Daily Writing Goals

This week I have finally had time off to write. When I say "time off", I mean whole days for writing and nothing else. At least, nothing else that required me to show up from 9-5. The days stretched out ahead of me. Eight hours for writing. Think of all those words I could write. Except ... I knew from experience how easy it was for each day, and all those hours, to dribble away on stuff. Household chores, house building things, attacking the endless mess in my office (and going to the stationery shop), reading, etc. How to organise my precious days so they were spent on writing?

It's partly about discipline. Nobody was making me do the other stuff. They were merely procrastination tools, ones I tend to do while thinking "I'll write better in the afternoon", and then finding it was after 5pm and I hadn't written a thing. I thought about what would get my backside in the chair and keep it there. Should I set a number of words to write? Not relevant at the moment because my writing task this week is a major revision, which means some new writing and some rewriting. How about hours sitting at the computer, no matter what? In the end, I decided on pages of revised novel. I aimed for 15 per day. Ha! I thought. That's nailed it.

Not. Monday and Tuesday saw me finally sitting down at the computer around 2pm. Should have been plenty of time to work on 15 pages, but somehow it wasn't. Tuesday I accomplished THREE! Wednesday morning I had a fantastic Skype call with my friend K, who completed the Margie Lawson course on Self-Defeating Behaviours earlier this year. K told me that what works best for her is putting writing first, sitting down after breakfast and writing for 2-3 hours, no matter what. Then the rest of the day is free for all that other stuff, and you feel great because you have written.

Obvious, isn't it? Well, it is if you are a morning person. Which I am not. But related to this are other elements, such as getting a good night's sleep so you can be up and functioning by 8am. Eating breakfast and doing some exercise helps too. Mostly, it's about making a decision that writing needs to come before everything else, and sticking to it. I used to read about full-time authors who go to their desk at 9am and write until 5pm. That's a great day's writing, I thought. But I don't write like that. I'm not sure anyone does. Eight hours at the keyboard? At the speed I type, I'd be producing 8-10,000 words a day.

But it would be 10,000 words of babble. I need thinking and planning and pondering time. When I'm not writing, that's when I see plot holes, and develop exciting new ideas. But I still need at least 2 hours of typing to get it all into the story. When I have a normal writing week, there are two days where I cannot write at all. Not even if I got up at 5am (and Melbourne is so cold right now, there's no way I'm doing that!). But this week has shown me that I can structure those other days better, and get more done, simply by writing first.

The Endurance Factor

“Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck—but most of all, endurance.”—James Baldwin

I found this quote today while doing some reading on all sorts of different topics, and also in between grading a huge pile of student work. Grading creative writing is something that could be termed an oxymoron perhaps - how can you give originality and pizzazz a grade? Funnily enough, it's not so hard because before you get originality, you have to have strong ideas, structure, characterisation, dialogue that works well, a facility with language, and a good grasp of grammar and punctuation. I guess that's why we teach all that stuff - because from there comes great writing and then ... originality.

I digress. Sort of. Because when we talk about creative writing students, there's a perception that of course they're all talented - why would they be studying writing otherwise? It's true that our students have talent, that germ of something which means when they write, at least a little something happens on the page. But it's what they do with it that makes the difference. Endurance plays a huge part in it. I've seen quite a few very good writers in my classes whom I thought would one day, sooner maybe than later, see their work published. But although their talent might shine, without endurance it fades. I see them a few years on, and they've given up because it got too hard - either to fit it into a busy life, or the rejections were too much to take.

Writing is hard. Good writing is harder. Great writing can take years to develop, to grow, to learn how to do. The myth persists that a great writer is born with the talent, and no doubt for a very occasional person, that's true. But again, it's what happens after that. The road to publication can be long and rocky. Just ask the guy who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. I saw that mentioned today as an "instant American classic". Yep, it was just a pity that he submitted it over and over and over for years, and finally killed himself. It was his mother who eventually found a publisher, and it became an instant classic. Hmmm.

