Writers Are More Prolific When They Cluster
citylab.com
citylab.com
A passage from 'Working':
And these writers provided more for me than merely the glow of their names. In my memory, no one spoke to me for the first few days I was in the room. Then one day, I looked up and James Flexner was standing over me. The expression on his face was friendly, but after he had asked what I was writing about, the next question was the question I had come to dread: “How long have you been working on it?” This time, however, when I replied, “Five years,” the response was not an incredulous stare. “Oh,” Jim Flexner said, “that’s not so long. I’ve been working on my Washington for nine years.” I could have jumped up and kissed him, whiskers and all—as, the next day, I could have jumped up and kissed Joe Lash, big beard and all, when he asked me the same question, and, after hearing my answer, said in his quiet way, “Eleanor and Franklin took me seven years.” In a couple of sentences, these two men—idols of mine—had wiped away five years of doubt.
[0] Caro, Robert A.. Working (p. 76). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Apparently one had to have a publishing contract to be admitted. I'm not sure how elitist that actually worked out to be.
There are also membership-funded places like http://www.writersroom.org/
I know more about how this works in the arts, where the relevant term is "residency". Access to exclusive residencies is usually allocated on the basis of previous career success, and they are usually funded by endowments of some kind. It's an example of institutional support for artists, and the top residencies are extremely elitist. There are lots of humble ones too, though.
It also means it attracts a lot of less serious writers. People who are more into the fantasy of writing than the actual doing of it (or at least the putting it out there in the world, which admittedly I'm somewhat guilty of myself, I only have a few short stories out there).
Basically it's headed by one stubbornly persistent guy in the area, who puts a lot of time into it, for free. He works with local libraries and municipalities to secure meeting spaces, sets up meetings, comes up with activities, etc. We tend to get an influx of new members every Nanowrimo, which he hosts the local chapter and then invites people to join the year round group (how he got me).
It has decent attendance, and can get up to 40 people at a meeting at times. The Nanowrimo-specific group is pretty strong and usually has 100+ people participating each year.
But yeah, I'm pretty sure without him at the helm, everything would have drifted off a long time ago and the group wouldn't still be there. If he ever decided to move on, I don't think the group would last more than 6 months to a year.
The advice from published authors I know is that the highest correlation with eventually getting published is to have a weekly (or regular) cadence with an intimate critique group of small size. The critiques themselves are useful, but even more important is the social pressure to produce.
I've always wondered how famous authors seemed to all hang out with each other, like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. I realized the question was poorly formed: famous authors tend to cluster because they got to know each other before they were famous. They improved their craft together, and each person's success levels up the group.
https://twitter.com/nemild/status/1113441095323492352
Consistency and having social pressure were critical for me.
Also, check out Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (book)
I think a lot about the comparisons to coding, because both writing and coding are acts of thinking. When we started Parse, for example, we hired folks who were naturally inclined to write. This gave us a huge advantage when it came time to communicate how the platform worked to a wide audience.
Do you have any thoughts on finding/developing your writing community?
You can also try larger cons that are aimed at your vertical, but I’ve found that workshops attract people who are more actively engaged in improving their craft. Those are the folks you want to mingle with.
Visual artists work that gains value is highly correlated with their network to begin with.
Right school, right galleries, never ever being seen in a lesser gallery. It makes me sad when an artist who wants to monetize is celebrating the mere fact of being on display as validation, when that very act is undermining the value of their work forever. Is the alternative of being in a prestigious gallery achievable for them? Probably not, and they should consider resigning to that reality if their time is valuable.
I think this is not known because when I listen to many talented and aspiring artists the things they value are so at odds with the things that would make them valuable. Things like "I never had formal education" being a bragging point to an aspiring artist not being aware thats not a bragging point to the people that the artist wants to assign value to their work.
If they accept that the alternative is not achievable then being on display in a "lesser gallery" is as good as it gets. So why shouldn't they celebrate? There's room for successful-but-no-superstar artists.
Again, I don't think many aspiring artists are aware. They focus on mastery of a craft and also want to make money. They feel that these things are correlated. They aren't.
