The Uses And Abuses of Productivity

Writers are always looking for the nearest fire escape when people ask about their process, and the Italian novelist Umberto Eco is not an exception. In a 2015 interview1, when Tonny Vorm asked Eco how he wrote his first novel, The Name of The Rose, he replied:

“It happens when you feel that you have to piss, and you have to run to the toilet.”

And added that:

“I cannot understand those novelists that [publish] a book every year. They lose this pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to prepare a story.”

But our economy doesn’t give writers the luxury of marinating ideas today. In College, courses allow very little time for writing essays. In the publishing industry, magazines operate on tight timelines. Consistency becomes the key metric for evaluating online writers, and the writing economy encourages us, using Eco’s toilet analogy, to piss before we have the urge.

Writing turns into a tradable commodity instead of the result of deliberate contemplation. And given the conditions, it’s time to call out this “fetishized productivity” and re-cultivate the pleasure of preparing ideas patiently.