How I Work

For me there are two distinct stages to the task of writing a book. The first involves developing the story in my mind. People get their inspiration in different ways. So I can only talk about what this is like for me. Sometimes I find that a huge chunk of the story arrives in my head almost by itself. Other times I get only a tiny clue, a plotline or a character, and then I have to really work at tracking the rest of the story down, as if it is a quarry I am hunting through uncharted territory. I have to be open to all kinds of possibilities at this stage, being prepared to change things dramatically if I suddenly see a better direction for the narrative.

So that’s the first part – devising the story. I used to spend much less time on this than I do now, because I couldn’t wait to get writing. I’d start hammering away at the keyboard before I had really finished thinking, hoping I could work out the rest of the story as I went along. Now, however, I have learned to slow down and think it all through properly before starting to write. That wayI produce much better novels. It may sound like a kill-joy approach but there are still plenty of discoveries to be made even when you think you know the plot backwards.

The second part, the actual writing, is much less random. I sit down at my desk five days a week and write from nine to five with an hour off for lunch. I try to write a thousand words a day to start with, and two thousand words a day when I get going.

Of course I don’t keep all the words I write. It’s a pity, because if I did, I would write my novels much more quickly. But, as any writer knows, you have to throw away a lot of work. So I spend the first part of every morning going through what I wrote the previous day and cutting lots of it out. However, I never actually delete any text completely from my computer. There is always a file into which I put all the cuts, cross-referencing them to the manuscript just in case I change my mind.

Setting a daily word-limit may seem an arbitrary way to proceed but it’s a practice followed by a great many writers. I’ve been told that Graham Greene invariably stopped at one thousand words even if he was in the middle of a sentence. This may be a myth but I could easily believe it.

This disciplined approach began when I wrote my first novel. As I said in my previous post, I was working full time, we had a child who didn’t sleep very much. So I made a rule that I would work for one hour a night, and stuck to it – even if I spent the entire hour just staring at a blank piece of paper. (It was paper in those days. I didn’t get a computer until my second book.)

I found that making myself work whether I wanted to or not and even if what I produced seemed like total garbage, helped my motivation. If you allow yourself to make excuses not to write once, it gets easier to do it twice. Pretty soon you find that you’re losing touch with your manuscript completely.

Word limits can also help you see the novel as a finite thing. Otherwise it can seem like a huge, never-ending task that has taken over your life. Let’s say a novel is sixty thousand words long. Now ask yourself how many significant episodes there are in the plot. Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that there are twenty. What’s sixty thousand divided by twenty? Three thousand. So all you have to do is write twenty chapters each of about three thousand words and you will have your novel.

Of course not everyone likes to think of it like this because it leaves out all the fun you can have along the way – those moments when your characters start to come to life, when you think of clever little plot twists, or when you write a passage that you feel is the best thing you have ever produced. I don’t even like to think of it like this myself all the time. Nevertheless it helps every now and again to remind yourself that writing a novel is just a matter of mathematics.