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But when I’m writing, I do best if I concern myself only with that day’s writing. Because that’s all I’m in a position to deal with at the time. I can no more write tomorrow’s pages today than I can breathe tomorrow’s air today. The fact that I don’t know what I’m going to write tomorrow doesn’t matter much today. I don’t have to know until tomorrow. And, when tomorrow comes, I’ll probably have the answer when I need it. It’ll grow out of what I manage to write today and whatever processes my unconscious mind sets in motion between now and then.

Sometimes, however, I know what’s going to happen next, both today and tomorrow. What stops me in my tracks is that the words just don’t seem to come out right. Nothing seems to work and I begin to have dark suspicions of organic brain damage.

That brings us to our second problem: There are days when all you can do is go to the movies. But there aren’t really very many days like that. What I’ve learned to do on those headful-of-cotton-candy mornings is to sit down and write my daily quota of pages anyway.

I make a bargain with myself. I give myself full permission to decide after the fact that the five pages read as though they were typed by an orangutan. If I hate them the following morning, I can throw them out with a clear conscience. But in the meantime I’m going to sit down and get them written, for better or for worse.

You’d be surprised how often I wind up with five pages of perfectly acceptable copy this way. I may yank a lot of sheets out of the typewriter en route, crumpling them up, hurling them at the wastebasket, and shattering the air with colorful imprecations. But I generally get five pages written that prove to be, if not divinely inspired, nevertheless as good as my prose is apt to get. And, on those genuinely rare occasions when I throw out the five pages on the morning after, I’ve nonetheless gained from the ordeal; the struggle will have jarred something loose, and I can approach with a clear vision the task that had been so impossibly muddled the day before.

Here’s where it’s so important that your daily quota is not too great a burden. For my part, I can always manage to squeeze five pages out of my typewriter. It’s a manageable burden. If I set my goals higher, I might have no trouble fulfilling them on good days, but on bad ones I’d be awed by having to produce ten or twelve pages. So I’d do none at all, and instead of making progress I’d sacrifice momentum.

Now and then a book grinds to a halt not because of projection or muddleheadedness but because something has Gone Wrong. We’ll deal with that in the next chapter.

Chapter 10

Snags, Dead Ends and False Trails

Sometimes a book just plain runs into a wall. It moves merrily along, lulling you into a false sense of security—is there any other kind?—and then a wheel comes off and there you are, knowing only that it’s your fault and that there ought to be something you can do about it.

If I had a magic answer, I would not be writing this book. Not because I’d be unwilling to share such divinely-inspired insight with you. Nothing would give me more pleasure. But I’d be too busy finishing up the dozen or more books of mine that ran into walls over the years, and that have languished unfinished in drawers and cardboard boxes ever since.

I’m not talking about those false starts where I knocked out one or two chapters of a book, then gave it up as a bad job. Those were just ideas I ran up the flagpole; when nobody saluted I hauled ’em down without a second thought. No, I’m talking about books that I stayed with for fifty or a hundred or a hundred fifty pages before something went curiously wrong, with them or with their author, and nothing more ever happened with them.

In some instances, this has happened to me because of my propensity for writing books without having a terribly clear idea where I’m going. I’m sure that if I always worked from a reasonably detailed outline I would run into dead ends far less frequently. On the other hand, my