On Being Prolific and Other Writing Myths

An Essay on Writing
by Wayne Scheer

People think of me as prolific because hardly a week goes by without my Yahooing that a story of mine got published. Of course, this may simply mean that I'm a braggart, but that aside, I've published more than two hundred stories, essays, a collection of short stories and one lonely poem in about seventy-five different publications over the past eight years. The numbers sound impressive--they impress the hell out of me--but I don't think of myself as prolific.

After all, if I were truly prolific, wouldn't it be easy to write this? Instead, it's taken me nearly an hour to compose the opening paragraph--and I'll probably change it completely by the time I'm finished.

That may be the first step towards being what folks think of as prolific: accepting that writing is hard work. We all know the old line attributed to various writers about how easy it is to write. All you have to do is stare at the typewriter (or computer) until blood drips from your eyeballs. The writing process may not be quite that traumatic, but knowing that writing takes time reminds me that I have to make the time to write. It helps that I don't have a life, being retired and all, so I can sit in front of my computer most weekdays. (My wife owns me weekends.) I eat breakfast and lunch at the computer, drink a pot of coffee and would probably eat dinner there as well if I didn't fear my wife. (She suggests I change that to "respect.") I take off about two hours a day to exercise or garden or read. That's my life.

I'd like to say I spend all that time writing. I spend much of it reading and responding to stories from the Practice and Fiction groups. Although I fear critiquing is often a form of procrastination, I'm also convinced it's an essential part of creating new work. Identifying what worked and didn't work in other people's stories is, for me, like batting practice for a ballplayer. It gives me a chance to consider various techniques and to recognize stylistic kinks.

I also try to write every day. The weekly prompts in Practice help guide me and offer me a deadline in order to limit my procrastination. I also spend time each day revising old work. I have a file of well over five hundred stories, many just story starters of two hundred or so words. When I first retired I joined another online writing group that required one story under two hundred and fifty words and another under one thousand words a week. Like Practice, they offered weekly prompts. Not having a supply of old stories, I wrote new ones most every week for a couple of years. Much of the writing isn't good or wasn't good initially, but through the years I've revised some of the ideas into twenty-five hundred word stories and others into under a thousand word flashes. That's probably the main reason I don't think of myself as prolific--because most of the stories I publish I know are rewrites of things I wrote years ago. Even many of my weekly subs to Practice are rewrites of old ideas.

But I think that's another important reason I appear prolific. Instead of deleting old stories that went nowhere, I rewrite. Sometimes, better stories and characters emerge. Sometimes not. I play a game with myself. I want everything in my files to sound, at least, literate. I imagine my son--who's a far better writer than I am--or my grandchildren reading my files after I'm dead, and I don't want to be embarrassed by my detritus. Often, fairly decent or at least passably decent stories emerge, somewhat like the Phoenix, mixed metaphors and all.

The next step towards being "prolific" is to show no shame and let my fellow IWWers have their say. I do this weekly in Practice, and when I write a longer story, I let the Fiction folk critique. One of the benefits of my critiquing as many stories as I do is when I send a story out to the group, I get a good many responses. And many are very good. I take all critiques seriously, even if I don't follow all of them. But there's nothing more helpful than getting a sense of what readers are thinking and feeling while reading a story of mine. This makes the IWW invaluable to me.

Again, showing no shame, when I revise a story to the point where I like it, I send it out to what I think may be an appropriate publication. I probably have twenty-five stories out at any given time. Twenty will likely be rejected, but that means I'll be able to Yahoo five of them, which makes me appear prolific.

How do I find new markets? That takes time, but the easiest way is to piggyback on markets other IWWers have yahooed. Also, I belong to a few market newsletters--Flash Fiction Flash, (monthly) CRWROPPS (almost daily) and Duotrope (weekly) are the most useful for me. Another good source, although time consuming, is to follow the links in publications that include my work and to check out the bios of writers who have published in these magazines. They list places they've published and many are new markets for me. I send stuff to as many different markets as I can, and when I find friendly editors, especially if they pay, I deluge them with stories until they beg for mercy.

So when people say I'm prolific, it's not false modesty that compels me to shrug off the compliment. I guess what I have to learn to do is wipe the blood from my eyeballs and just thank them.