you are satisfied.”
In the interest of the craft of writing, a good question to ask yourself is: Are you ready to log those 10,000 hours? How will you do it? Do you like to write in long spurts, working an idea until exhaustion? Or do you prefer to work an hour, or two or four, every day?
What’s the trick?
I’ve read countless articles about how many writers trick themselves into writing. Why? Because the idea of writing for three to five hours a day is intimidating. That the writers don’t have the confidence that the words will be there. That, as Joan Didion insists, they don’t trust the process. There’s a reason that “writer’s block” is a topic of endless discussion among students and professionals in the writing world.
Tricks are fine. Whatever gets you to the page.
One trick writers employ is a timer. They set a timer for ten, fifteen or twenty minutes. The rationale is that they can certainly write for twenty minutes! Then, when the timer buzzes, if the work is flowing, off they go!
Recently, the writer Janet Malcolm published a book titled Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Writers and Artists. Her fascinating and lengthy essay on the infamous Bloomsbury group gives us the backstory on how a disparate group of intellectuals and artists became ubiquitous in the literary world. Have you ever wondered how an author as experimental, as language-driven and as dreamy as Virginia Woolf became embedded into every college English curriculum? How Bloomsbury captured the imagination of virtually every aspiring author?
“Every day for five to six days a week, they went to their rooms after breakfast. They wrote from 9:30 a.m. until lunchtime at 1:00 p.m. Three and a half hours per day, five to six days per week, 330 days a year. That is why their output was prodigious—novels, memoirs, essays, a prodigious output. In the afternoons and evenings, they walked, they read, they had long discussions,” Malcolm writes.
Not every writer has the luxury of time, or the confidence to arrange their lives as the Bloomsbury group did. But what about using a timer to accomplish a minimum of twenty minutes or even an hour per day? Don’t forget: hours add up.
Do the math: You write 1,000 words in an hour, that’s four pages. Four pages over a month (twenty days) equals eighty pages. Eighty pages over three months equals 240 pages. Congratulations! You just wrote the first draft of your next book!
If you were to research the backstory of now-famous writers, you would learn that a significant percentage wrote their first books on stolen time, in short spurts, on weekends. Toni Morrison wrote in taxicabs while she was working as an editor. Christopher Gortner, author of eight novels, wrote his first three while he was working full-time.
What Are You Afraid Of? A Frank Discussion of Writer’s Block and Fear
The fear of writing is real. For many, the idea of a blank page is one of, if not the most, terrifying task. Given any other task—mopping the floor, running a load of laundry, cooking, cleaning the cat box, walking the dog—anything is more appealing than facing that page.
No matter that once the body is in the chair, the words, most of the time, will begin to flow. Still, the fear is, “What if they don’t?”
Fear is powerful. We avoid fear in all sorts of ways. We fear planes; we don’t buy a ticket. We fear meeting new people; we don’t go out to events where we don’t know anyone. Our subconscious avoids fear as a survival tool!
Avoiding fear, or any other uncomfortable situation, is called staying in your “comfort zone.” Choosing to write will certainly take you out of your comfort zone.
So, before you become a winning writer, you will have to make peace with fear. I’m not a psychologist, but my colleague Renate Stendhal is. We’ll hear from her later in our chapter on “Confidence.”
Anne Lamott wrote: “I used to not be able to write if there was a dirty dish in the sink. Now I can write if there is a dead body!”
Again, your writing is a practice. Do you work in a rush or methodically?
Joan Didion worked every day, to much success. So did the Bloomsbury group. Many writers believe in a daily writing practice like the pope believes in Jesus.
But how about this for an idea? A “crash”?
Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks. He writes: “Many people work long hours. When it comes to the writing of novels, however, the consensus seems to be that after four hours or so of continuous writing, diminishing returns set in. I’d always more or less gone along with this view, but as the summer of 1987 approached I became convinced that a drastic approach was needed. Lorna, my wife, agreed…. So Lorna and I came up with a plan. I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we mysteriously called a “crash.” During the crash, I would do nothing but write from 9:00 a.m. through 10:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitatively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one…. Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere—I let them remain and plowed on.”
So, winning writers’ styles vary. Daily practice, crash, and “flow.” There is no right way.
The movie Trumbo tells the story of Dalton Trumbo, the author of Academy Award-winning screenplays and prize-winning novels. Trumbo worked in a fever of alcohol and pills—turning out play after play. His output, like the Bloomsbury group’s, was prodigious.
Your style might even vary from project to project. Some poems “write themselves.” Others need ten revisions. And some books come very easily. Be open to how your project is going.
Where Did That Come From? A Note on the Source of Writing
I’ve had students ask, “How can I multiply my ideas for stories, poems, or even my next novel?” A good practice is training yourself to pay close attention. Dorothy Bryant advised: “It is common that while you are working on one project, your creativity is at a fever pitch. You have ideas for other projects. Rather than stop what you are doing, take your notes, file them away. That way you know you’ve captured the ideas, but they must wait until you finish the project at hand.”
For example: You might overhear a couple arguing in a restaurant. A friend might have a gem of insight, but she is not a writer. Ask if you can use her idea—promising proper attribution, of course. Or, you walk into a pet store and two turtles are mating. You’re fascinated, so you observe, wait to see if the scene provokes a feeling. You go to a rally, an art show, a movie. It moves you deeply. Try to locate the feelings. That’s your germ.
Another approach is to turn your dreams into poetry, prose, songs or any other creative endeavor.
Writer and teacher Sandy Boucher said, “Everyone wants to have written.” To that, I would like to add “Everyone dreams of being a writer.”
I’m here to tell—you don’t have to dream about it—you can actually use your dreams to source your creativity.
Many famous artists from
