A Writer's Tale

For some writers, a page might be composed in a couple of minutes. (He is more typist than writer.) At the other extreme, a person might spend two or three hours laboring over one page. (Such a person is probably not a great artist. More likely, he’s either a prima dona or doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing likely both.) For most of us, a page might take anywhere from fifteen minutes to half an hour. Maybe a full hour if we’re trying to compose a very special effect or having a problem.

To write a single page per day, then, is a task that should probably take no longer than one hour.

If an aspiring writer is incapable of finding one hour per day to sit down and work on his craft…

Well, let us suggest that he give up the pretense of being an aspiring writer.

Because he ain’t one.

Because anyone can find time to turn out one page a day if he really wants to.

Now, I don’t want to seem like I’m getting hung up in semantics here. A person doesn’t have to write a page every day. Things happen. I don’t write a page every day. I don’t write at all, for instance, when I’m traveling. Now that I’m reasonably successful, I take a day or two off, each week, for activities with my family.

However, I usually do write 100-150 pages per month. That averages out to a lot more than a page per day. My daily goal is five pages. Sometimes I go over, and sometimes I don’t make my five.

Before I was a full-time writer, I held full-time jobs but still managed to turn out a large amount of fiction. (See the Autobiograpical Chronology.) Having a job is no excuse for not writing. My goal in those days was three pages per day.

How did I do it?

Not easily.

I sometimes wrote for an hour before going to work in the morning. I often wrote during my lunch break. I wrote another hour or two each day after work. And I usually devoted large portions of my days off (weekends and holidays) to writing.

I often hear aspiring writers talk about what they are “going to write” if they can ever “find the time.”

With that attitude, they are probably never going to accomplish much.

You don’t find time. It is there. Twenty-four hours of it each day. If you want to be a writer, you only need to make the decision to use at least one of them for the writing.

Turn out that page. Or skip a day, and turn out two or three the next day. But get them done.

Or forget it.

A few helpful hints on how to turn out pages:

1. If you can’t find an uninterrupted hour, it’s hardly worth bothering to get started on real writing. So use the fifteen minutes, half an hour, or whatever to proof-read, revise, or play around with ideas for new stuff.

2. For best results, find a block of two or three hours in which you’ll be able to write without interruption. With this much time, you can get into the piece and really cook.

3. Start each writing period by re-reading what you wrote yesterday. Revise it as you go. This will not only improve yesterday’s material, but it will pull you back into the story, making it easy to continue where you left off.

4. Write the material well, but don’t spend great amounts of time trying to get it “just right.” Don’t spend your whole hour working on one or two sentences. Keep moving. Turn out a page or two or five. Polish them some other time.

5. Follow Hemingway’s advice and stop the day’s writing at a point where you still know what is coming next. This will help you start up again easily the next day.

6. If you are serious about being a writer of fiction, then be wary of foreign entanglements. For example, you might be better off writing your own fiction than trying to edit an anthology or publish a fanzine or run a web site or organize a fan convention, etc. Sure, such activities may gain you some recognition and possibly important connections. But it is more important to make books and stories than contacts. You won’t have any use for the contacts if you don’t have a product to sell them.

 

Rule 4

“Write Truly.”

The notion of writing fiction “truly” may sound a trifle contradictory.

After all, fiction is made up. How can it be true if it’s made up?

In fact, most fiction is mostly true. You are obliged to be accurate about every detail that isn’t directly related to your story. For instance, such matters as historical, geographical, scientific and technological facts (including how firearms really operate) must be true.

Readers have to be given the straight scoop except when you are manipulating the truth for the sake of the story (in which case, your readers need to be tipped off that you’re bending the truth).

In some cases, novels provide valuable information about fascinating subjects. Most Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton novels, for example, give a lot of insight into one topic or another. Their stories are made up, but their information isn’t.

No matter what you’re writing about, your background material should be as close to the truth as possible.

Which really should go without saying.