How Writers' Work

When I first started taking writing classes after college, I became a nervous wreck. The classes themselves triggered my agitation. Inevitably, class discussions would eventually come around to how writers write, in very practical sense: how many hours a day, in the morning or the evening, how many words per day, how many pages per day, do you have to write every day, how much rewriting do you do, when do you rewrite: as you go along or after you finish a draft, etc. I began to worry that perhaps I was doing something wrong.

These discussion undermined my confidence as a writer, because I did things differently than almost everyone. Surely, I was doing it wrong! But I started to pay closer attention to what the other students were saying, and it eventually dawned on me that everyone wrote differently than everyone else.

Since then, I’ve learned that there is no formula, and there are no rules.

Here are some of the “rules” that people swore by, and that you’ve probably heard as well, whether from a writing instructor, a book about writing, or other writers:

You have to write every day. You have to write at least 3 hours each day.

Never count your words; it’s about quality, not quantity.

Write in the morning when you are fresh.

Write what you know.

You’ll have to write many, many “drafts” of a manuscript before you have something half-way decent.

Like my Pittsburgh-Irish grandma used to say: hogwash!

As a writer, you have to do what works for you. We all live in the real world where money needs to be made, dishes need to be washed, and errands need to be run. Which means what works for one writer may not work for you. Not only are life situation different, but writer’s themselves are different. So don’t worry about how other writers work. You’ve got enough to worry about just sitting down and writing at all without concerning yourself with adhering to arbitrary rules.

With that said, here’s how I work:

I don’t write every day because I don’t have time. I carve out niches of time for writing two to four times a week, a few hours at a time. I’d love to be able to write every day, but I can’t. That doesn’t mean I won’t write at all.

Sometimes, if I have the time, I will write every day for a week or two. Other times, I won’t write for a month or two.

I used to write in the morning, but now I mostly write in the evening. The only advantage I saw to writing in the morning is that it was like exercise: I would feel energized all day long. But I never noticed a difference in the quality of the writing based on the time of day I wrote it.

I can only write for two, at most three, hours at a time. I can’t imagine sitting there for eight hours writing. It is extremely draining.

I write a lot of words at one sitting, 1000 – 2000 words in those two or three hours.

I rewrite constantly, although I don’t really know what “rewriting” means. Sometimes I delete whole paragraphs, whole scenes, and start fresh, but mostly it’s a process of tweaking: find a better word, a better phrase, rearrange a paragraph, add something new, delete something that doesn’t work.

My constant rewriting means that I don’t have distinct “drafts”, like some writers talk about. When a writer says she rewrote her novel 50 times before it was finally published, I have no idea what she is talking about. I doubt that she does, either.

Oh, and I often write about what I don't know, but at the same time, always about what I strive to know: people.