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This keeps coming up of late, so I felt like I should blog about it. It is this logic which supports 50% of the the Internet.
When meeting new people, or when people discover for the first time what I'm trying to do with my life, I get a lot of the same questions: what are you writing? Have you ever been published? Why are you bothering with genre fiction? (I won't dignify the last question with a response.) These questions are all fine and good. But I get other questions that people don't seem to realize are related to those questions (well, the two worth talking about). Questions like why it's so hard to get me to come out on weeknights; why I sometimes take a while to watch or read things they've lent me; why I sometimes get depressed or angry or excited, or why I just suddenly stop talking for an hour or two during a conversation on Instant Messenger.
Here's the thing: I don't work 8 hours a day. I work more like nine or ten.
My writing regimen is not even the strictest I've seen, derived from the "beginner's" writing regimen laid out by the inimitable Stephen King in On Writing (the single best book on writing I have ever read). That regimen is 1000 words a day (about 4 normal word processor pages, ish, depending on how often I break paragraphs), 5 days a week. Sometimes I will cheat and count an hour or two of editing as "equivalent" to 1000 words, so that I get editing and submission done without killing myself in the process. And of course, I allow for unique situations (depressed friends, birthdays, weddings, emergencies, etc.) to make me miss an extra day or so a week, and tend to take a vacation around about Christmas, like everyone else does.
What this means is, my average weekday starts like everyone else's: get up, groan about how early it is, rob the coffee maker of its payload, etc. The middle of my day is pretty typical, too—though I guess I exercise more than the average American. But my evening is wildly divergent.
I get home later than most, because I take the train. So call it 7. Most nights, I have to cook; call that about an hour's worth of time. That's 8. I eat dinner then, usually while watching an episode of something on DVD, or part of a movie. We're at 8:30, 9pm. Then I go and write.
This is where things get nebulous. Sometimes, I'm done writing by 9:30, all's well, nothing odd to report, no concerns whatsoever. Some nights, I'm still staring slack-jawed at the computer screen come 10, wondering why I can't decide which of the characters in this scene will catch all the stray bullets coming at their conversation. Once in a while, usually due to forgetting to turn off Digsby or daring to click on my TVTropes bookmark, I wind up there all the way until 11. And then, I'm spent.
Sometimes, if I was in the middle of a movie, I'll watch the rest of it; sometimes I'll watch another episode of whatever show I'm watching. Maybe if I feel really good or I reached some important milestone, I'll have a Jameson's (neat, please), or walk down to Cost Plus or 7-11 to get something sweet. But usually, I'll just get in bed and read.
I do get two days off in a week, but you'd be amazed how fast those disappear. Am I playing D&D that weekend? One left. Do I want to go out on a date? Oops. What if I want to go out on a date and I have guests for the weekend and there's a new movie out I want to see? Well then, I'm glad I only visit the gym at my office every other day, because I need to get some writing done on my lunch break.
So, if you lent me a book and I keep deflecting whether or not I read it, that's why. If I've had a DVD of yours for eight months, that's why. If I keep vacillating about whether or not I want to come out to the bar tonight...well...you know the answer. I'm tightly scheduled, a lot of the time, and there are weekends where all I want is to get up in the morning, curl around my coffee, and get some of this beautiful work done. Writing is the world's most delightful thief, grabbing onto my time and my life and not letting go; and I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.
When meeting new people, or when people discover for the first time what I'm trying to do with my life, I get a lot of the same questions: what are you writing? Have you ever been published? Why are you bothering with genre fiction? (I won't dignify the last question with a response.) These questions are all fine and good. But I get other questions that people don't seem to realize are related to those questions (well, the two worth talking about). Questions like why it's so hard to get me to come out on weeknights; why I sometimes take a while to watch or read things they've lent me; why I sometimes get depressed or angry or excited, or why I just suddenly stop talking for an hour or two during a conversation on Instant Messenger.
Here's the thing: I don't work 8 hours a day. I work more like nine or ten.
My writing regimen is not even the strictest I've seen, derived from the "beginner's" writing regimen laid out by the inimitable Stephen King in On Writing (the single best book on writing I have ever read). That regimen is 1000 words a day (about 4 normal word processor pages, ish, depending on how often I break paragraphs), 5 days a week. Sometimes I will cheat and count an hour or two of editing as "equivalent" to 1000 words, so that I get editing and submission done without killing myself in the process. And of course, I allow for unique situations (depressed friends, birthdays, weddings, emergencies, etc.) to make me miss an extra day or so a week, and tend to take a vacation around about Christmas, like everyone else does.
What this means is, my average weekday starts like everyone else's: get up, groan about how early it is, rob the coffee maker of its payload, etc. The middle of my day is pretty typical, too—though I guess I exercise more than the average American. But my evening is wildly divergent.
I get home later than most, because I take the train. So call it 7. Most nights, I have to cook; call that about an hour's worth of time. That's 8. I eat dinner then, usually while watching an episode of something on DVD, or part of a movie. We're at 8:30, 9pm. Then I go and write.
This is where things get nebulous. Sometimes, I'm done writing by 9:30, all's well, nothing odd to report, no concerns whatsoever. Some nights, I'm still staring slack-jawed at the computer screen come 10, wondering why I can't decide which of the characters in this scene will catch all the stray bullets coming at their conversation. Once in a while, usually due to forgetting to turn off Digsby or daring to click on my TVTropes bookmark, I wind up there all the way until 11. And then, I'm spent.
Sometimes, if I was in the middle of a movie, I'll watch the rest of it; sometimes I'll watch another episode of whatever show I'm watching. Maybe if I feel really good or I reached some important milestone, I'll have a Jameson's (neat, please), or walk down to Cost Plus or 7-11 to get something sweet. But usually, I'll just get in bed and read.
I do get two days off in a week, but you'd be amazed how fast those disappear. Am I playing D&D that weekend? One left. Do I want to go out on a date? Oops. What if I want to go out on a date and I have guests for the weekend and there's a new movie out I want to see? Well then, I'm glad I only visit the gym at my office every other day, because I need to get some writing done on my lunch break.
So, if you lent me a book and I keep deflecting whether or not I read it, that's why. If I've had a DVD of yours for eight months, that's why. If I keep vacillating about whether or not I want to come out to the bar tonight...well...you know the answer. I'm tightly scheduled, a lot of the time, and there are weekends where all I want is to get up in the morning, curl around my coffee, and get some of this beautiful work done. Writing is the world's most delightful thief, grabbing onto my time and my life and not letting go; and I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.
Labels: writing process
posted by Tyler at
10:10 AM
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