If the market price is the value to everybody, then a $100,000 spare part for some random industrial equipment is worth $100,000 to me. But, somehow, I clearly wouldn't spend that much to buy it. The market price isn't the value that everybody agrees on, it's the equilibrium between buyers who decide not to buy it and sellers who decide not to sell it. Yes, to a certain group of people stuff in that New York gallery is worth a lot, but so is that spare part. Manufacturing it might be a good job but nobody goes in to art looking for a good job.
in more efficient markets you can weigh it by volume (VWAP), art is not an efficient market
In the lower value bucket, they typically have a trade or product with no scarcity, and no market. They try to sell based on a multiple of their effort. This is everything under $1,000. Prices adjust based on volume sold and desperation of the artist, by artist. So therefore yes prices are more arbitrary at the beginning of an artist's career, and at an art show there would be no rhyme or reason between artists. Perhaps some competition and a race to the bottom at a bazaar. This is the same as pretty much any other trade or contractor that is always testing their market. These artists aspire to be in higher tiers, but largely don't act like they understand what drives the value in those tiers. If they do understand and realize they aren't eligible either way but still spend their time on trying to monetize art, then that is a good objective lens. People with other marketable skills will just resign their art to a pasttime and forget about the monetization goals.
In the middle value bucket, it is mostly fine art with low worth, and a very different market. The market forces to create the arbitrary prices are different and mostly correlated to the artist's network when they were alive. Typically there is something undermining the scarcity of these works, but that can also be just demand. Galleries arbitrarily raise the prices over time until a private seller undercuts them.
In the high value bucket, it is mostly fine art with high worth. The market forces to create the arbitrary prices are different and mostly correlated to the artist's network when they were alive. Here it is rarely about the aesthetics or the discipline involved in a piece, but the eligibility of a piece even appearing in this market is again based on the artist's network while they were living. Most of the high value bucket is a product of monetary policy and there are whole books about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
The HN audience should be pretty familiar with this already considering how much we talk about startups and labor markets--proximity breeds productivity. Startups breed more startups, software jobs breed software jobs.
But it extends beyond that even. This is, in part, why similar stores cluster. The "cost" of doing business goes down when you're near other people who are doing the same business, for a variety of reasons. In writing, "cost" is feedback and gathering inspiration. Its hardly different at all.
Breaking it down further it brings to mind mapping with more data than we probably have. Like say if they found "muse correlations" with everyone - mapping productivity and interactions. Like say being in the Shelley's social circle was associated with a 5.0 but the one copy writer of no historical note has a 4.5. Of course if someone was prolific enough they might cause anyone who interacts with them to have a high number as a sheer mathematical side effect.
Being around a group of highly-skilled peers sets the bar. It exposed your shortcomings and gives you a resource to remedy them.
I’ve sometimes worked at home which can be great for a few days of pure coding but for the longer term development I really relish having other peers around.
I once did a project, about six months work, purely from home and although I was disciplined enough to work I feel I was nowhere near my best because of the isolation.
This is why I find it strange the drive a lot of people have to work at home, for me it’s nice occasionally but it just doesn’t work for my creativity.
One of the more interesting papers I read last year was "Knitting Community: Human and Social Capital in the Early Transition into Entrepreneurship", Kim 2018 https://goo.gl/1AfwZG on knitting enthusiasts on the Ravelry knitting forums https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravelry - despite being eminently digitizable, participation in offline knitting circles still appeared to be a big predictor of knitting success & innovation.
At the same time, we are physical beings, and there's nothing quite like the experience of sharing a space with people into what you're into.
While I've made several pretty good friends from the writer's group, and gotten a few things published through them, some useful critiques, encouragement, etc, I don't think I've gone anywhere near as far with that I have in less than half the time in the game industry.
I think part of that is the act of writing is completely solitary, whereas game design, while it has solitary parts (working on manuals, sell sheets, thinking long and hard about what direction to take the game, making prototypes, etc), the process tends to be highly collaborative.
I.e. I'll playtest your game, then you'll playtest my game. After (or sometimes during) the game, we'll brainstorm new ideas, go over what works, what doesn't, maybe change the rules mid-playtest, etc.
Whereas in my experience with writing, you might share a passage from time to time and get some feedback on it, or recruit someone to beta read something you've written, but it's a lot slower process and a much bigger commitment (if you're writing novels at least). It could take them several weeks to finish your book (if they ever do at all), and if they suggest anything structural, like "I don't think taking the book in this direction worked here", you might have to rewrite half the book to incorporate that change and see if it makes it better.
Short stories are easier, and I've gotten some good feedback on my short stories before.
But even the heavier board games out there tend to require no more than about 3 hours of a player's time (still a lot, even to me, I prefer about 90 minutes or less), but you could still make an Saturday afternoon of it, including an hour of feedback, and get home in time for dinner.
And not only that, but you'll often get multiple people's feedback with one playtest session.
Much, much harder to get a commitment for as long as it takes to read a book. And unless you set up storytime hour where you read out the book, just about everyone you recruit can only experience it by themselves, so it's a lot more work to get that feedback from people.
Or if it's not called that, then it should be.