Telling Write From Wrong (Part 2)

Gotta Go With The Flow

Photograph copyright: DAVID McMAHON

Thank you for all those wonderful comments on yesterday's post, the first in this daily series. Hats off to Eve, who wrote more than five thousand words yesterday for her forthcoming novel, Rebel's Ascent. That sort of output is really prodigious and anyone who finds the time to top the 5000-word mark in a day is doing a superb job. That, in turn, leads me to a question I often get asked by writers, who always want to know how to maintain their writing flow.

Today's tip: Don't put too much pressure on yourself.

No one can tell you that your output must be 1000 words or day or 1356 words a day. Why? Because creativity is not a finite science.

Two colleagues of mine, both very good journalists who began novels only to put them aside, asked me what sort of target I set myself each day. My reply was simple. My wife and children are my first priority - always have been, always will be. Writing novels is important to me, but it is not a crucial part of my life. I confessed that my sworn target is simply 300 words a day.

They were obviously surprised. Yes, I admitted, it's just a small target - but it's a realistic target. There are days when I simply don't have time, between working full-time and doing all the things that fathers do, to write 300 words a day for my next novel. But I can make up for it the next day. And when you think about it, 300 words a day adds up to a tad over 9000 words a month. Pretty impressive when you look at it that way.

That's the approach I took when I wrote my first novel, Vegemite Vindaloo. And that's what I'm doing as I write my second novel, Muskoka Maharani. Writing a novel (or any book for that matter) must never take over your life completely. You should leave yourself enough space to enjoy the other pleasures of life, and it helps if you return to the manuscript because you want to, not because you have to. That is what keeps creativity alive.

Finally, there is no "correct" wordage on a daily basis. A steady output works for some people, while bursts of frenetic writing interspersed with several days away from the plot works for others. You write what you want to write, when you want to write.