The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write, and keep on writing.”
Ken MacLeod
“Nothing will work unless you do.”
Maya Angelou
William Styron called writing “my tortoise-like art” and pursued a strict writing pattern: He rose at 12, then had a leisurely lunch or brunch until 2, when he took a long walk with his dogs and mentally organized his afternoon bout of writing. Once his walk was over, he’d disappear into a barn where he’d coax a No. 2 pencil across yellow legal paper, each sentence painfully polished until he went onto the next. At 7:30 in the evening he’d emerge with “my painful 600 words,” which he played with over a drink and then gave to his wife to type. His daily output? About two and a half pages.
Few of us have the luxury of rising at noon, plying our craft in a writing barn, or passing our pages onto a wife to type. But Styron’s story here isn’t about the perks of being a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, it’s about the benefits of establishing a writing regimen.
Aspiring writers tend to obsess about “the writing process,” but many quickly discover that there’s no one-size-fits-all pattern to cling to. Styron wrote in the late afternoon, Eudora Welty was at her desk from 9 to 12 in the morning, Michael Chabon is a committed night owl. Roald Dahl wrote in two-hour sessions, working from 10 to 12 and then knocking off for a few hours and picking up his pencil again from 4 to 6. William Styron wrote 650 words on a good day; Stephen King doesn’t get quit until he’s written 2500 words. Styron wasn’t a reviser; Nabokov once said his pencils outlasted his erasers because he rewrote so much.
The message? At its heart, finding your own writing process isn’t about how or when you write, it’s about discovering a writing pattern that works for you — that plays to your strengths and circumstances — and then pursuing it consistently. Writers like Styron, Welty, Hemingway, King each learned the secret to productivity: develop a personal game plan for tackling the page and then stick with it through thick and thin. Something to ponder and apply as we all write on!
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