Bad Math

There’s a saying I’m fond of: Don’t do the math. What math? The bad math that tells you how much time and money you spend on your art in relation to how much money you earn from your art. The math that reveals your acceptance to rejection ratio and the hours of suffering to hours of elation ratio. For most everyone, the results are grim.

Recently, I discovered another math not to do: the number of drafts. The excruciatingly talented writer John Yearley hipped me to a nice little psychological trick: name your drafts with the date and not a draft number. So instead of MyStoryVer193.doc try MyStory031812.doc. Of course you could just count those 193 drafts, but it’s less in your face this way.

But there are times when doing the math isn’t bad. There is, as I discovered at the Playa artist residency, a good math. About two weeks into my residency at Playa I decided to write 1,000 words a day for thirty days. These thousand words had to be part of new stories, a couple of which I had in mind before I arrived. That would theoretically yield 30,000 words. That’s about 100 pages. For me, that would be a colossal output.

I stuck to it, and from February 1 until March 4, I wrote 1,000 or more words. (I took three days off and one day I wrote about 500 words). The result was a total of 31,416 words and 12 new stories generated. The 1,000 words forced me to come up with new narratives. At the end of 30 days, I was cooked, but happy.

I know that 90% of these words are crap, and the stories little more than sketches. Some of them will be developed, some of them will merged, others discarded. But the point is I now have a giant chunk of marble to work with, to chip away at, to carve and polish. For the first time this collection feels and looks like a book.

So what next? I need to get back to A Life’s Work, trying to find money to hire an editor and complete the film. And while I do that, work on that giant chunk of marble. I’ll also be trying to avoid the bad math and trying to embrace that good math.