Lawrence Block - Writing the Novel

Unless I can consistently choose to work, I’m not going to get books written.

Self-discipline takes a variety of forms. In this regard we might consider two of the most prolific novelists the world has ever known, Georges Simenon and John Creasey. Each wrote several hundred books, and each achieved considerable prominence in the field of crime fiction.

John Creasey wrote every day. He worked seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, producing approximately 2,000 words each morning before breakfast. His routine never varied; at home or abroad, tired or bursting with energy, he got up, brushed his teeth, and started writing. He admitted his behavior was compulsive, explaining that he couldn’t relax and enjoy the rest of the day unless he’d first tended to his writing chores. If you write 2,000 words a day, you are going to turn out close to a dozen books a year, and Creasey did just that for most of his lifetime.

Georges Simenon’s approach was altogether different. You may have seen a television documentary on his writing habits; it has had considerable exposure over the educational channels. Typically, he would pack a bag and a typewriter and travel to one European city or another where he would check into a hotel. There he would work in the most intense manner imaginable, immersing himself utterly in his work, avoiding human contact for the duration, and producing a finished manuscript in ten or twelve days. The book finished, he would return home and resume his everyday life, letting the plot gradually develop for his next novel, and ultimately heading off to another city and repeating the process once again.

My own writing methods have changed constantly over the past twenty years, forever shaping themselves to fit my state of mind, time of life, and various special circumstances. In the early years, the Simenon approach had a tremendous appeal for me. I can still see something to be said for the idea of completing a book in as short a total span of time as possible; that way one remains very much in the book during the term of its production, and one’s involvement can be very intense indeed.

I have on occasion written books in as little as three days; I’ve written a couple that took only seven or eight days that are probably as good as anything I’ve done. I can’t argue that I made a mistake writing those books as rapidly as I did. Nor am I at all inclined to attempt to do that sort of thing now.

Nowadays I try to write not twenty or thirty pages in a day’s time but five or six or seven. Age may very well be a factor, but I rather doubt that it’s the only one, or even the major one. It’s at least as significant, I think, that I’ve become a more careful writer and a more flexible one. When I was a brash and cocky young scribbler I was blessed with a very useful sort of tunnel vision; i.e., I could just see one way to do something in a book, and so I lowered my head and charged right in and did it. Now my vision has widened. I’m apt to be more aware of possibilities, of the multiplicity of options available to me as a writer. I’m able to see any number of ways to structure a scene. A slower pace helps me choose among them, selecting the one I’m most comfortable with.

Years ago I was apt to work late at night, and that’s something else I don’t do any more. I’m sure part of the appeal of the midnight oil lay in the image that went with it — the lonely toiler, fortifying himself with endless cups of coffee, smoking endless cigarettes, and fighting the good fight while the rest of the world slept. There was also a practical element involved; with the rest of my family (like the rest of the world) asleep, I could work without interruption, a consummation devoutly to be wished if ever there was one.

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 it.

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.