Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [56]
Then too, at that stage in my life I appeared to be more of a night person. I felt the wise thing to do with mornings was to sleep through them, and that a sunrise was a marvelous thing to look at immediately before going to bed.
Ah, well, the only constant is change, and now I almost always make work the thing I do at the beginning of the day, not the end. My work is done most frequently in the morning, immediately after breakfast. When I try to work considerably later in the day, I find my mind’s not up to it. I’m fresher first thing in the morning, when I’ve had six or eight hours of sleep to clear the garbage out of my head.
A majority of professional writers seem to have found this to be true. Quite a few report that they used to work in the evening, or late at night, but that they gradually found themselves becoming morning writers. Others work at night still, and find it’s the only time they can work. Others work any old time, whenever they can get it together.
There’s no magic answer, and there are certainly more exceptions than there are rules, so I would not dream of advocating that anyone abandon a system that seems to be working just fine. However, for someone trying to decide at what point of the day to schedule writing time, I would very strongly recommend working first thing in the morning, especially for those writers with nonwriting jobs. It’s easier to write, and to write well, after a night’s sleep than after a hard day’s work. It’s also a sounder policy to write after morning coffee than after the post-ratrace martini.
More important than what hours you spend at the typewriter are how often you choose to spend them. If there’s one thing I’m convinced of, on the basis of my own experience and the experience of others, it is the desirability of steady production. There are exceptions—there are always exceptions—but as a rule the people who make a success of novel writing work regularly and consistently. They may take time off between books, or between drafts of a book, but when they’re working they damn well work—five or six or even seven days a week until it’s done.
There are two reasons why this is important. Obviously, the more steadily you work the sooner you’ll be done with this monumental task. If you write two pages a day, a two hundred-page book is going to take you one hundred days. If you write every day, you’ll complete that book in a little over three months. If you only average three writing days a week, the same book will take the better part of a year.
More important, I believe, is that steady day-in-day-out work on a book keeps you in the book from start to finish, and keeps the book very much in your mind during those hours you’re at the typewriter and during those hours you’re doing something else—playing, reading, sleeping. You and the book become part of one another for the duration. Your unconscious mind can bring its resources to bear upon plot problems as they present themselves. You don’t have to stop at the beginning of the day’s work to read over what you’ve already written and try to remember what you had in mind when you left off last week.
“A novelist,” Herbert Gold says, “has to think/dream his story every day. Poets and story writers can go for the inspired midnight with quill dipped in ink-filled skull.” And Joseph Hansen adds, “I have made a number of young novelists angry by saying that writing is something you do when you get up in the morning, like eating breakfast or brushing your teeth. And it is. Or it had better be.”
After you’ve determined when to write and how often to write, there’s something else you have to work out. That’s how much you’ll write each day, or how many hours you’ll spend doing