Nothing improves your writing, I think, as much as your keeping writing.
I guess I write four or five hours a day, but I do it seven days a week. It's very disciplined, yes, but it's joy for me.
It's physical. If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.
I've never abandoned the novel.
If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.
When I made the decision to really get serious about my writing, I set myself a goal of 1,000 words a day for seven days. If I got to 7,000 words before Monday I could take a day off, but I had to get there. I had to do that every week.
On the whole, anything that gets you writing and keeps you writing is a good thing. Anything that stops you writing is a bad thing.
I'm not a disciplined writer.
I've always kept writing. There's never been a moment where I went through a spell where I just don't write.
What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.
Writing is a wholetime job: no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it.
I don't write all the time. But if I'm writing something, I'll just bang into it every day until it's finished. I write pretty quickly.
I'm a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I'm at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.
I try to keep a steady pace with my writing. I have found that super-productive days are usually followed by two and even three days when I can hardly write a word. I used to try for 1000 words a day; now I am high-fiving myself after 500.
Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed.
The most common misperception about me is that I write fast. I just write often. Every hour that I can.
I'm a person who, when I set out to write, I write. It's just like when you set out to eat, you eat, or when you set out to sleep, you sleep. I don't do somersaults to write something. I just do it.
I make sure to write every day, even if it's a little bit.
When I'm writing, I write every day. It's lovely when that's happening. One day dovetailing into the next. Sometimes I don't even know what day of the week it is.
It's the hardest thing in the world to dedicate to writing, but if you do that even once a week, after six months or a year you'll have something substantial.
That, for me, is a very important test of a young writer's commitment because most of them are going to have to continue doing that when they've finished the program.
I wonder if it is wise for any of us to read anyone's writings too consistently? No matter how able they may be, they seem occasionally to find it difficult to be consistent, and this tends to give me as a reader the feeling that we are all of us swayed by so much by our momentary impulses and interests, that what we write at any time can not be taken too seriously.
There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.
Capote wrote every day. He said that's the only way, you have to sit down every day and do it.
Discipline is what makes a writer. If writing was like lifting weights, then I'd look like Mr. Universe. Write every day. Give the Muse a chance to get to know you.
