Writers Write

Harlan Ellison was known for his opinion that writers write. And he proved this time and again by writing at parties and in bookstore windows, just to name two frequent out of the norm places.

For Ellison, the circumstances of a writer’s life does not matter. Writers will write no matter what is going on in their lives.

Personally, I agree with Ellison. And therefore I find the writing habits of writers, especially those of successful writers, to be a most interesting study. And an instructive one as well.

Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope is my mentor when it comes to writing. He was a living example of Ellison’s Dictum.

After feeling his way into the writing business through three failed novels (and Trollope did view writing as a business), he hit upon his writing model.

Trollope’s manservant would wake him at 5 AM and provide him with a cup of coffee. (The servant was paid extra for this duty.) Trollope would go to his desk and spend a half-hour reviewing what he’d written the previous day.

After his review, he set his watch on the desk and proceed to write by hand with a dip pen one 250 word page of text every 15 minutes.

At the end of 2 1/2 hours, he put his pen aside and got ready for his workday at the post office. Another 10 pages and 2500 words of his story or novel under his belt.

Of note, Trollope kept a journal recording when he failed to meet his goal and why. He would then do his best to eliminate whatever it was that got in the way of him reaching his goal. Very instructive that.

Trollope maintained his part-time writing schedule for his entire life, even after he finally left his post office employment.

His annual word production amounted to over 760,000 words. Not too shabby for a part-time writer.

Hugh B. Cave

Hugh Cave began his writing career at the beginning of the 1930s. During that decade he sold 800 stories to pulp magazines. Which comes to 6 or 7 stories every month. And most of the stories were in the novelette word range.

That’s one heck of a lot of words.

Cave slowed down in the 1940s when he switched to writing for the higher paying slick magazines. During the 40s, he “only” sold around 350 stories. He might have written more, but he did take time off to fight a war.

Writers do indeed write.

The King of the Pulps

H. Bedford-Jones “…considered writing his profession in life, a means to be financially independent…” (King of the Pulps: The Life & Times of H. Bedford-Jones by Peter Ruber, Darrell C. Richardson, Victor A. Berch, p. 53)

To that end, in his 40 year career, Bedford-Jones wrote some 25 million words. An average of 625,000 words per year. 

Although his output was undoubtedly greater in the first two-thirds of his career, as ill health slowed down his writing greatly in the last years of his life.

Bedford-Jones kept four typewriters busy — each with a different story.

If he reached an impasse in the story he was working on (he was a pantser and made it up as he went along), he simply slid over to the next typewriter and worked on that story.

HB-J believed writers write. No time for writers block.

The Perry Mason Man

Erle Stanley Gardner, a good friend of H. Bedford-Jones, while a partner in a law firm, wrote 100,000 words a month and endured a 90% rejection rate in order to learn the craft of writing.

But Gardner persevered through the rejections until Perry Mason made him wealthy. The rejection slips were worth it.

Writers Write

I can go on, but I think you get the point. And I haven’t even touched upon the writers working today who turn out a prodigious amount of words in order to make a buck.

Ellison was right: writers write. They do so because they have to. They are compelled to do so by a force within their beings. I know, because it is true for me.

As a reader, I’m glad writers write. Very glad. Because I am assured of an endless supply of other lives and other worlds and other experiences that I may make my own.

I am grateful for writers who write and wish for them very long careers.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

CW Hawes is a playwright; award-winning poet; and a fictioneer, with two bestselling novels. He’s also an armchair philosopher, political theorist, social commentator, and traveler. He loves a good cup of tea and agrees that everything’s better with pizza.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider buying me a cup of tea. Thanks! PayPal.me/CWHawes 

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On the Shortness of Life

A little over a week ago, I learned of the death of a fellow indie author. I did not know Laila Doncaster, except in passing. We exchanged a few words now and then on Twitter, occasionally retweeted each other’s tweets, and that was that.

Her first book of a projected series was published on May 1st. Her bio on Amazon speaks of looking forward to an early retirement. And now she’s dead.

I am saddened. Very much so. A person looking forward to the future, an exciting future, and now there is no future. She’s gone.

Every now and again someone will chasten me for my attitude towards my writing. The sense of intense urgency I have to put pen to paper.

