Speed

In her 1934 classic, Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande encourages hopeful writers to develop a daily habit of writing several pages—of anything—first thing in the morning.  I recall the same advice from Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones.

I never could get into the habit of “morning pages,” but the whole point of that was to get the wannabe writer to write at the same time, every day, without fail.  Brande says,

Within a very short time you will find that the exercise has begun to bear fruit.  The actual labor of writing no longer seems arduous or dull.  You will have begun to feel that you can get as much (far more really) from a written reverie as from one that goes on almost wordlessly in the back of your mind.  When you can wake, reach out for your pencil, and begin to write almost on impulse, you will be ready for the next step.

That next step is to write on schedule—to make daily appointments with oneself to write, and then keep them.

With these two practices firmly in place, Brande says,

Perhaps for the first time you see that if you want to write you can write, and that no life is actually so busy as to offer no opportunities if you are alert to find them.  Then, too, you should begin to think it less than miraculous that writers can bring out book after book, having found in yourself the same inexhaustible resources that issue in the work of others.  The physical mechanism of writing should have ceased to be tiring and begun to take its place as a simple activity.  Your realization of the writer’s life is probably more vivid, and nearer to the truth, than it was before—which is in itself a long stride to have taken.

So, it turns out I’m a bit lazy when it comes to establishing good habits of any sort.  I skipped the morning pages, and I also skipped the appointment-setting thing.  But I do write every day, and I have found it to be absolutely true that the process becomes less and less of a chore.  I can pick up my novel at any given time of day and go straight to work.  I can write for hours without my hand cramping up.  I almost never find myself staring at an empty page, feeling blocked.  At the end of every writing session, I take a moment to figure out what my plan is for the next session, whether it involves typing a chapter, beginning a new scene, or finishing one off.  (I almost never stop writing in the middle of a scene, especially at night; because if I do that, I can be fairly certain I will go to bed and not be able to sleep!)

Last night, I wrote 10-1/2 pages.  By hand.  Two or three months ago, an evening writing session would have yielded about 5-6 pages.  I’m writing faster and, I think, better.  And it feels so good.  I look back on my self—my days, my moods—before I was engaged on a daily basis with this work, and I don’t know how I stood it.  I didn’t know how bad I felt until I started feeling better!

Writing is hard.  But it’s easy, too.  You just have to do it.  Every day, a little bit or a lot.  Don’t let it slide.  Just do it.  Speed will come, and you will be amazed!