I have written 30,000 words in a month - think of it - 30,000! I hope I am putting the right number of naughts: an average of a thousand words a day! For thirty days!
When I'm working on a novel, I generally do write every day, but in between those marathons, I take breaks. My brain needs time to recharge.
The fastest I've ever done a book is a 112,000-word book in about a month.
When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted.
I don't think the process of writing books is in any way sensible. It's not logical, and it's not reasonable. I do write very fast, and I just do it in a binge. Other people binge-drink; I binge-write.
When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.
I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.
If I'm on a roll, and I finish a script at 3:00, I'll start another at 3:02.
My writing regimen is not very regimented. I tend to be a binge writer, working sometimes in the morning and sometimes all night. When I get going I like to hunch over the keyboard until I feel totally played out.
I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished.
I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.
For me, I need to fully immerse myself in a script to the point where I'm literally locking myself away for weeks at a time and I just write it. So I can write twelve to fifteen hours in a day, with breaks in between, obviously, but I need to just sort of live within the world of the script.
Until now, I've been a kind of binge-writer - I'll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.
Once I start writing, I can't stop.
I binge write. I think it's because I started seriously writing by participating in National Novel Writing Month, an online-based challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.
Certain people want to binge-watch stuff, and they want 10 solid hours of whatever, not realizing that writing 10 hours of quality television is a exhausting experience. Writing an hour and a half is a warm hug compared to writing 10 hours of television.
I spill it out as fast as I can. I don't really edit. In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages. In London, 80 pages.
When I'm on a good go, I can do 12, 13 hours of writing.
I usually don't write at night, but there are times where I wake up at 3 in the morning and write all night.
Fortunately or unfortunately, NaNoWriMo requires you to write at a breakneck pace, so I got used to just pushing on through.
During my second draft pass on my last book I made 20,000 words happen in a week, which is practically supernatural for me, and it would never have been possible without three nights in a hotel in my own city.
I don't have a writer's room. I write all the shows myself. Ninety-one episodes a season, I'm sitting there at the computer writing and writing and writing because I want the voice to be authentic so that the audience is hearing from me and not other writers.
I write manically.
Some of our best episodes of 'Buffy' were written over a weekend. You can really get in touch with your creative spirit when you're at your most desperate.
