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I'm a slow writer – always have been and
always will be. I gasp when I hear about authors who knock off ten
or twenty thousand words in a day. On a good day, I manage about
two pages, and on an average day, one page. But do I worry? No –
because as long as I keep writing, the pages keep steadily mounting
up. Even at 650 words a day, that's still 65,000 words in a hundred
days - which is a whole Ferren-size novel. My secret is consistency
– I'm always writing, I never stop. Not for weekends, not for
holidays – only Xmas and birthdays and special events.
If I have to take a long break, it's a huge
struggle to get back into the world of the story – I'm no longer
living in it. For me, it's easier never to stop, so that I don't
have to go through the agony of re-starting! When I sit down to
write every day, I know that, no matter what mood I'm in, very soon
the world will start taking over again. It's bigger than me and
it has its own momentum! I don't worry about being inspired, I don't
have to force myself to sit down to write. I just know I'm going
to do it.
Most professional writers I've talked to say
the same. With a poem or short story, you can wait for inspiration
to come – but not with a long novel. A long novel can't depend
on the inspiration of a single day.
So I have a regular writing routine – which
is one way of avoiding my old nemesis of writer's block. I start
every morning straight after breakfast and work through till after
lunch, usually 1.30 or 2.30. It doesn't matter to me so much now,
but at first I needed a stopping time as much as a starting time.
If I wrote myself out, exhausted my imagination, then I had no excitement
to go back to next morning.
There's another part of my routine later in
the day which is maybe just me – I've never heard of anyone
else doing it, but I'll tell it anyway. After a break of a couple
of hours (doing jobs as far away from writing as possible), I spend
the later part of the afternoon 'realising' the next episode for
tomorrow. By 'realising', I mean working up atmosphere, setting,
feel, the way it's going to present – what film makers call
mise-en-scene, I think. For me, it's a sort of pre-filming in my
head (and everyone tells me my novels read like films!). The beauty
of it is that I have a night to 'sleep on it', which somehow solidifies
the scene and makes it real. When I sit down to write the next morning,
it's as though I only have to record something that actually happened!
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