far, too attenuated.” But there are also cases in which an artist’s natural patience and tolerance for work provides the finished result with the rendering time that it needs to reach its ideal form. And we have it to thank for many displays of gratuitous craft and beauty.

This leads me to a conclusion that I’ve recently come to appreciate more fully, which is that every form of artistic activity is equally difficult. I don’t mean that the violin is as easy as the ukulele, or that there isn’t any difference between performance at a high level and the efforts of a casual hobbyist. But if you’re a creative professional and take your work seriously, you’re usually going to operate at your optimum capacity, if not all the time, than at least on average. Each day’s work is determined less by the demands of the project itself than by how much energy you can afford to give it. I switch fairly regularly between fiction and nonfiction, for instance, and whenever I’m working in one mode, I often find myself thinking fondly of the other, which somehow seems easier in my imagination. But it isn’t. I’m the same person with an identical set of habits whether I’m writing a novel, a short story, or an essay, and an hour of my time is pitched about at the same degree of intensity no matter what the objective is. In practice, it settles at a point that is slightly too intense to be entirely comfortable, but not so much that it burns me out. I’ve found that I unconsciously adjust the conditions to make each day’s work feel the same, either by moving a deadline forward or backward or by taking on projects that are progressively more challenging. (This doesn’t just apply to paid work, either. The amount of time I spend on this blog hasn’t varied much over the last five years, but the posts have definitely gotten more involved.) This also applies to particular stages. When I’m researching, outlining, writing, or revising, I sometimes console myself with the idea that the next part will be easier. In fact, it’s all hard. And if it isn’t, I’m doing something wrong.

This implies that we shouldn’t pick our artistic pursuits based on how easy they are, but on the quality that they yield for each unit of time invested. (“Quality” can mean whatever you like, from how much you get paid to the amount of personal satisfaction that you derive.) I work as diligently as possible on whatever I do, but this doesn’t mean that I’m equally good at everything, and there are certain forms of writing that I’ve given up because they don’t justify the cost. And I’ve also learned to be grateful for the fact that everything I do takes about the same amount of time and effort per page. The real limiting factor isn’t the time available, but what I bring to each creative hour, and over the long run, it makes sense to be as consistent as I can. It isn’t intensity that hurts, but volatility, and you lose a lot in ramping up and ramping down. But the appropriate level varies from one person to another. What Parkinson neglects to mention in his contrast between “an elderly lady of leisure” and “a busy man” is that each of them has presumably found a suitable mode of living, and you can find productive writers and artists who fall into either category. In the end, the process is all we have, and it makes sense that it would remain the same in its externals, regardless of its underlying goal. That’s a gentler way of stating Parkinson’s Law, but it’s no less accurate. And Parkinson himself seems to have softened his stance. As he said in an interview to the New York Times toward the end of his career: “My experience tells me the only thing people really enjoy over a long period of time is some kind of work.”

The email of the species

It has often been said that you should never put anything into an email that you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times. Sony learned this the hard way, as has Colin Powell, and the latest round of leaks has people in government, entertainment, and other fields scrambling to rethink their relationship with the send button. But you should also never put anything into an email that you wouldn’t want read by your biographer, or, more realistically, by your kids. It feels as if email has been around forever, but it’s a recent enough development that we haven’t seen many biographies using it extensively as a primary source. Still, it’s only a matter of time. There are obvious challenges involved in preserving and accessing correspondence in digital form, but as long as it exists, determined scholars will figure out a way to get at it. A biographer will do anything to get at a trove of personal correspondence—believe me, I know. The hacker and the biographer differ mostly in the means that they’re willing to use to get at what they want, rather than in their underlying reasoning: they just draw the line at different places. Motivated researchers won’t stop at the obvious, and they can mine the available material in unbelievable ways. Which just means that we need to get used to the idea that anything that we type is likely to end up in the public record, or, at the very least, in the hands of a curious stranger.

Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between physical letters and emails, as well as about the kind of information that they yield about their senders and recipients. The four primary subjects of Astounding are some of the most prolific correspondents imaginable, and this isn’t a coincidence: I don’t think I would have even contemplated tackling this project if I hadn’t known in advance that there was a vast amount of archival material available. When I read their letters, some of which run to a dozen pages or more, I’m often amazed by the amount of time and effort that they put into each one. When you think about the inherent challenges of the medium, compared to how we send messages today, it can seem incredible. An actual piece of paper had to be rolled into a manual typewriter—along with a second sheet to make a carbon, which is how so many of these letters were preserved—and composed by hand, with limited ability to edit or correct mistakes. Even if you account for the power of habit, and the fact that we’ve simply lost many of those skills, there’s no denying that writing a letter was a messier, more laborious, and lengthier process then than it is now. After it was finished, it still had to be slid into an envelope, addressed, stamped, and mailed. Days or weeks would go by between each side of a conversation. In some ways, it’s hard to imagine how anybody got anything said at all.

But when you look at it more closely, you realize that it was exactly those conditions that made it possible for good letters to be written. A letter was an event in itself, and the inconvenience that the materials imposed made the writer more likely to take the result seriously. (To put it another way, the time and effort expended in setting up the typewriter, addressing the envelope, and mailing the letter were fixed costs, independent of the content of the letter itself. If you were going to go through the trouble of writing somebody at all, you might as well make it worth your while.) The necessary length of time that elapsed between a message and its response encouraged you to cover multiple subjects and cover as much ground as you could. This isn’t to say that you couldn’t write a quick, casual note as well: most of the letters in the John W. Campbell archives are only a page long, and many are just a couple of sentences. But if we have so many fascinating letters from that era, it isn’t despite the cumbersomeness of the medium, but because of it. It reminds me a little of what I’ve written in the past about Blinn’s Law, which says that as technology advances, rendering time—which in this case means the amount of time spent writing and revising a letter—remains constant. When it comes to email, however, the ability to easily revise hasn’t resulted in longer, more polished messages, but a greater number of casual communications. Individual letters may not stand out as much, but the overall volume of wordage is about the same.

And although we might mourn the loss of the long personal letter, which I’ve pretty much ceased to write myself, biographers might actually benefit from the change. When you’re sending a typed or handwritten letter, the analog format gives you time to consider what you’re writing, or to have second thoughts about a message before sending it. (Campbell’s archives include several important letters that were written but never sent.) An email allows us to be more impulsive, which is why the victims of leaks invariably come off so badly. Email doesn’t discourage introspective writing, exactly, but it certainly doesn’t encourage it—while it definitely encourages us to shoot out a hasty line at a moment’s notice. It’s more like a private conversation than a conventional correspondence, and reading it feels closer to eavesdropping than to opening somebody’s mail. Biographies of the future, which draw on email instead of letters, may even differ in tone from the ones being written today: they’ll be assembled from countless small glimpses of spontaneous moments, rather than from the deep dives into the writer’s head that letters once afforded. The result may well be more accurate as a result: an email sidesteps the author’s internal censor, reflecting who the sender really was, rather than how he or she wanted to appear. That will probably always be true, even as public figures become more cautious. Colin Powell can’t be happy about the leak. But his biographers certainly will be.

The art of distraction

If you were to ask most writers what they thought of distraction, they’d probably say that they needed a lot less of it. I’ve noted elsewhere that in theory, writing a novel is easier today than ever before: whether you use Microsoft Word, Scrivener, or even WordStar, the physical act of putting words down on a page has never been more straightforward. We have software to check our spelling and help us outline our stories; the process of revision, even at the most granular level, is close to seamless; and even if we write our works by hand, the range of other conveniences at our disposal can’t be denied. Online research gives us access to information that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to find in the past, to the point where authors like Jonathan Franzen have argued that the idea of research itself has been permanently devalued. In terms of looking for inspiration, we have whole libraries of quality content available for free, with more being added every day, all of it searchable and retrievable from anywhere. If all that stands between us and decent work is a series of practical obstacles, these hurdles have been gradually filed down, until almost nothing separates us from the performance itself.

