A place and time to write
Writing is a solitary business. To get anywhere, you need to treat it like a proper profession with a fixed timetable and a place of work. If like me you have a full-time job taking up nearly 40 hours of your week (not to mention the hour spent in the car travelling and the hour spent during lunch time, when you need to rest your brain and your eyes), the time left for writing is limited. Probably most of your writing in this case will be restricted to weekends.
In my own case, as I begin to get more serious about my writing, I think leaving a gap of five days between writing is not a good thing. How can things be kept fresh in your mind? This will lead to the laptop being taken out and ideas being typed up and a paragraph added here and there during the week. That to me seems a big higgledy-piggledy.
So, to be truly serious about the business of writing, I have decided that I must spend 1 hour each night writing - keeping my continuing story fresh from day to day, not having to revisit what I wrote last week. Weekends are different, of course. For now, two hours on Saturday and two hours on Sunday will suffice. It should be possible in that length of time to write between 6,000 and 8,000 words per week. Or roughly 24 to 32 pages of the average novel. In theory, reaching that magic 400 pages should take around 14 weeks, or just over 3 months.
Then you have to consider the place of work. I am lucky enough to have a whole room to base an office environment in. Complete with a sizeable desk, a bookcase, a PC and laptop, it sounds ideal. But, it’s no good having a great office if you get interrupted or if it’s in a mess. I must admit that my office space is currently full of junk. That’s going to have to change. I just can’t imagine writing in a cluttered office surrounded by boxes of books, broken lamps and the like.
So, I’ll pencil in a timetable, stick to it, lock out the rest of the world and write in a vacuum. Sounds easy, huh?
As a wise man once said, “It sounds great in practice, but will it work in theory?”
Posted: May 3rd, 2007 under The Writing Process, Writing.