All my posts this week are dedicated to becoming a more prolific writer! If you’ve missed out so far, here are the links to each post to help you catch up: Do you suffer from hypergraphia, Tips on becoming a more prolific writer, and finally, Avoiding burnout and boredom as a writer.

There’s a lot of overlap among these posts, and that’s fine, because being a more productive writer is a very dynamic process that can involve doing more than just taking action – like changing how you think about and approach writing. Today’s post is no different.

What kind of environment do you like to write in?  Some prefer noisy with lots of activity while others prefer quiet places with no one else around. There is no right answer to this question. Personally, I think places like the library are too sterile for me to write in, and at the same time, I could never sit in the corner of a crowded bar penning my prose.

Add some music to your writing
For me, listening to music is a must while I write. However, I don’t turn up my computer speakers or plug my iPod in just to have something playing in the background. No, music is often a great muse for me. It gets my creative juices flowing ( Ireally hate that expression, but it seems to fit well here). There is just something about listening to all the different layers of sound and how they mix together that helps me while writing.

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This week is all about being a more productive writer! I started off with a brief post about a little known writing disorder called hypergraphia, then moved onto a more traditional post about being more prolific.

Today I’m going to continue with this theme, but in a slightly different way. Rather than talk about ways to make time for writing or writing more during each session (both great topics), I’m going to talk about avoiding burnout as a writer. Actually, there are two separate issues here: burnout and boredom. They’re very different, but still somewhat related in their causes and cures.

When writing becomes boring
Yes, even writers can get bored with writing. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer or that you’ve used up all your creativity. When you think about writing on a very literal level, it is just marking down seemingly random symbols that have a very arbitrary relationship with anything in real life. There’s an entire theory that goes along with this very idea called deconstruction, something I’ve taken entire classes on and still have a hard time understanding.

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Just about every writer wants to become more prolific. If many of us had the choice, we’d quite are day jobs and lock ourselves in our rooms for the better part of the day to devote to writing. Sadly, this remains just a fantasy. We have other responsibilities that include family, jobs, social engagements, errands to run and the many other mundane details that fill our lives.

Just your imagination
But being a prolific writer doesn’t have to be a dream, nor do you have to suffer from hypergraphia to write large quantities of material. Having an active imagination helps, although it’s not a direct requirement. How can this be? Isn’t writing fiction and poetry fully dependent on imagination? Well, yes and no. It takes imagination to come up with story ideas and work out character and plot details. There’s no doubt about that. But actual writing is more of a matter of discipline and perspiration (ie. hard work).

The process of writing is creative one. When you physically start to put words onto paper to create sentences, and those sentences then create paragraphs and so on, until you have a completed manuscript, you are performing a creative act. Creativity begets creativity. So even if you are not, or don’t think you are, creative enough to be a writer, you will start to become more creative as you write more. In other words, creativity can be gained and is not inherent in finite quantities in our brains.

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Most people know about writer’s block, a condition where one cannot squeeze a word out of their pen or keyboard if their life depended on it. But the pendulum also swings the other way. There’s a little discussed ailment called hypergraphia – the obsessive urge to write.

When I say "obsessive urge to write" I’m not talking about someone who writes for a few hours a day because it’s his/her job, or even a person who has lots of good ideas buzzing around. No, I’m talking about someone whose compulsion to write is so great, that the person cannot control it and they cross the line from just being "creative" to having a real mental disorder.

I first heard about hypergraphia in a philosophy class I was taking and we got sidetracked discussing an upcoming essay that was due. Many of us in the class tended to write longer essays than what was required (it was an upper-level class) and the professor wondered if any of us suffered from this strange disease.

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I don’t think there’s any other word in the English language that can stir up such passionate feelings among writers and the publishing world at large as the word plagiarism can. And for an honest writer accused of plagiarism, I think death might be a more preferable fate, as with the latter a writer doesn’t have to suffer through the humiliation of defending his/her own work from accusations that parts of it (or worse, the entire manuscript) has been copied from another source.

