Performative vs Productive

Performative vs Productive

There is a peculiar strain of writer who appears to spend an extraordinary amount of time being a writer and remarkably little time writing.

You know the type.

The notebooks. The fountain pens. The carefully chosen writing retreat in an abandoned Scottish castle. The atmospheric desk photo. The scarf. Possibly a fedora, if things have gone very badly.

There will be memes.
So many memes.

Memes about not writing. Memes about procrastinating instead of writing. Memes about buying notebooks instead of writing. Memes about opening the manuscript and immediately doing literally anything else.
The smell of libraries, the bookshops with coffee, the book-scented candles.

At some point, this stops being self-deprecating humour and starts looking suspiciously like a business model.

I recently saw the phrase:

“You don’t have to write to be a writer.”

I beg to fucking differ.

You do not have to write every day. You do not have to publish. You do not have to earn money from it. You do not even have to be particularly good.

**But somewhere in the equation, there does actually need to be some writing.
**
Otherwise, what you have is not a craft. It is an identity.
And identities are wonderfully easy to perform.

Writing, unfortunately, is work.

It is sitting down and making the sentence better, discovering that chapter twelve doesn’t work and fixing it, deleting three thousand words you quite liked because the book is stronger without them.
It is getting to chapter seventeen when nobody is watching, and there is no aesthetic reward whatsoever.

That part is not especially Instagrammable, which is why performative work is so seductive.
Performative work looks productive.

Printing out a 400-page manuscript and attacking it with coloured pens looks serious. Booking a retreat looks serious. Building an elaborate planning system looks serious. Rearranging your desk, choosing your tools, discussing your process and posting about how difficult the creative life is can all create the satisfying impression that something important is happening.

Sometimes those things genuinely help.
But sometimes they are just theatre.

I have published ten books without printing a single manuscript on A4.
If I want to read away from the writing environment, Kindles exist.
If I want to scribble all over pages, an iPad and Apple Pencil exist.

I can mark up a manuscript without creating a temporary, unsynchronised, non-searchable fork of the book made from dead trees.

The same principle applies to almost everything.

A writing retreat can be wonderful.

But if you genuinely cannot write without mist rolling past the window of a remote castle while a murdered governess rattles chains in the east wing, you have accidentally turned ambience into a system dependency.

Go to the castle because castles are cool.
Just don’t confuse going to the castle with writing the book.

That is the distinction I keep coming back to:

Does this thing help me produce better work, or does it mainly help me feel like a person who produces work?

Those are not the same thing.
And the world is full of systems designed to reward the second one.
Social media certainly does.

Writing culture just makes the contrast particularly funny because, ultimately, the output is extremely easy to identify.

There either is a book or there isn’t.

• The scarf does not count.
• The retreat does not count.
• The notebook collection does not count.
• The memes definitely do not count.

And unfortunately, the mortgage company remains deeply resistant to being paid in literary affectation.

At some point, you have to make the thing.