“Who the hell has the time to write a novel?”
That’s what a musician friend remarked to me, and I had to admit, he had a point.
Talk about a long march! My last novel took 7 years from first glimmer to publication.
It’s lonely work. Your friends and family don’t understand what your’re doing or why, and unless you have a publishing contract in hand, and an editor watching the calendar, no one in the universe, except you, will give a rat’s netherworld if you finish it or not. Not even God.
But enough handwringing. It’s a monumental job, but novels get written all the time. The question is: how to scale a monumental labor down to everyday proportions.
Recently, a friend’s blog pointed me to “Writing in the Age of Distraction.” by the prolific Cory Doctorow, who, by his own count, produces “at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches.”
How does he do it? No secrets, just the simplest advice you could imagine. With apologies to Doctorow, I’ll summarize:
Work in modest sprints, short but regular. Limit expectations: aim for a comfortably undersized daily word count, or if you work by the clock, commit to a short time period and stop when it’s over, even if you’re in the midst of a sentence (something you should welcome, in fact, since “rough edges” allow you to pick up the next day in mid-momentum. Don’t procrastinate with “vital” research, or incoming communications that “must” be answered.
For me and my wife, the piece that stuck was: “a short, regular schedule.” To that we’ve added another element, one that is right for us, namely: “first thing in the morning.”
That means exactly what it says: work first. Not after checking email, not lingering over breakfast and the New York Times, but FIRST.
So simple, but such reluctance to peel back expectations. Why? I suppose we’re just too awed by legends of literary iron men and women chained to their desks until they’ve put in a 12-hour day, far too daunting for most of us.
And yet a single hour seems…well, embarrassingly puny.
Maybe it is, but I’m not embarrassed, not at all. So far, I’m to busy watching my novel grow again. Stay tuned.
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- Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction (q-ontech.blogspot.com)
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree completely! When I did NaNoWriMo this past year, everyone thought I was crazy for writing 50,000 words in a month but when it came down to it and I was really focusing, it only took me an hour, maybe two, of work to complete the daily word count goal. I just took it 1,667 words at a time.
It’s surprising how much you can get done in an hour. Screenwriter John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Big Wednesday, Conan the Barbarian, etc.) said in an interview that he works 1 hour a day. The secret is focus, confidence, skill, and regularity.
There’s a guy who sells his 5 minue method for novel writing on line. My first thought was, “it’s a scam,” but it’s amazing what you CAN do it 5 minutes, with intense concentration. There are 12 5-minute periods in an hour. Even if you only write in half of them, that’s six. Six will add up to quite a bit of work in that hour.
Agreed. First thing in the morning is a good trick too. I find there’s very little to distract me before 8am, making that power hour even more effective.
The insane deadline of NaNoWriMo drove me to write for a couple hours a day. I’ve been having trouble duplicating that sort of will power since then, but as long as I write for a half an hour a day, I know I will at least be building my ideas out, and that at some point I will finish whatever I’m working on. And heck, sometimes that half hour turns into two.
Also, after reading Doctorow’s article, I’m thinking about disabling my wifi while writing. The Internet is very distracting.
Example: This comment.