In practice, of course, that isn’t the case. A decent novel takes about the same amount of time to write today as it ever did, whether you’re an accomplished hack or a diligent artist. (Whether a novel takes six weeks or six years to complete is more a function of the author’s personality, and this fact hasn’t changed since the days of Anthony Trollope.) Elsewhere, I’ve said that this can partially be explained by a variation on Blinn’s Law, which states that the amount of time it takes to render a single frame of animation remains constant, even as technology advances. Animators have a certain baseline level of patience that doesn’t change much; if the hardware becomes faster, they simply ask their computers to do more and more. Word processing software, in turn, might seem like it saves time, but whatever a writer gains in the process is offset by the many little revisions and corrections that he or she might have skipped on a typewriter. Whether or not such infinitesimal changes make any difference is debatable—they’re often touches that even the most diligent reader wouldn’t notice—but it means that the minimum time a novel has to percolate in a writer’s head will pretty much stay the same.

Another part of the explanation lies in the increased possibility for distraction that technology affords. Writers have always found ways to procrastinate, but the temptations we have these days seem qualitatively different, thanks largely to the very same innovations that have granted us so much potential freedom. It’s often pointed out that the most successful forms of online content—Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, even the web itself—arose less out of an overarching vision than from a set of convenient tools that allowed users to easily shape the results from the bottom up. Publishing a picture or a comment is so effortless that it can almost be done without thinking, which turns the screen in which we spend much of our lives into a jungle of ephemera. It includes a lot of garbage, but with a few basic filtering mechanisms in place to separate the good from the bad, we end up with an incredibly seductive menu of constantly updated diversion. For writers, the process works in both directions, with the ease of generating content colliding with the ease of consuming it, and the two halves meet on the laptop. And because we spend so much time there, we’re more vulnerable to it than people whose jobs require them to occasionally get out of the house.

Writers all develop their own ways of dealing with this, often taking the form of a conscious rejection of technology itself, whether it’s Franzen’s computer with the Ethernet port glued shut or Michael Pollan’s writing shack. Most of us find ourselves somewhere in the middle, with the time we spend on actual work alternating uneasily with checking email or clicking through the newswires on The A.V. Club. And the first step to living with distraction is acknowledging that it has its place. Obsessive singlemindedness can be as dangerous to a writer as its opposite; every meaningful project includes elements of delay, avoidance, and postponement. The form it currently tends to take is a little more insidious, since it can’t be distinguished at first glance from much of what we do when we’re being productive—as any office worker knows who has ever quietly switched over from a spreadsheet to ESPN.com. But it’s impossible to cut ourselves off from it entirely without separating ourselves from the useful tools that it simultaneously provides. And if nothing else, we can take consolation in the fact that when you average out the forces of acceleration and distraction, we end up more or less where we’ve always been.

Blinn’s Law and the paradox of efficiency

Note: I seem to have come down with a touch of whatever stomach bug my daughter had this week, so I’m taking the day off. This post was originally published, in a somewhat different form, on August 9, 2011. 

As technology advances, rendering time remains constant.
—Blinn’s Law

Why isn’t writing easier? Looking at the resources that contemporary authors have at their disposal, it’s easy to conclude that we should all be perfect writing machines. Word processing software, from WordStar to Scrivener, has made the physical process of writing more streamlined than ever; Google and Amazon have given us access to a world of information that would have been inconceivable even fifteen years ago; and research, editing, and revision have been made immeasurably more efficient. And yet writing itself doesn’t seem all that much less difficult than before. The amount of time a professional novelist needs to spend writing each day—let’s say three or four hours—hasn’t decreased much since Trollope, and for most of us, it still takes a year or two to write a decent novel.

So what happened? In some ways, it’s an example of the paradox of labor-saving devices: instead of taking advantage of our additional leisure time, we create more work for ourselves. It also reflects the fact that the real work of writing a novel is rarely connected to how fast you can type. But I prefer to think of it as a variation on Blinn’s Law. As graphics pioneer James Blinn first pointed out, in animation, rendering time remains constant, even as computers get faster. An artist gets accustomed to waiting a certain number of hours for an image to render, so as hardware improves, instead of using it to save time, he employs it to render more complex graphics. This is why rendering time at Pixar has remained essentially constant over the past fifteen years. (Although the difference between Toy Story and Cars 2, or even Brave, is a reminder that rendering isn’t everything.)