I am driven to produce as much as I can, as fast as I can, and get as many copies of my books into as many hands as I can.

I’m told I shouldn’t feel so driven. I’m told I shouldn’t be looking over my shoulder for the Grim Reaper, while my pen is scratching out page after page of words.

All I can say in response to these well-meaning folk is to quote Seneca: “The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

Or to paraphrase: I might die tonight — I need to write today. After all, only I can write my books; and I have many score begging to be written down.

Seneca’s essay, On the Shortness of Life, needs to be required reading. It is the antidote to the carelessness with which most of us approach life and live life — which is the most non-renewable of resources.

I’m 67 years old, and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I’ve wasted most of the time given to me in this thing we call life.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. However, it wasn’t until I was 37 that I actually, in all seriousness, began to act on my desire instead of just dabble. And it was another 11 years before I began to see the fruit of that action.

According to the actuarial tables, I have another 10 years to live. That’s not a lot of time. And anything can happen between now and then to shorten those 10 years.

Seneca wrote:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

There’s some comfort in that advice, yet how many of us know how to use our time and not waste it? I confess I’m still struggling with that one. But here, too, Seneca has some advice for us:

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

In other words, it is unproductive busyness, unproductive worry and anxiety, unproductive lack of focus, unproductive preoccupation with things that don’t matter that rob us of the one thing that does matter — irreplaceable time.

It is the life lived deliberately that is the fruitful life. It is the focused life that is the productive life. As Rainer Maria Rilke advised the young poet: once you’ve decided you must write, then you must structure your life so that nothing gets in the way of writing. Harlan Ellison put it more cryptically: “Writers write.”

I might beat the actuarial odds. My mom was 80 when she died. My dad is 87. His mother died in her 90s, although the last few years she was debilitated by a stroke, and his father died a month shy of his 103 birthday. But I can’t bank on it. Which means I have to write today.

As Seneca noted:

…the man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man, who is already full and satisfied, food which he does not want but can hold.

Living deliberately is the key. And when we do, life — no matter how long or short — is time enough to accomplish great things.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy and productive living!

Anthony Trollope on Speed Writing

At every turn, indie writers are encouraged and urged and pressured to write faster. Quality seems to be a second thought. Just as long as thousands of words are written every day, the indie writer is told that he or she is on the first step to success.

Books abound telling us how to write faster. The following books appeared on the first page of an Amazon search: 2K to 10K, Fast Fiction, Write Fast, 5000 Words Per Hour. And of course the authors of these books are making money hand over fist by telling us how to write faster. But none of the authors of those books are in the same league as Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Stephen King, Sandra Brown or Dean Koontz. Generally speaking the writers of how-to books don’t make their living by writing fiction. They make their money telling wannabe writers how to write. And that should be a warning to us all.

There is no secret to writing fast. To put it bluntly, all one needs to do is to park one’s butt in a chair for a set amount of time, cut the distractions, and write. As Australian science fiction and fantasy writer Patty Jansen has said, 1000 finished words each day will produce at least four novels per year. At the end of three years a writer could have four three-book series for sale. That is a solid step in the direction of writing for a living.

Four weeks ago I mentioned Anthony Trollope’s method for producing three-quarters of a million words per year. In his own day, the Victorian novelist was known as The Writing Machine. In an era when artists were supposed to work by inspiration, Trollope quite baldly and boldly showed that successful artists work by perspiration. Let’s expand a bit on Trollope’s method.

Anthony Trollope viewed writing just like any other business. To be successful, one had to have goals and then set up a plan to meet those goals.

In several different chapters of his Autobiography, Trollope gives us a window into his working life as a successful author. I recommend that every writer read Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography. It’s available for free at Project Gutenberg.

Goals

Trollope’s overall goal was to be a successful author, which by his definition meant he had to earn a livable wage from writing.

The first step in achieving that goal was to write books. For each novel, Trollope set a date for the novel to be completed and submitted to a publisher.

To hold himself accountable, he kept a writing diary and recorded his progress in it. In that way he didn’t have to guess if he was making progress towards his goal. He knew how much he had written every day. He also knew if he was slacking off. The diary was his production manager.

By setting a goal, Trollope had made a commitment. We all know the benefit of setting goals. We also know the benefit of being held accountable to reach those goals. Trollope held himself accountable by means of his writing diary and his desire to earn a livable wage from his writing.

