October 2nd, 2007
Graham Greene’s writing MO
Today is the birthday of Graham Greene and, according to the Writer’s Almanac entry for October 2nd, Greene had a simple, devastatingly routine way of working. Writing for a precise window of time every day seems to have been helped him clock up an impressive word count, and ultimately write as many books as he did. It must work; if I had a chapter for every writer who’s told me that “if you write 500 words a day, you’ll have a first draft in six months”… well I’d have the damn first draft.
“Graham Greene realized early in his writing career that if he wrote just 500 words a day, he would have written several million words in just a few decades. So he developed a routine of writing for exactly two hours every day, and he was so strict about stopping after exactly two hours that he often stopped writing in the middle of a sentence. And at that pace, he managed to publish 26 novels, as well as numerous short stories, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and travel books. He said, “We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.”
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:47 am
Ahh, I do hate people who are so organised. 500 or 1000 words a day makes it easy. Where’s the challenge when you don’t leave everything till the last minute and you’re not pumping out coffee-powered words for 12 hours a day?
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:05 am
Ah yes, how goes the novel? Are you getting close to caffeine-induced heart attacks yet?
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:28 am
No, it’s all going swimmingly. First draft completed, notes from editor have been assembled and taken on board. Now it’s going over it again and improving the bits that need to be improved, fleshing out characters more and tightening everything up.
It’s promising to be the best book I’ve ever written.
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:16 pm
You should, like, start a writer’s club, or something.
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Oh god, I forgot all about that! I’m too excited about Triv night and that other mysterious project we chatted about pre-Feist.
See, how flaky I am?
October 3rd, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Hmm, yes, must do some swotting for that. And send Triv email reminder. Huzzah!