What makes great writing? I think it is that ability to somehow put words on the page in a way that readers engage with. Just as well we have a wide range of readers, people who love Dan Brown, people who love Annie Proulx. Because words on the page have different effects on different readers. Nevertheless, along with the ability has to come a number of other things. As Baldwin says, discipline is a must. If you can't regularly commit to putting plenty of words on the page and then reworking those words until they sing, you won't get far. A book-length work is a huge, scary undertaking. There'll be plenty to tell you you're mad. Only self-discipline keeps your backside in that chair.

Luck? Yes, even though we hate to admit it. The story idea that somehow magically taps into the zietgist of the time. The editor who absolutely loves Shakespeare and receives an unsolicited manuscript that draws on Hamlet in a new way. The agent you meet just when she's heard of a publisher looking for a book just like yours. But it's not all luck. You make your own luck by being aware of the industry and researching your markets properly.

Love? I guess he means a love of writing. If you love writing for its own 'self', for what it gives you, for the thrill of having written, for how it gives you the licence to do almost anything in words that you dream of - then love helps a lot too. It especially helps when you're getting lots of rejections. But it's endurance that will get you there. Like building a house, you must believe that as along as you keep going, keep adding wood and nails and cement and pipes and a roof, then one day you may well have what you dream of - publication.

And then you must learn to endure all that comes with it - the pressure of each book after that, the reviews, the critics, the long hours at the desk (because you learn that each new book brings its own problems and you will never know it all)... Goodness, I'm starting to depress myself here! But it is endurance, and it is hard - never assume it will be easy because that way lies the road that holds those signs that say things like You're not good enough and I knew you'd fail and How come others can do it and not you?

You have to ignore them because, after all, as a writer you have chosen something that you may do for your whole life. Something that will have moments of ecstasy, moments of deep despair, and a whole lot of days of staring at a blank screen. Endurance doesn't have to be like carrying a heavy sack up a muddy hill in boots that are two sizes too large for you. But it does have to be something you cultivate inside yourself, like a solid warm extra organ that gives you the fortitude you need to keep going.
(And for those of you who know me, can you guess what the house is going to be called when it's finally finished? No, not Emoh Ruo. ENDURANCE.)

If You're Not Writing, Are You a Writer?

This topic has come up several times in the past few days. It's strange how something you barely think about from one week to the next suddenly jumps out in front of you. When I was doing psychology/philosophy stuff years ago, the theory was that "the thing" was always there - the difference was that something in your life made you notice it. Today, it was our second year novel writing class. One of the students had only written 15 words this week, and seemed to think that was OK. Nup. Not if you want to be a novel writer.

I haven't been writing for a few weeks now. I needed a healthy break. Of course, what happened was I ended up writing poems instead of fiction, plus I did some journalling. I still felt like I wasn't really writing, because I wasn't producing 3000-5000 words a week. Now I have started again, simply because I couldn't stand not writing anymore. The urge got bigger and bigger, and finally I opened the laptop and began. Feeling, as usual, like what I was writing was awful, but words on the page are words to work with.

Today my email newsletter arrived from Margie Lawson and Mary Buckham. (It's free, by the way.) It included an interview with a writer called Lois Faye Dyer. I'd never heard of her before (I don't read her genre) but she said something that rang a bell to clang along with the other things I've been thinking and hearing. "Too many writers don't spend enough time writing. A writer writes. Full stop. ... Finish a book a year, a whole book, not just the first three chapters and a plot synopsis."

I know there are literary writers who regularly take 2-3 years to write a novel. That's not the point. The point is - they are still writing regularly, and probably every day. Andrea Goldsmith has been a full-time novelist for many years. I've heard her talk about her writing life - it includes reading, thinking, planning and writing, as well as lots of rewriting. All the time. It's her career. Those of us who have day jobs have to fit our writing around what pays the bills. But we still write regularly, we produce words - lots of them - and we rewrite lots of them.

That's how a book gets written. And the next one. And the next one. By writing, regularly, by giving up other things in order to put words on the page, by understanding that only by writing are you a writer. Thinking about it doesn't count.