In the end, we are the ones who are responsible for our own success.

Write Every Morning

To achieve his greater goal, Anthony Trollope set smaller goals. Goals that could be achieved every day, and thereby be an encouragement to him.

He set aside three hours every morning as his writing time. This was a daily goal. 

He got up at 5:30 AM, spent the first half-hour reviewing the previous day’s production, then wrote for the remaining 2 1/2 hours. Afterwards, he dressed, ate breakfast, and went to his day job at the post office.

Why write in the morning? Why not in the evening? Trollope doesn’t specifically tell us. However, he was a very busy man. He had a family and a full-time job. He was a social person and, after a day at the post office, he’d go to the club, visit with friends, play whist, and two or more times a week he’d go fox hunting.

Practically speaking, that only left mornings in which to write — and early mornings at that.

Psychologically, though, writing first thing in the morning says something else. It says we value it above everything else in our day. It’s so valuable that we make sure we get it done before we do anything else. Even eating breakfast. Whether Trollope realized it or not he was telling himself that writing was the most important thing in his life.

Lawrence Block noted he was fresher first thing in the morning. The issues of the day hadn’t filled up his mind yet. So in addition to the psychological value, writing first thing in the morning means we get to start with a clean slate — and thereby hopefully produce our best work.

Write To The Clock

It’s one thing to get up at 5:30 AM to write and it’s another thing entirely to produce something in the three hours you’ve set aside to write.

Trollope left nothing to chance. To sit and stare at the wall or out the window, waiting for inspiration to strike, was not the Trollope way. He was a busy man. He had to make the most of his time. And make the most of it, he did.

After reviewing the previous day’s work, Trollope took out his watch and set it on the table. He took out a sheet of paper, dipped his steel dip pen into the ink pot, and commenced writing.

Writing 250 words per page, he turned out one page of his novel every 15 minutes. One thousand words per hour. Two thousand five hundred words, or 10 manuscript pages, by the time his morning writing session was over.

By setting both a daily goal and an hourly goal, Trollope could gauge his progress. And we all know how exhilarating even small successes can be.

By writing to the clock, Trollope produced 47 novels, 17 works of nonfiction, 2 plays, 44 short stories, in addition to numerous articles, lectures, and letters. And all that in the span of 35 years, from 1847 (when his first novel was published) to December 1882 (when he died).

Summary

How did Anthony Trollope produce a full-time writer’s output only writing part-time?

He made efficient use of his time. In a nutshell, this is his method:

• Write at a set time every day.
• Write for a set amount of time every day.
• Write a set amount of words in that time every day.
• Set a deadline for the work to be completed.
• Keep a diary of your progress to inspire you or chastise you.

Two thousand five hundred words each day will give you 912,500 words a year. That’s seven 120,000 novels. Or eleven 80,000 word novels. Or eighteen 50,000 word novels.

Honestly, does anyone need to produce more than that in one year?

As always, comments are welcome! And until next time, happy reading (and writing)!

Writing Fast: To Go Where Few Of Today’s Writers Have Gone Before

If you are a writer, I’m going to save you at least a buck today. A buck might not be much, but save enough of them and you can retire.

The other day I ran across a podcast interviewing Rachel Aaron, “Miss 10K Words A Day”. After reading through the transcript of the interview I decided to check out her blog. I found the original post from 2011 in which she outlined her system for writing 10,000 words a day. After reading it, I came away singularly unimpressed. There was nothing new there. Which is so often the case with writing advice. As the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote, “There is nothing new under the sun”.

Now my intention is not to put down Ms Aaron. After all she’s radically increased her word count per day — and tossed onto the rubbish heap the myth that fast writing is bad writing. And I say, Good for her! But what’s apparent to me is that she’s young and has little knowledge of the fact high word counts for writers used to be very much the norm. They had to be. Those writers of the pulp era wrote for a living. Every word they wrote was money in their pocket. No words on the page, no money. It was that simple.

Ms Aaron also writes for a living and she too has discovered fast writing is one of the keys to making a livable wage from the writing of fiction. But fast writing is nothing new, although I get the impression she seems to think so.