But one article, in discussing the controversy surrounding Southern Illinois University’s (SIU) President Glenn Poshard plagiarized various sections of his doctoral thesis, brings up the broader point of how plagiarism should be defined. While on the surface this appears to be a straightforward issue, digging a little deeper shows that plagiarism is not very clear-cut at all. As the article points out, there are three different types of plagiarism:

By the time the task force was finished equivocating, though, the faculty committee reviewing Poshard’s dissertation had plenty of wiggle room to declare the president guilty of "inadvertent plagiarism" — carelessness, in other words. This is not to be confused with "uneducated plagiarism," which suggests the writer truly didn’t know better, or "intentional plagiarism," which might as well be defined as stealing someone else’s work and admitting it once you’re caught.

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Call it one of my pet peeves, but I really hate it when, after letting someone read a work of fiction that I have written, the first question they ask is: "Is this based on your own life?" Why do I hate that question so much? Because if it’s obviously a work of fiction, then no, it’s not based on any part of my life. If a short story resembles my life, it is purely coincidence and nothing I planned ahead of time.

However, before I continue, I will add that such a question about the connection between a piece of fiction and the author’s life is not totally irrelevant. There is an entire line of literary criticism that asks that precise question, and then goes on to interpret the work based on the author’s life and the events surrounding his/her life. I have always had a strong distaste for such criticism because it only goes skin deep and relies on arbitrary connections.

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This is a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Why do I write? Let’s face it, the life of a writer can be tough, especially if you’re trying to make a living at it. And if you write fiction or poetry, don’t quite your day job just yet.

Okay, so let’s say you do managed to get published and earn a meager living composing words. Unlike a rock star, you won’t have groupies or roadies catering to your every need. You won’t have autograph hounds camping on the street next to your house. You will probably even be able to go to the store without anyone recognizing you. Then, to top it all off, writing is such a solitary activity that I guarantee you won’t have thousands of screaming fans urging you on as you pen that new bestselling novel.

Now that we’ve established most writers (even successful ones) go without the money and fame (yes, there are always exceptions), let’s strip all that away. Forget about money and fame and just concentrate on the writing part. For one thing, writing is hard work. It takes a lot of energy to maintain the level of creativity need to write an entire short story, or even a novel!  Furthermore, the urge to only write when feeling "inspired" is almost unbearable at times (I fall into this trap more than I care to admit).

For the sake of this post I won’t even go into doubting your own abilities, self-critiquing, the agony of writer’s block and the uncountable other maladies writers tend to suffer.

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At first glance, the 2 different writing contests sponsored by Amazon.com and Borders seemed like a good idea. That’s what I thought yesterday when I first read the article and wrote my original post (Writing contests gain steam online). But after doing some thinking, I’m just a little bit wary of these contests.

So instead of writing a long and drawn out manifesto against these literary contests, I’ll just make a list of a few problems I can think of. This list is in no particular order:

1. Why is Penguin co-sponsoring a literary contest to find an "unknown" author? I thought large publishing houses, such as Penguin, have mountains of submissions in their "slush pile" written by unknown authors. Maybe the slush pile ran dry. It just seems odd that they’re suddenly taking a different route to find another book to publish.

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The power of the internet is being used to try to find the next top novel! According to a Yahoo! News article some major players in bookselling are also getting involved in the search. Amazon, the online mega-store with humble beginnings selling only books, is partnering up with the Penguin Group and Hewlett-Packard:

From Monday until November 5, authors from more than 20 countries with an English-language novel manuscript can submit their work to Amazon which will assign a group of online reviewers to evaluate excerpts online and invite customers to make comments and rank their favorites.

The hope is that by letting writers submit their unpublished novels via the internet, it will greatly level the playing field and allow complete unknowns to have a chance at being published. Furthermore, one of Amazon’s long-running features is to let ordinary readers write reviews of the books they read (many of these reviews are quite comprehensive).

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There’s no doubt that the short story is in trouble. I’ve written about it here (Is the short story dead?), and a trip to your local bookstore will show you just how hard it can be to find a book of short stories amid all those popular fiction novels that sell millions of copies, self-help books promoting the newest fad in pop-psychology, diet books, celebrity memoirs, and…well, the list goes on.

Stephen King, who many consider to be the iconic image of those popular fiction novels that appear to edge out works of short fiction, ironically, is the editor of The Best American Short Stories 2007. These annual collections go back several decades, and when I was just a young, carefree college freshman, I began to read these collections with much interest.

In an essay written for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, King talks of his experience trying to find the best short works of fiction to include in this year’s collection. As he does, he attempts to figure out why the short story, which used to be very lucrative for both writers and publishers, has slid down into the wastebasket of American literature.

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