On not being a famous author

I was reading somewhere recently about Simon Winchester’s account of his typical writing day. It sounded idyllic. He has a farmhouse up in the hills of Massachusetts, and a barn converted into his library/study/scriptorium. Each morning he enters the barn before dawn, spends two hours reviewing the previous day’s work, then prints it out before breakfast. Then he works from 9am till 3pm writing new material, his word counter in the top left corner counting down the target: 100,000 words in a hundred days. That’s focus.

It made me envious beyond measure, made me hate myself for not being better at this stuff, for not being Simon Winchester. There’s a purity in that kind of routine. Whereas I waste my early morning writing in blogs, or in my ‘morning pages’, which are just private drivel and won’t amount to anything. They’re therapeutic, you see. Though maybe my best therapy would be to aim to write 100,000 words in a hundred days.

Instead, what does my day consist of? Lots of coffee, and reading the paper, and desultory emails here and there, chasing ideas that have been sent out and have no response yet… then a response comes in, a rejection obviously, and much nervous energy and time gets wasted in dealing with that. It’s a day of faffing, without focus, without drive.

Advertisement

~ by grumblyman on November 28, 2008.