Nevertheless, she’s come up with a system, a good system by the way, and is willing to sell it to you for 99¢. Which is very generous on her part. Some writing gurus charge a whole lot more for a whole lot less.

But everything she has to say can be gotten for FREE on the Internet. Starting with her own blog post in 2011.

Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock, that prodigious writer of science fiction and fantasy, used to write novels in three days. Karen Woodward outlines how he did it in a blog post from 2014. And you can find another article at wetasphalt.com.

The Guardian, in 2010, presented Moorcock’s “Ten Rules For Writers”. Wonderful advice from a master.

The articles above are all free, just click on the links, and if you follow the advice you will increase your daily word count substantially.

Lester Dent

But Moorcock didn’t come up with his method all by himself. He got it from Lester Dent, a pulp era writer with a fantastic output. Dent was the creator of Doc Savage. If you’ve never read Doc Savage, you are missing out on a classic.

Karen Woodward has a fabulous series of blog posts on Lester Dent’s method of fast writing. The first one is “Lester Dent’s Short Story Master Formula”. The links to the other four articles are at the bottom of the initial post. And note, the formula works equally well for novels. A shorter version of Dent’s formula can be found at Dirty 30s! on paper-dragon.com. And once again, this information is all free!

Anthony Trollope

But fast writing didn’t originate during the pulp fiction era either. It began much earlier. Alexandre Dumas (1802 - 1870) made frequent use of assistants and collaborators to increase his production. Which is, of course, a time honored method of doing so. James Patterson does it today.

One of my favorite authors, Anthony Trollope (1815 - 1882), in a writing career that spanned 37 years, produced 35 standalone novels, two 6-novel series, 42 short stories, 2 plays, 18 works of non-fiction, and 3 articles, as well as keeping up a voluminous correspondence. Without the help of assistants or collaborators. How did he do it? Quite simple, really.

For most of his writing career, Trollope worked a full-time job at the post office. Which meant he had to make the most of his time. He’d get up 2 1/2 hours before he had to leave for his day job in order to have time to write. The first half-hour he reviewed what he wrote the previous day. For the next two hours, he wrote.

He wrote by the clock. Literally. There was a clock on his desk. He wrote, by hand, with a dip pen, 250 words every 15 minutes. Or 2000 words in those two hours. He did that every day.

If during the two hours he completed the novel he was working on, he took out a fresh sheet of paper and began the next one. What that tells me is he had the story idea already in his head or written down somewhere. The key is he didn’t have to think about it. It was already there.

Trollope also kept a journal in which he recorded his daily word count. The purpose was to catch himself if he started slacking off.

Let’s summarize Trollope’s method:

1. Have the storyline in your head, at the very least. Jot a few notes, if you need to. Moorcock and Dent did the same thing by writing in fictional universes they’d already created in detail. They didn’t have to figure out stuff on the fly.
2. Set aside a regular time and place to write EVERY DAY. This is one of the secrets Rachel Aaron discovered and used to increase her word count.
3. Review the previous day’s work to prime the pump and get the juices flowing. This is akin to warming up exercises before a person goes jogging.
4. Don’t dawdle. Write quickly and get the words down. If you need notes or an outline in order to do so, then take a few minutes to jot them down. Writers often get bogged down when they have to spend time thinking about what they are going to write instead of writing it. Another secret Ms Aaron discovered.
5. Record your progress. That way, if you find you are falling behind, you can easily pinpoint why and correct the problem. This is another one of the secrets Ms Aaron discovered, which I am passing along to you.

There you have it, Anthony Trollope’s secret to speedy writing. The granddaddy of speedy writers. You also now know Michael Moorcock’s method, Lester Dent’s method, and Rachel Aaron’s method of speedy writing. And all for FREE! You’ve just saved yourself a buck.

The secret to fast writing is no secret. Writers have been writing quickly for many, many decades. As Dean Wesley Smith has pointed out, it is the traditional publishing world and academia that has made us think fast writing equals hack writing. I am very glad Rachel Aaron has discovered the secret to fast writing and is popularizing it. But it has never been a secret. It’s just been demonized by those who didn’t and don’t write for a living.

So get out your pencil, pen, or keyboard and start writing. You’ve nothing to lose but those doggone low word counts.

As always, comments are welcome. Until next time, happy reading! And happy fast writing!