A successful short story writer once explained that she wrote a new short story every morning and edited a draft of an older story in the afternoon. This sounded like an admirably disciplined approach, and I’ve remembered this part of her talk for almost forty years. Recently an agent talked about his strategy for getting his clients to a six-figure salary. His advice was simple: writers should write three hours a day and work on marketing three hours a day. Like many of the other writers on the zoom program, I wondered if this was sustainable.
When I begin a new novel, I set a word quota for the day and usually reach it. My basic goal is 1,500 words, but the day’s results may range from 800 to 2500 words. For this year’s NaNoWriMo I logged in 48k words over the month (and after taking off most weekends). But I did not always write for three hours. I compose by scene, any one of which can be long or short but always moves me forward as I want, allowing for surprises, digressions, corrections and additions to earlier scenes. But the question of time doesn’t arise.
With the idea of time nagging at me, I decided to try a week of writing for three hours each morning. Because of other commitments, I couldn’t commit to three hours of marketing in the afternoon, and will set that aside for another time. (Any excuse will do to get out of three hours of marketing.)
I began my three-hour commitment on Monday morning. How am I doing? So far I’m four for four—four short stories written over four mornings, spending three hours each morning doing nothing but writing fiction.
What have I learned? The time pressure changed my process. Sunday evening I began wondering what I’d write the next day since I’m not working on a novel (that would have been easy). In a file of short story ideas I found one that had been rattling around in my head without any sense of urgency. But once I knew I’d be writing soon the story began to feel warm, taking shape. At ten in the morning I was on my way, and at one o’clock, I was done, with a three-thousand word story. I set it aside to marinade, as it were, for revising at a later date.
On Monday evening I once again wondered what I would write in the morning. Would my discipline dry up? I had a vague idea and held onto that through the evening. In the morning I went to work and after three hours had another three-thousand word story by one o’clock. Wednesday and today, Thursday, went the same with an idea in the previous evening and a three-hour sprint in the morning. Today my story is only twenty-five hundred words so I’m writing this blog to fill out the time.
The difference between this challenge and my regular approach to short stories is time. I don’t usually put myself under pressure to develop a story on a certain day at a certain hour. I prefer to take the time to think about it, let it take shape, and write it when I feel ready. The challenge has made me much more prolific, at least as far as short fiction is concerned, and I now have four stories to polish and send out. By tomorrow lunchtime I may have a fifth. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to try for a second week. I’ll let you know.
