The Craftsman’s Workshop: Slow Productivity and Better Stories

As you may have heard me say by now, my goal this year is simple: don’t be butter scraped over too much bread. In other words, I want to embrace slow productivity and curb my tendency to spread myself too thin.

That’s where Cal Newport comes in.

Cal Newport Prophecies My Career?

I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity. In some strange way, Cal Newport’s books seem to either be prophetic of or else mirror my writing career. 

When he came out with his book Deep Work, I was just starting to get serious about my author business. Digital Minimalism arrived when I was working on limiting my visual distractions. Then A World without Email was published as I started to feel the need to streamline the business side of my offerings…

… And now we have Slow Productivity–right before I was about to reach burnout.

And it’s so good! Do yourself a favor and buy it! Seriously, this book is going to be life-changing.

What’s Slow Productivity All About?

The central idea is that the greatest artists, scientists, poets, and creators in general (“knowledge workers,” to use the author’s term), need time in order to create things that last, things that move the earth, things that people talk about centuries later.

There are three major postulates to this philosophy of slow work:

1. Do fewer things;
2. Work at a natural pace; and
3. Obsess over quality.

And this world we live in is not conducive to that kind of work. We’re all rushing around like chickens without heads and trying to pump out content, content, content to get the attention of the algorithms. Well, that’s the exact opposite of the conditions required for making something beautiful.

This is something I’ve always felt very strongly about. I don’t want to simply churn out stories for the sake of money or fame. I’ve always written because I want to write stories that transform people. And in the process of writing this kind of story, I myself am transformed.

So what are the “right conditions” for crafting this kind of story?

A Myth about Jane Austen

Jane Austen is the subject of one of the most interesting anecdotes in Slow Productivity. There’s an urban legend, made famous by Austen’s nephew, that goes something like this:

Jane Austen was an extremely busy woman who spent her days receiving visitors in her drawing room. In the ten or fifteen-minute intervals between guests, Austen would frantically scribble out stories, then hide them as soon as she heard someone approaching. You see, it wasn’t considered dignified for a woman to write fiction. So she wrote in snatches in much the same way that we pursue our creative endeavors in any minutes we can scrounge from our busy lives.

But as it turns out, this urban legend is a lie!

In fact, what happened is that Jane Austen spent much of her early years practicing writing but was then forced to give it up entirely due to the very active social life she led when her family moved to Bath. When Austen’s brother became rich as a result of an inheritance, he was able to provide a quiet house in the country for his mother and sister, and ONLY THEN did Austen have time to write what later became some of the most important novels in English literature.

The takeaway?

You should do fewer things if you’re going to be productive like Jane Austen. 

I am taking deliberate measures to do fewer things so that my writing will be better. For you, this means better quality literature is coming your way. Hurray!

But slow productivity has an even bigger application for all of us seeking to live well. For that, you’ll need to come on a little journey with me to The Symbolic World Summit…

The Symbolic World Summit 

I’ll be honest. I arrived at The Symbolic World Summit utterly exhausted, hungry, and not a little cranky. I had just spent two months in Belarus and then a week at The Future of Publishing Mastermind. 

However, my mood was quickly turned around thanks to the wonderful people I met! I won’t go into details about the conference, but I will share a few of the interactions that have stayed with me.

Meeting Jonathan Pageau and Martin Shaw

You may be surprised to hear that, though Jonathan Pageau and I have closely collaborated for years, this was our first time actually meeting in person. And let me tell you, I was blown away by the incredible generosity he showed by being present for every single person in front of him. 

I also met the great Martin Shaw. He’s quiet and still, even through he contains multitudes of universes inside him. Every once in a while he’ll start talking and you feel like you want to pull out a notebook to write down everything he says. Everything that comes out of his mouth seems to have been ruminated deeply. 

What Moderns Need Most

But the great thing was watching him work. Martin is a fantastic storyteller. He can talk for hours and hours, and still you’re never bored! That’s because he has an incredible gift he has honed and trained, but also because he reads the feedback of the audience so that no two storytelling sessions are ever the same.

Martin teaches that what moderns need most is oral storytelling. Why? Because both the telling and hearing of stories require fully enfleshed attention. You can’t miss a word. If you do, you miss the story. It’s completely unlike the written word or audiobooks, which you can listen to while you putter around the house and do your chores. It’s an experience you can only have with your full body and mind present and in full communion with the person in front of you.

I don’t know about you, but that’s what I want to do when I grow up.

A Challenge from Martin Shaw

Martin left us with a challenge. It’s simple, but I bet you haven’t done it in a while, if ever. Ready? 

✓ Memorize a poem this week!

I’m in. Are you?

“You Have Offended Your Daemon.”

As I was leaving the conference, I was very blessed to have time at an airport bar to sit down with Martin and Richard Rohlin over a beer. I opened up to Martin about something I’ve been struggling with, and what he said shocked me. 

But first, a little backstory.

My patrons will remember that Martin joined me for an awe-inspiring, unrecorded chat about the art of storytelling about a year ago. Since then, I’ve taken his storytelling advice to heart. The result? 

To be honest, it hasn’t been particularly fruitful. I’ve felt unable to marry my old storytelling self with the Martin-inspired storytelling self. So I asked Martin about that. And you know what he said?

“Maybe you have offended your daemon.”

