Jaime Todd Rubin tells the story in today's Daily Beast of how he cranked out over 400,000 words in a year by carving out time for writing every day, even if only for 20 minutes, learning also to tune out background noise like TV, kids, bats in the attic, small-arms fire, tsunami warnings, etc. He also tracked himself on Google Docs, apparently allowing himself to create all sorts of statistical charts about his writing.
If you're into that sort of thing.
I have never been the sit-down-and-do-a-little-every-day sort of writer. I'm more like a volcano that bubbles beneath the surface, before it all comes spewing out in one long, semi-continuous flow. I write 10 or 12 hours a day until it's done.
I would like to be the kind of writer who sits down and does an hour or two every evening, Or who putters away at it mid-morning, preferably with a banana muffin on hand. I'd love to be able to go to Starbucks in the afternoon like clockwork every day, flip open the laptop and write for an hour, no matter what.
I'm so busy these days with other things that the 10- or 12-hour day of writing just isn't going to work for me.
So I will have to give that 1- or 2-hour-a-day session plan another try, though there's something about my personality that resists it.
What about you? Are you a compulsive word-vomiter like me or the type that can make writing work in small increments? What are your secrets for keeping the creative juices flowing when you only turn them on for an hour or two a day?
1 comment:
Life is requiring me to write in one-to-two hour blocks right now. That's how I wrote when my kids were younger, and it worked fine. Stay tuned! ;)
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