Multitasking 101
Shelly Lowenkopf -- December 27, 2005
"The secret of getting ahead," Mark Twain tells us, "is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one."
When you think about it, this does not sound like Mark Twain, not so much because it is so practical as because it isn't funny. We are used to him being funny but he is among the last we would suspect of being practical. Truth to tell, he got what he would call a tolerable amount done in his life time. In fact, he was multitasking long before the word was coined or the concept bandied about in personal improvement programs and MBA seminars. By my reckoning, it takes thirty-seven volumes,--each of respectable page length--to pack in all the writing he did during his time on earth.
Another multitasker was a man named Frederick Schiller Faust, best known by his pseudonym of Max Brand. Faust was killed in Italy in 1945 by a German bullet while serving as a correspondent during World War II. Nevertheless, as reported to me by his late son-in-law (and pretty much the multitasking writer himself), Faust was so prolific that at least one new book of his was published throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.
Yet another adept in the literary ways of multitasking, his career ended by death in November of 2005, was the individual who started out in life as Salvatore Lombino and ended as Ed McBain, with a few side trips as Evan Evans and, more popularly, Evan Hunter. Lombino/McBain was made famous by his Eighty-Seventh Precinct police procedurals, which he turned out at an alarming rate. But such was his ability that he was forced into inventing a new series, focusing on the activities of a lawyer-cum-sleuth, Matthew Hope. To keep him occupied between mysteries, he turned to science fiction and mainstream fiction.
Demonstrating that multitasking is by no means the province of male writers: Quick! How many books has Joyce Carol Oates written? And what about her professing literature at Princeton? And what about her near-concert level of playing ability as a pianist?
And what about Ruth Rendell, who is not satisfied with her police procedurals featuring the canny Inspector Reg Wexford. Ms. Rendell's alternately written mysteries have a different cast of characters each time, as do her collections of short stories. Of course her pseudonymous mysteries, written as Barbara Vine, have a different tone and different characters.
How do they do it?
How do they keep their focus, fighting off new ideas as though they were mosquitoes out for an evening snack? How do writers keep their concentration,--their literary equivalent of the athlete's game face?
This single matter, more than any other, separates the grown-ups from the wannabes.
Writers have no choice but to live not merely with but through the problem. They either have to learn to take copious notes while going forth with the project or to adapt what I call The Bradbury Process.
In the early days of Ray Bradbury's career, well before there were computers of any consequence, typewriters had become the conventional mean of composing manuscripts. Indeed, that early multitasker Mark Twain was the fist to have typed out a manuscript (Huckleberry Finn) for submission to a publisher. Bradbury somehow managed to acquire a number of old Remington uprights which he spaced about a large work area. Each typewriter had a sheet of foolscap copy paper at the ready. Each typewriter had a different story in the works. Writing time was (and still is) precious to Bradbury. If he became stuck on a story for more than fifteen or twenty minutes, he moved along to the next story, working on it, either until he finished it, came to the end of a working day, or, getting stuck, moved on to the next typewriter and the next story.
Such a lovely method. Of course you could wonder if the man is so talented, so loaded with story that he would have been as productive no matter what he did. But it doesn't hurt to wonder.
It has long been Anne Lowenkopf's observation of my writing habits that I have an inordinate number of unfinished projects in relation to the projects I have finished and set forth into the slippery world of submissions and publication. I take the high road with my intentions of being around long enough to finish most of them. This also raises the issue of whether we judge writers by the quality of their work or the quantity.
The simple calculus is this: Writers write. Their doing so is a part of a process that has little to do with some theoretical score card. In a nice, tidy universe, writer would have the opportunity to get one everything they wish before moving to the Big Writer's Blog in Cyberspace. But one of the few things writers and poets know for sure is that this is no orderly universe we inhabit; it is chaos gone wild.
What to do?
For starters, there is the Bradbury technique. Another could be named after the late, lamented Dennis Lynds, who simply broke his day up into units, spending time on the projects that would pay the rent, then putting some effort on the kinds of stories that, until they appear in collections, pay off in ballpoint pens and t-shirts as well as the satisfaction of doing them.
There is an approach I alluded to a few paragraphs back and which I will name after one of the most accomplished of unrecognized American greats, John Sanford. I remember being impressed when John crowed on his ninetieth birthday, "Kid, I just signed a three-book contract." Thus the John Sanford approach: outlive them.
Selden Edwards, former headmaster of a prestigious prep school, likens a writer's multitasking to the chess hustler who goes from park to park, taking on ten opponents at once, moving from game to game and giving a pretty fair accounting of himself.
My longtime pal, Digby Wolfe, inventor of the famed Laugh-In, his own shelves bulging with awards for humorous and dramatic TV shows, has come forth with another analogy. Having once been married to a circus performer, Digby came up with the interesting bit of trivia that a juggler can only hope to juggle a maximum of eleven articles. "Try to get in one more plate," Digby advised me, "and you'll be up to your rear end in broken china."
So the wisdom of this boils down to three basics:
- Make sure you get the time to get your writing done
- Never under any circumstances work on more than eleven projects at the same time.
- Live as long as you need to.
As humans and certainly as writers, we are all multiple personalities. The difference between us and those afflicted with MPD is that we recognize, encourage, and support the multiplicity. Within any one of us at any given time, there is the equivalent of an Italian parliament holding session, clamoring for attention, wanting to lead the show, threatening to resign, calling for a vote of no confidence.
I was fortunate to have two persons in my life I consider to be my mentors. More about Rachel Maddux in another column. The focus here is on Virginia Gilmore, an Actor's Studio-trained Broadway stage actor. "If you wish to be successful as a writer, you must learn to act and the first act you must get down is the Mars Probe. You are always sending parts of yourself out there beyond you, gathering data and relaying it back to earth, where you process it and make humanity of it."
Sometimes, if you see me and I appear to be out, I'm simply gathering data and trying to make sense of it.