Can’t Get Your Novel Moving? Try “Lower Standards”

“Who the hell has the time to write a novel?”

That’s what a musician friend remarked to me, and I had to admit, he had a point.

Talk about a long march! My last novel took 7 years from first glimmer to publication.

It’s lonely work. Your friends and family don’t understand what your’re doing or why, and unless you have a publishing contract in hand, and an editor watching the calendar, no one in the universe, except you, will give a rat’s netherworld if you finish it or not. Not even God.

But enough handwringing. It’s a monumental job, but novels get written all the time. The question is: how to scale a monumental labor down to everyday proportions.

Recently, a friend’s blog pointed me to “Writing in the Age of Distraction.” by the prolific Cory Doctorow, who, by his own count, produces “at least a book per year, half-a-dozen columns a month, ten or more blog posts a day, plus assorted novellas and stories and speeches.”

How does he do it? No secrets, just the simplest advice you could imagine. With apologies to Doctorow, I’ll summarize:

Work in modest sprints, short but regular. Limit expectations: aim for a comfortably undersized daily word count, or if you work by the clock, commit to a short time period and stop when it’s over, even if you’re in the midst of a sentence (something you should welcome, in fact, since “rough edges” allow you to pick up the next day in mid-momentum. Don’t procrastinate with “vital” research, or incoming communications that “must” be answered.

For me and my wife, the piece that stuck was: “a short, regular schedule.” To that we’ve added another element, one that is right for us, namely: “first thing in the morning.”

That means exactly what it says: work first. Not after checking email, not lingering over breakfast and the New York Times, but FIRST.

So simple, but such reluctance to peel back expectations. Why? I suppose we’re just too awed by legends of literary iron men and women chained to their desks until they’ve put in a 12-hour day, far too daunting for most of us.

And yet a single hour seems…well, embarrassingly puny.

Maybe it is, but I’m not embarrassed, not at all. So far, I’m to busy watching my novel grow again. Stay tuned.