Writing the Novel_ From Plot to Print - Lawrence Block [57]
Some writers put in a certain number of hours each working day. I’ve never worked that way, and research leads me to believe that most pros pace themselves more by the amount they produce than the time it takes to produce it.
I’m certainly more comfortable making a contract with myself to produce five pages of copy, than to spend three hours at the typewriter. For one thing, the amount of time I spend working doesn’t seem particularly relevant. Nobody’s paying me by the hour, and nobody’s checking to see if I punched the old time clock at the appointed hour. The idea of spending a set number of hours working may help to allay one’s conscience, but I don’t think it has much to do with the business of writing.
Some days the writing flows and I can do my five pages in one glorious hour. When that happens, I’m free to do as I wish with the rest of the day. I’ve learned to stop writing then and there, because my mind’s tired after five pages, whether it took me one hour or three hours to get them written.
Other days, the writing pours like January molasses. Maybe I’ll take five hours to do as many usable pages. Those days aren’t much fun, but I’ve learned to keep at it for as long as it takes, because for all the agony of their composition, those pages are apt to read just as smoothly as the ones that came with no effort. If I threw in the sponge after three hours, those pages wouldn’t get written.
I had much the same system at the beginning of my career, when I wrote soft-core sex novels in two weeks’ time, five days on, a weekend off, then five days to finish the book. Then I wrote twenty pages a day where now I write five, but the basic principle was the same.
The number of pages you shoot for is for you to decide. My pace changes depending on the book I’m writing. Some novels seem to demand a more intense level of concentration, and a smaller number of pages will tire me. Others, for whatever reason, move at a faster natural pace.
You may find that one page a day is as much as you can easily manage. That’s fine. Work six days a week and you’ll produce a book in a year. You may find that it’s no strain for you to turn out ten or twenty or thirty pages at a stretch. That’s fine, too—enjoy yourself. My questionnaire responses suggest that a preponderance of pros do four or five pages a day, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be less than professional by shooting for a higher or lower number. They settled on that figure because they found out it seemed to be right for them, just as you’ll find out what’s the right pace for your own novel.
One thing you might try to avoid, in this connection, is attempting to extend your productivity. This sort of overload principle works fine in weightlifting, where one’s ability to manage more weight increases as one lifts more weight, but it doesn’t work that way in writing. It’s tempting to try to do a little more each day than we did the day before, and I still find myself intermittently struggling to resist this particular temptation, even after lo these many years. If I can do five pages today, why can’t I do six tomorrow? And seven the day after? For that matter, if I really catch fire and do seven today, that proves I can definitely do a minimum of seven tomorrow. Doesn’t it?
No, it doesn’t.
What does happen, in point of fact, is that this sort of overload generally leads to exhaustion. Then I can rationalize taking a couple days off—after all, I’m ahead of schedule, aren’t I?—and the next thing I know I’m not producing consistently at all. I’m writing in fits and starts, stealing days off and then trying to make up for them by doubling up on my work. The book suffers, the manuscript takes longer than it would have taken otherwise, and once again the tortoise nips the hare at the finish line.
The motto is “Easy does it.” Find your right pace, make sure it’s one that’s not going to be a strain, and then stick with it. If you do have a day when you write an extra page or two, don’t waste time thinking about it. Regard it as a freak occurrence, nothing to be deplored but nothing