Hours or pages?

Even if you're really cooking on your work, you have to stop sometime. I haven't met anyone who can consistently write all day, or write, say, ten pages in a day. At some point, even when you are on a tear, the writing can go from excellent to moribund in an instant. The worst part is, you often can't tell when the transition takes place. When I was writing Mailman, my fourth novel (and the one I had the most fun writing), I would sometimes exceed my allotment, in the excitement of the moment. When it came time to pare down the monstrous thing I'd made, I could tell precisely where I went off the rails each day--it was as clear as cracks in the sidewalk.

Many writers don't have the luxury of being able to maintain a consistent schedule. But when I'm working on any kind of extended piece, especially a novel, I do my best to set aside the same time each day for writing. I'm a morning person--I do almost all my writing these days between 8am and 11am on the sofa, in my pajamas, with my HP laptop (running Ubuntu Jaunty of course) on a little lapdesk that Rhian had before we met, the underside of which is stuffed with little styrofoam pellets to create a comfortable contour for your legs. But it isn't the hours that form the parameters of my working day--it's the pages. I have to write four pages, period. If it's mostly dialogue, or short paragraphs, I finish quickly. If it's complex or sustained narrative, it takes longer. If I'm still excited after four, I might continue for one more, but I learned my lesson with Mailman. More likely, I run out of steam after two, and have to push myself. But the forced writing is usually better than the overrun writing. This is the Graham Greene method: quantity, not time.

Other writers go by the clock. They will write for a set number of minutes or hours. When Rhian was working on getting her chops back after a long break, she wrote ten minutes a day for a couple of weeks, no more. Eventually she was ready to expand. (I dunno how long she's going these days...she is very secretive about her writing habits). I understand the time-limit method, but my mind doesn't work that way--I have an amount of work I can do in a day, and it doesn't matter how long it takes. Four pages is, I've discovered, the amount of half-decent writing I can do, and I am not eager to mess with the formula.

What's your method, hours or pages? Or are you completely haphazard? And if so, how's that working out for ya?

Let's Get Lost

One of the reasons I love writing novels (as opposed to writing short stories, which I merely like) is that there's so much room to spread out. You can walk into a novel, take off your hat and gloves and coat and leave them lying around on the furniture. You can spill food on the floor and leave it there. You can just make yourself a big mess and live in it for a couple of years.

I'm a tidy person, by nature: I like to keep my desk clean and the floor free of obstructions. I like to plan out tasks and execute them on schedule. But (as I've posted here before), the older I get, the less I like to plan out a novel. Short stories lend themselves better to my fastidious side; I find that they need to be almost perfect right off the bat, or I can't make them work. They have to be some kind of miraculous magic trick, or feat of physical dexterity, like sinking a three-pointer or making a perfect omelette.

A novel, though: you can stumble upon something and just go at it like a madman for a couple of days. In the novel I'm trying to write (I can't call it "my book" until I hit 75 pages or so; anything less, and it's just hubris), I recently found myself describing a character's job at great length--a good page and a half's worth. It doesn't really have anything to do with anything, and who knows if it will stick. But wow, what a blast. It's the most fun I've had writing in months. This is what it's all about--getting up in the morning and having no idea what you're going to be doing, then ending up describing the expression on a man's face as he peers out of a passing pickup truck, or the way an overweight hotel manager pushes himself up out of a swivelchair, or the way a CEO with a terminally ill child gossips about her employees.

The problem of course is confidence: confidence that any of it is worth it. If you have some distant goal in mind, maybe you can convince yourself that everything is relevant, even when you know it isn't. But without the goal, the excursions into the mess of the unknown just feel like so much pointless nonsense.

When it's on, though, it feels great. Getting lost, wandering around, finding your way back. Here's hoping it's on more often than not, for you, in 2009.