My daemon? I didn’t know I had a daemon. I’m an Orthodox Christian. But this is how Martin sees stories: they are embodied beings. They are spirits. 

As much as I try not to be a modern, I’ve inevitably absorbed the rationalism of my age. Maybe I just don’t want to think about story as spirit. It’s much easier to think of the spiritual world as something that is distant, that I don’t have everyday access to. The spiritual world is uncomfortable. Encountering it demands a lot of you. 

So this idea that there’s a disconnect between me and the muse? Well, it’s something I’m going to need to ponder.

The Time Between the Dog and the Wolf

Martin did tell me I must find a place to brood outdoors at dusk, what he calls the time between the dog and the wolf (an Irish expression, I think).

I’ve been doing this, and I’m telling you, there is something about that witching hour that’s magical.  

• We need silence. 
• We need stillness. 
• We need a place to think, to be surrounded by nature, to be in touch with the movement of our heart.

This is another part of slow productivity and the art of living better that we all need to embody. 

The Art of Living

I recently happened upon a Substack called The Convivial Society written by L.M. Sacasas, a newsletter on culture and technology. In it, he writes: 

“The art of living, like any other art, is the art of learning to work creatively within the constraints of the medium… But if the constraints of a medium of art appear self-evident—the canvas is only so large, the instrument plays only a certain range of notes—what are the limits of the medium on which the art of life plays. Indeed, what exactly is the medium in view? 

This post is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive, so I hesitate to answer that question in definitive fashion (as if I could). Rather, I’ll simply tell you how I thought about the matter.

Perhaps because I had Berry on my mind and had recently written about his distinction between those who wish to live as creatures and those who wish to live as machines, I thought of our embodied condition as the medium of the art of living. The stuff of life is our bones and flesh. We may be more than bone and flesh, but we are not less. 

The constraints of the medium, then, are the constraints of our embodiment, or at least that is my proposition to you.”

It’s an interesting proposition, isn’t it? That the medium of life is how much we are enfleshed.

How to Be Rooted

Someone suggested to me recently that people talk about the need to be rooted but don’t have a very good way of actually rooting.

I think that’s because we don’t know how to tell stories. We write them, but we don’t tell them. And telling stories is something that can only be done in person.

In our March newsletter from the St. Basil Writers’ Workshop (go subscribe – it’s free!), I wrote about storytelling being an embodied experience of the art of living in a way that we all can (and should) try. I wonder if the art of living is not simply about being embodied but being embodied within a storytelling culture. 

So in addition to memorizing a poem, I think we should all tell a story to someone next to us this week. It doesn’t have to be a fairy tale, but if it is… you’d make me very happy ;).

I’m going to be practicing the art of storytelling much more over the course of this year. I want to develop this practice in person, not only on Zoom. Let me tell you what that looks like:

Upcoming Events and Projects

(I’m saving the best project for the last, so read to the end!)

1. IACL Kickstarter

On March 25th, I’m launching a Kickstarter to fund the third volume of my Slavic fairy tale collection. And guess what? I’m also creating special Kickstarter editions of volumes one and two! You’ll definitely want to keep an eye on this project, because you’ll find a lot of live storytelling experiences embedded in the reward tiers 🙂 

(For those who have already purchased volumes one and two [In a Certain Kingdom: Fairy Tales of Old Russia and In a Certain Kingdom: Epic Heroes of the Rus], the stories in the Kickstarter editions will be the same, but I’m adding additional material on the history and folklore behind the stories.) 

Sign up to be notified when it launches! This helps Kicsktarter advertise my project, and it also notifies you when the Kickstar is live so you can help me reach the awesome stretch goals I’ll be rolling out as surprises 🙂 

Oh, and signing up also gets you access to some early bird rewards that will only be available at the beginning of the campaign!

2. Webinars for Writers

I’m starting a series that will be the definitive library of webinars for the writer who is ready to get published. It gives you all the info you need, from creating your business strategy to setting up your author website to figuring out which publishing path you want to follow and actually selling your books.

Here are few of the first events as a teaser:

This webinar series is hosted on an online writing community I run called the Story Herth. These webinars are exclusive to Story Hearth members. On the Story Hearth, you also get access to an incredible community of like-minded, supportive writers, accountability groups, live writing sessions, office hours with me, and more! Check it out.

3. BIG DRUMROLL… Announcing the Wood Between the Worlds Press

I am THRILLED to share that I was recently hired to start a publishing company that will be your go-to resource for new stories written by this generation’s Inklings!

You know how difficult it is to find books that are as good as Narnia and The Lord of the Rings? And how there’s a massive amount of sci-fi and fantasy books being published that we don’t really have a canon for because nothing has yet stood the test of time? And how you have to wade through it yourself, and some of it’s mucky and awful and you wonder if it’s even worth it?

Well, The Wood Between the Worlds Press is solving that problem for you. We’re going to be publishing the best books for you to read. And we’re also going to be your go-to resource to hear about the good, transformative stories you can’t miss. 

We already have about five books in the pipeline, and they’re really good! I can’t wait to share them with you!

We’re starting with a Substack where I and several guest authors like Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau will be talking about what makes a good story. In fact, we’re just about to launch our first issue, so be sure to follow us! 

Well, that’s all for now.

I hope you’re taking time to memorize poems, to brood, and to tell stories.