writing

I spent the day writing.

You know, we’ve all heard about the authors who are able to whip out a complete manuscript in three weeks.  What I want to know is, how do they do it?  I mean, forget about writing anything good, or comprehensible, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.  What I want to know is how do they physically manage to type out all those words in such a short space of time.  I have been at my desk for eight hours, minus a one hour break, and I would consider today, a pretty successful writing day, as far as my writing days go.  It was slow, but I wrote 4 double spaced pages, which is one more than my required daily quota.

An adult fiction manuscript is a minimum of 200 pages.  That is the bare minimum, most are longer.  So, how do they do it?!

Don and I watched a biography of a well-known author and he would lock himself in a hotel room, and in three weeks would emerge with a completed manuscript in hand.  He was a multi New York Times bestseller.  Once he would finish a manuscript that would be it.  He wouldn’t rewrite.  It was done.  Finished. 

How could his fingers type out that many words, let alone, his brain must have been mush.  And his shoulders must have been one huge knot from being hunched over his typewriter pounding out those words.  I don’t even want to contemplate what his butt must have felt like after sitting for so many hours on end? 

I’m not jealous of the books he wrote, because it seemed, watching the documentary, that the pleasure for him was in the spending of the enormous amounts of money he made.  What I am envious of, is, can you imagine if one could write, what needed to come out, but to be able to do it in such an expedient fashion that there was still hours and days and weeks of free wheeling indulgence.  Sleeping in, cooking elaborate meals and eating them.  Long uninterrupted walks where the work wasn’t calling to you. 

You have something you want to explore, you sit down and three weeks later that itch is scratched.  It would be an interesting sensation, that’s for sure.

Posted by Meg Tilly on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 in Chewing the Fat

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