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My Say gives writers a chance to air their views about writing and the writer's life.
Contributions should ideally be 200 to 400 words in length and of general
interest. Please
email them to us. WritersServices' decision on whether or not to include
each contribution is final.
The Writing Session
By Timothy Hallinan, author of The
Fourth Watcher
- Getting there:
Write 500 words a
day, five days a week, and in ten weeks you’ll have 25,000 words. That’s a
quarter of a good-size novel. At that pace, even with the inevitable wrong
turns and backtracks, you’ll be able to turn out a revised draft of your novel
in a year.
Tuning in: Writing regularly and
at some length also keeps the world of your novel open to you. Annie
Dillard once said that writing a book is like taming a lion: the longer you
stay out of the cage, the more dangerous it is to go back in. Working
regularly keeps that lion under control.
Opening up: Regular writing also
brings the world of your book into your non-writing life — and vice-versa.
You’ll find yourself thinking about the book even when you’re not writing.
Everything you see or hear will have some sort of relationship to your story.
You’ll find yourself asking, "Is this material or not?" "Is this what Judith
would say in that scene?" Driving down the street, doing dishes, taking a
shower (especially
taking a shower) — you’ll have inspirations.
Turning on the sorter: There’s a
little node in your brain called the
reticular activating system. It’s a sorter:
it flips through the hundreds of thousands of things you see, hear, read, and
think every day, and it says, This is
important or
This is junk. And it calls the
important things to your attention. The reticular activiting system is why you
can hear your name spoken across a noisy room, or why, once you’ve decided to
buy a certain car, you suddenly see billboards and commercials for that car
everywhere. Those things were always there, but the reticular activating
system had been putting them in the junkpile. The universe has a vast
amount of material to offer you, free of charge, for your book. If you write
regularly, you’ll recognize that material when it comes along. It could,
ultimately, be the thing that either saves your book or takes it to a higher
level.
And finally: Write regularly because it’s a privilege to be able to do
so. Write regularly for the love of challenging your creative spirit to grow
and flourish. Write regularly to experience the magic of a new world
coming into being at the ends of your fingers. Write regularly to strengthen
yourself against the despair of gruntwork, dead dialog, and bad pages. And
most of all, write regularly in order to write
better.
And remember, the session you decide to blow off today or tomorrow
might be the most important session in the development of your book. Ain’t no
way to know except to do the session.
Timothy Hallinan is the author of
The Fourth Watcher.
He began writing books while enjoying a successful career in the television
industry. He is the author of a number of novels and a non-fiction book on
Charles Dickens. For years he has taught a course on "Finishing the Novel"
with remarkable results – more than half his students complete their first novel
and go on to a second, and several have been, or are about to be, published.
Visit
www.timothyhallinan.com
The Fourth Watcher - to buy on
Amazon US
Amazon UK
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