Similarly, whatever time I save by writing on a laptop rather than a manual typewriter is canceled out by the hours I spend making additional small changes and edits along the way. The Icon Thief probably went through eighteen substantial drafts before the final version was delivered to my publisher, an amount of revision and rewriting that would have been unthinkable without Word. Is the novel better as a result? On a purely technical level, yes. Is the underlying story more interesting than if I’d written it by hand? Probably not. Blinn’s Law tells us that the leaves and grass in the background of a shot will look increasingly great, but it says nothing about the quality of storytelling. Which seems to imply that the countless tiny changes that a writer like me makes to each draft are only a waste of effort.

And yet here’s the thing: I still needed all that time. No matter how efficient the physical side of the process becomes, it’s still desirable for a writer to live with a novel, or a studio to live with a movie, for at least a year or so. (In the case of a film like Frozen, that gestational period can amount to a decade or more.) For most of us, there seems to be a fixed developmental period for decent art, a minimum amount of time that a story needs to simmer and evolve. The endless small revisions aren’t the point: the point is that while you’re altering a word or shifting a paragraph here or there, the story is growing in your head in unexpected ways. Even as you fiddle with the punctuation, seismic changes are taking place. But for this to happen, you need to be at your desk for a certain number of hours. So what do we do in the meantime? We do what Pixar does: we render. That’s the wonderful paradox of efficiency: it allows us, as artists, to get the inefficiency we all need.

Less critical, but more often

If there’s one piece of advice I’ve given on this blog more than any other, it’s that you should never go back to revise a story until an entire rough draft is finished. I repeat this so often because in many ways it’s the most fundamental writing rule I know, and for me, it made the difference between years of starting and abandoning ambitious projects and being able to write extensive works of fiction on a regular basis. Yet I also haven’t been entirely honest. In fact, I go back to revise unfinished work all the time: a given day’s work will often consist half of writing an initial draft, with another half spent going back to rework what I already have, sometimes with three or four additional passes before I’m done. Granted, I don’t do this until a rough draft of the entire chapter is finished, and even if I’m still not satisfied with the result after the final rewrite, this doesn’t keep me from moving on to the next chapter the following day. But on the surface, it looks an awful lot like a violation of my own philosophy, which is that revision is best reserved for after you’ve managed to tackle some version of the story as a whole.

So why do I do it? Part of it lies in a distinction I’ve come to draw between two kinds of revision, one which might be called rendering, the other reworking. The quick rewrites I do for each day’s work are, in fact, a lot like the rendering process in animation: you start with a rough wireframe model of how the entire scene will look, then gradually refine the result until you end up with something that plays more or less like it will in the finished movie. As I’ve mentioned in my post in Blinn’s Law, rendering time generally expands to fill up the amount of time available for its completion, limited only by the number of hours the animator, or writer, is willing to spend at the metaphorical drawing board. The time I spend writing each day has remained constant over the last few years—it’s maybe four to six hours. As I’ve grown more experienced and comfortable with my own style, the number of minutes it takes me to write that first draft has gone down considerably, so I spent the rest of my allotted time on rendering. But I still think of the final result as the rough draft, despite the fact that it has passed through several more iterations after the version I rapidly typed up that morning.

And although every writer develops his or her own approach to cranking out that first draft, in my case, the routine I’ve developed—a really rough version followed by two or three equally fast passes—works so well that I don’t expect to ever give it up. It’s partially derived from David Mamet’s advice about splitting the work up into manageable tasks: when I write that ugly first draft, I’m not worried about elegance or even passable style, but just about getting those basic plot points and story beats down on paper. In the next pass, I try to turn the result into something resembling civilized prose; in the next, something that I’d theoretically want to read myself; and in the last draft, if I’m lucky, I’ll end up with something just a bit better than I hoped. In that sense, it really has more in common with one of my favorite tidbits of wisdom from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: “Be less critical more often.” I’ve learned not to put a lot of pressure on any one pass; I don’t need to get everything right all at once. But each time I go through the text, it gets a little better, and by keeping my critical eye as forgiving as I can, I still have the energy to go through it a second and third time, with each revisit yielding small discoveries and improvements of its own.

