CN Central: An hour a day, or a week-long blitz?

Hi Anna. I work full-time also. My routine is to get up at 4 o’clock every morning and write for two to three hours before heading off to my day job. Fortunately, I am a morning person, so this isn’t a problem, and I can usually get about a thousand words done each day. At the weekends, I try to double this to maybe 2000 to 2500 words each day on Saturday and Sunday. Of course, it does mean I have to be in bed and asleep by 10 o’clock each night.

Wow – that’s very disciplined – just as well you are a morning person! It must be really nice to go to your day job and feel like you have already achieved something for the day. Have you always worked like this on your writing or has your routine evolved over the years?

When I first got published back in ‘97 and started writing full time, I was looking forward to sleeping in every morning. However, I found that if I started writing anytime after 8 or 9 in the morning, I couldn’t get anything done. Really weird – some psychological quirk, I suppose. So even when I was a full time freelancer, I still had to get up at an ungodly hour every day. C’est la vie…

I somehow managed to write my novel alongside my final year at University, I find the way I do it is in spurts of long writing sessions. I used to use it as a distraction from essays and my dissertation because I saw it as a productive activity. It might take about an hour to get into one of these spurts, but then I just wouldn’t stop. I need to know I’ve got plenty of time before I can set about writing, an hour here or there is no good for me. So, if I don’t have the time then I make the time by vowing not to go to bed until I’ve finished this session. Writing late into the night is the way I like to do it, my mind is rarely functioning properly until 10am at the earliest! The longest time on the novel wasn’t the inital write through for me, it was the editing side, and I find that to be a lot easier to do in small, one hour slots, mostly because I find it a lot more boring!

Yes – I guess that there are different stages of a novel that might favour alocating different amounts of time. I thnk Uni life does lend itself quite well to writing in spurts as you don’t always have a full day’s work (i.e. where you have to be sitting in an office not falling asleep at your desk!) following a late night writing. I imagine you got through a lot of coffee!