Anthony Trollope used to get up everyday at 3 in the morning and write for a few hours before going to work at the post office. He invented the mail box in fact. He was an amazingly disciplined and gifted writer. He was also a nincompoop. He probably had a wife who did all the cooking and cleaning and child-rearing and all he had to do was sit at his desk waiting for the muse to strike, while the wife bustled about making his morning porridge and tea, spooned it into his mouth, and ironed his shirts for him.
He did say one sensible thing and that is that the number one rule of writing is to “apply the seat of ones trousers to the seat of ones chair.â€Â
I lead workshops for aspiring writers aged 9-12 and one of my themes is writing techniques, and the first rule is B.I.C. or the Notorious B.I.C. (none of them get the hip reference to the famous, dead rapper because theyre all too young) but they do understand the rule- Butt in Chair, which I stole from Mr. Trollope and from Jane Yolen who gave it the cooler moniker. Workshops are great because they get me thinking about writing and how I write and why I write and why I love words so much, and how hard and unbelievably grueling it can be to tap out 2000 words a day. And they remind me of certain weaknesses I have, like having to do the dishes before I sit down in front of my computer every day to write my 5 pages or whatever goal Ive set for myself depending on whether Im at the beginning stages of a book or whether Im on firm deadline- like I am at the moment. The beds have to be made too. I cannot concentrate if I know that upstairs there are duvets lying askew or dirty dishes in the sink or that my myspace mail has not been answered. So in comparison to Mr. Trollope you could say that I am lazy, but in fact, to paraphrase another writer who I admire so much more, Susan Cooper, Im just preparing myself. She says:
There has to be a lot of slightly magical stuff before I write: I have to read what I wrote before; I have to walk around. Youre really doing these things in order to put yourself into a kind of trance state.
Another fave Philip Pullman says:
I sit and groan and scratch my head and tap my pencil on my chair.
Brian Jacques:
I do write every day but not to the destruction of everything.
And lastly Tamora Pierce:
When I get stuck, Ill get up and read a bit. If Im really having a hard time, Ill go run errands and set a time on the clock to put the butt back in the chair.
So I figure, thats really what Im doing. I might look as if Im fussing around the house or staring off into the distance not thinking about anything but Im day-dreaming, Im wool-gathering, Im getting myself in the zone. Im always thinking about writing in general and usually about writing in specific, and now that I have a five month old in the mix, I tend to do more writing in frantic spurts of inspiration, and then a couple of hours of good solid, word fixing, plot structuring and problem solving while she sleeps. Whatever works is whatever works at that particular moment.
Now, I really have to get back to the book…….
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