Thoughts of LoWriter

Jack London said that when he was a kid he caught a really bad illness that made it so that he couldn't go outdoors or engage in physical activity. As a substitute, his schoolmasters made him write some sort of essay every morning. He credited this forced productivity for his ability to write novels later in life. he just got into the habit of writing every day.

John Cheever gets up in the morning, shaves, puts on a suit and goes into his basement and writes for eight hours, then changes into "regular" clothes to go back to his regular life. Writing is a job for him...good times.

i honestly dont like the idea of "writing as a job" but i bet i'd be a better writer if i did. i like to keep my job and my passion separate. (even though i write for my job,and i have to write passionately).

i like the bone pile idea. i wonder... if you collect enough "bones", perhaps you could have a book of just bones. that would be quite the concept. i mean, you'd still have to edit it for flow and whatnot, but it's a neat idea regardless.

yeah. that was me, if you oculdnt already guess....

I think it's less about making writing an obligation and more about making it routine. Since I haven't done a great deal of writing recently, I'll use running as a metaphor. When I wake up, I rarely feel "in the mood" to go for a run. In fact, usually I'm groggy and grumpy, but six days out of the week I haul myself to the gym and do my run, not because it's a job per se, but because I want to be fit.

If I said "well, I'll just run when I feel like it", I probably wouldn't succeed because I wouldn't feel like running very often, but if I decide that I'm going to run every morning six days a week then I probably will succeed because if I stick to my routine, I will get a good amount of excercise every day and as long as I eat right I will inevitably become fit.

In much the same way a writer working on a novel may only write when they feel like it, but many successful and prolific writers build writing into a routine so that their productivity has a much better chance of success.

Personally, when I wrote a rough draft of a novel, I was so excited to be finally finished with my shitty rough, that I haven't looked at it since. If I had built a true routine around my writing, I would go back and rewrite with the same dedication I wrote it in the first place :D

I am personally looking forward to the day when I am not working eleventy billion hours a week. When that day comes, I plan to write everyday. For an hour right away when I get home. Or hell, stay up until 1 am and do it then. Right now, it's not just a matter of not being in the mood, it's mathmatically impossible to do the number of things I need to do in order to be healthy and still work as much as I do (barring the invention of an actual time turner like they have in Harry Potter, of course.) I get more millage out of my hours than the average bear, but there still aren't enough of them.

Since I only really put up the pretence of being a writer at those artsy sort of cocktail parties I don't have anything to add from experience. However, I read somewhere that when someone asked Faulkner whether he wrote every day or only when the inspiration hit him his answer was something like "I only write when the inspiration hits, I just make certain it strikes me at 8am every morning."