Back when I was researching ADD, my good friend Chalain recommended a book to me. He then went on to describe the content of the book so well that I never bothered to actually get the book. The basic premise of the book is that ADD brains are not broken. They are just wired for hunting/gathering rather than for farming. These people latch onto a project and push themselves past reasonable limits to achieve it, like the hunter pursuing a deer. Sometimes the huge effort is hugely rewarded, other times the hunter goes hungry. This hunter/gatherer brain is contrasted with a farmer brain. Farmers are wired to do the same things over and over regularly. They plant lots of seeds. Then they tend lots of little plants. Then they harvest lots of big plants. Then they plow it all under and start again.
I am definitely a hunter/gatherer rather than a farmer. The farmer tasks in my life, dishes, laundry, house cleaning, fixing regular meals, these are the things that I always feel like I am failing at. I’m not very good about putting in small regular efforts even when I can see that it is the best way to maintain the system. It feels much more natural to me to wait for things to pile up and then to make a big effort to organize it all at once. I have known this about myself for a long time and I try to create my systems for getting things done so that they are complimentary to my inclinations. Some people run loads of laundry and fold a little bit every single day so that they don’t ever get too far behind. I do laundry only twice per week (sometimes only once) thus I focus on laundry for a morning and forget it for the rest of the week. But some things simply have to be done in a farmer way. Letting the dishes pile up makes the job harder and results in a chaotic kitchen. So I’m constantly trying to train myself to clear up dishes and load dishwaser every time I cook or eat. I’m better at it than I used to be, but it still isn’t instinctive.
The reason I bring this all up isn’t about housework at all. It is about writing. I haven’t written any fiction for weeks. As soon as I declared my intention to write at least 500 words of fiction per day, I stopped writing it at all. As I fell behind schedule I got angry with myself and frustrated over the lack of writing. But then I realized that dictating a daily word count is a very farmer way to approach writing and I am not a farmer. I was taking writing, which was very natural to me, and translating it into something foreign because that seemed the “correct” way to be proffessional about writing.
If I require myself to write a certain number of words per day, then that requirement sits in my brain like a burden. It adds to the stress of the day. If instead I allow myself to put down writing completely for a time, then I can pick it up again with joy at a later time. During the days I am not writing, I can still do things that will make me better as a writer. I can analyse movies and books for characterization and plot arcs. I can collect ideas and fragments to be used later. I can watch people and ponder why they behave the ways that they do. I can sit down and brainstorm to connect fragments and observations so they can be used later. In short, I can be gathering. Then I can sit down to do the necessary making.
This approach to writing probably means I will never be a prolific writer. I’m alright with that. I don’t need to write a story every week. Perhaps I’ll get better at this and I’ll write faster. That would be okay too, so long as I am still working with my natural rythms instead of against them.
Orson Scott Card has said he only writes when he needs to–as opposed to just about every other professional writer I’ve heard talk about writing, who say they make themselves write a prescribed number of words or minutes each day. Card’s prolific enough to make a living from writing, so it can work.
That sounds like an interesting book. Do you recall the title?
Definitely a hunter/gatherer here…
Good luck with your writing. I remember when you wrote your goal of 500 pages a day and thought, wow, I would be too stressed to give myself a word count, I would have to set a time instead. 😉 I’m definitely a “project” person instead of a “maintenance” person. I’m interested in the book, too. Do you remember the title/author?
Yay! This entry explains it all! I keep wondering why I keep doing archaeology instead of a few dishes everyday.
I wait to clean the kitchen until it becomes a four hour ordeal to clean it.
Same with other rooms. And then, I get frustrated at my son for being like me with his room.
I definitely concentrate on “projects” and everything else goes to pot.
Thank you. You made me feel better about myself and gave me something to think about.
(Ross is definitely a farmer. : ) thank goodness!
That’s the way I write, and I consider myself prolific. I think I am, in comparison to everyone but Brandon.
Perhaps planning to _do_ writing every day, without specifying a wordcount? Mentally, you could consider it “checking the bushes for ripe berries”. If you don’t find any, that’s ok, but if you find some, you “pick” as many as are ripe that day.
Perhaps as you washed the breakfast dishes, you could “check the writing bushes” to see if there is something ready to gather. If you make the association into a habit, you get the benefit of “farmer” functions by being predictable (checking every day during dish washing), while getting the benefit of “hunter” functions by not _demanding_ there be anything on those writing bushes. Then you could put in your writing journal “nothing ripe today” and count it as writing for the day.
I’m not certain on the exact title, but it was written by Thom Hartmann.
I’m not certain about the exact title, but the author is Thom Hartmann.
I’m not married to a farmer. Howard is very much a hunter. It works because I’m more of a gatherer and we take turns managing most of the farmer tasks.
I LOVE this way of thinking! Brilliant idea! 🙂
Wow. I’m very much like you in this regard, and this is a brilliant insight. Thanks for sharing it!
Just as you say: As soon as I declare my intention to do *anything* every day, I stop doing it entirely. It becomes a burden, and a crushing stress because I’m angry with myself for not doing it. I’m much better when I do things at the spur of the moment, in a burst of energy. Then I laze around for the rest of the day! (Hunt, then loll around. I think I just discovered why the lion is my totem animal.)
I identified something similar about myself a few years ago. I was homeschooled all through middle school and high school, and that enabled me to keep a kind of weird school schedule. I discovered that when I had a class that met all year long, I would start really strong, doing all the homework, but by about January I had stopped doing the reading and started missing classes–I lost interest.
By contrast, if I was interested in a particular subject or book, I’d sit down and read the whole book. I always worked much better when I could focus on just one thing, really intensely but for a short period of time. The only real writing I’ve ever gotten done was during NaNoWriMo–anything less just didn’t have enough oomph behind it, and so it gets shoved down the priority list.
Now I’m in college and I run into the same thing. All my essays get written in big, painful chunks, instead of a little at a time. People are always telling me to start earlier, but I just can’t. I don’t work that way.
The thing, once you’ve identified this sort of trait, is to figure out what to do about it to make life a little less of a struggle. (Personally, I suspect the essays will never be easier.)
I’ll chime in late and say that I’m definately a hunter personality, while my wife is clearly a farmer personality. I does seem like a good analogy for exploring why we do things the way we do. It’s inaccurate and limited as all anologies are, but it makes a good starting point for deeper consideration.
“Hunter in a Farmer’s world” … it seems to currently be out of print.
This seemed like a good theory, and originally, I didn’t think I could add anything to it. Your comment about a lack of farmers was interesting though, I see farming everywhere.
I’ve noticed that a farmer’s chores tend to fade into the background if they’re a good fit, and it seems like we’re a lot more suited to focus on our hunter side in our late teens and twenties. Farmers are visibly slipping into my zany, late night gamer 20s group of friends. Nearly half of us have ADD, all of us used to avoid any routine that didn’t allow all night talks. So watching stability slip in has been a surprising process. People got jobs, settled into routines, and even their playing has routines.
My wild, project-mad dad is a few decades ahead on this curve, and has settled down to work a 9-5 and help a farm expand back into a business. The idea of a long term day job still rankles him as much as he loves it, but he’s really enjoyed raising chickens and horses, clearing land, maintaining the solar, handling that chicken-stealing fox, upgrading the fence, planning for goats.. actually, the farm’s list of chores includes a lot of really intense, all consuming projects.
In the end, I think most of us are both farmers and hunters, but are only proud of one or the other.