The other type of revision is reworking, which involves radically rethinking the structure and content of the text itself, and that’s still something I prefer to save for later in the process, once I’ve started to get a sense of what the hell the story is really about. Even then, however, I’ve found that I’d rather do multiple modest revisions than one aggressive one. The cumulative result is the same: each sentence gets revised countless times, and I devote the same number of hours to the overall process. The difference, aside from the fact that it’s emotionally less taxing to spread the work out over several rewrites, is that it allows me to approach the story from a greater variety of moods and angles, and it keeps the text itself fresh. When you’re in the depths of a really severe rewrite, there often comes a time when you’ve been stuck on the same paragraph for so long that you no longer really see it, which often leads to hasty, poorly considered changes. If you’re less critical more often, it’s easier to take the work as a whole into account, and you retain your perspective on the weight of any individual sentence. The danger, of course, is that you give less than you should to any one rewrite, reasoning that there’s always one more around the corner, and that revision itself can turn into a way of life. But if you’re mindful of the risks, it’s the best way I’ve found of seeing a difficult project all the way through to the end.

Blinn’s Law and the paradox of efficiency

As technology advances, rendering time remains constant.
—Blinn’s Law

Why isn’t writing easier? Looking at the resources that contemporary authors have at their disposal, it’s easy to conclude that we should all be perfect writing machines: word processing software has made the physical process of writing more streamlined than ever, Google and Amazon have given us access to a world of information that would have been inconceivable even fifteen years ago, and research, editing, and revision have been made immeasurably more efficient. And yet writing itself doesn’t seem all that much easier than before. The amount of time a professional novelist needs to spend writing each day—let’s say three or four hours—hasn’t decreased since Trollope, and for most of us, it still takes a year or two to write a decent novel.

So what happened? In some ways, it’s an example of the paradox of labor-saving devices: instead of having more leisure time, we create more work for ourselves. It also reflects the fact that the real work of writing a novel is rarely connected to how fast you can type. But I prefer to think of it as a variation on Blinn’s Law. As graphics pioneer James Blinn first pointed out, in animation, rendering time remains constant, even as computers get faster. An artist gets accustomed to waiting a certain number of hours for an image to render, so as hardware improves, instead of using it to save time, he employs it to render more complex graphics. This is why rendering time at Pixar has remained essentially constant over the past fifteen years. (Although the difference between Toy Story and Cars 2 is a reminder that rendering isn’t everything.)

Similarly, whatever time I save by writing on a laptop rather than a manual typewriter is canceled out by the hours I spend making additional small changes and edits along the way. The Icon Thief probably went through eighteen substantial drafts before the final version was delivered to my publisher, an amount of revision and rewriting that would have been unthinkable without Word. Is the novel better as a result? On a purely technical level, yes. Is the underlying story more interesting than if I’d written it by hand? Probably not. Blinn’s Law tells us that the leaves and grass in the background of a shot will look increasingly great, but it says nothing about the quality of storytelling. Which seems to imply that the countless tiny changes that a writer like me makes to each draft are only a waste of effort.

And yet here’s the thing: I still needed all that time. No matter how efficient the physical side of the process becomes, it’s still desirable for a writer to live with a novel, or a studio to live with a movie, for at least a year or so. For most of us, there seems to be a fixed gestation period for decent art, a minimum amount of time that a story needs to simmer and evolve. The endless small revisions aren’t the point: the point is that while you’re shifting a paragraph here or there, the story is growing in your head in unexpected ways. Even as you fiddle with the punctuation, seismic changes are taking place. But for this to happen, you need to be at your desk for a certain number of hours. So what do we do in the meantime? We do what Pixar does: we render. That’s the wonderful paradox of efficiency: it allows us, as artists, to get the inefficiency we sometimes need.