I’M GETTING into the swing of writing this Blog now, making it part of my new daily regime. I've always been very anti regimes, thinking them to be a form of self-imposed slavery.
But I've come to realise that this is perhaps why I never seem to get anything done.
Also, it's not self-imposed slavery if your daily regime consists of nice, decent things that - approached the right way - are a pleasure and not a chore. Writing this Blog isn't a chore at all; it serves as good finger exercise before getting on with some proper writing.
I've not mentioned this as yet (you're learning so much so soon) - but I'm in the process of writing a novel. Well no, that's not quite true, I'm in the process of planning my novel in great detail and will start writing within the next two weeks. Therefore, my new regime has been created to accommodate this project. I've got it all worked out...
Firstly, I've not written a novel before - let's stop calling it a novel and call it a book, 'novel' sounds pompous - but think with the right planning (the difficult stage I'm attempting at the moment) I can't see it being any harder than, say, running a marathon.
Running a marathon would be a MASSIVE pain in the arse, full of set backs and moments of doubt, but ultimately 80% of the population could do it, even if it took them about 8 hours. Which is just a long ramble. But still only 8 hours, and most people could do it in about 4.
It takes 8 hours to fly to America. Just think, instead of spending all that time fidgeting about on a hard aircraft seat, why not just run a marathon instead and really achieve something? Yes Stanley, that makes perfect sense.
BUSINESS MAN ON PHONE 1: "John. Hi, you okay? We expected you in Chicago this morning."
BUSINESS MAN ON PHONE 2: "Yeah, sorry Chuck, I decided to run a marathon instead. If you need me I'll be in a hot bath until Wednesday."
Anyway, all I'm saying is that it's a big challenge but hardly an insurmountable one. What's an average book's length? Between 70,000 and 100,000 words? Put in a good 4,000 a day and that's the bugger written in 17 to 25 days. Nice job! One a month!
No, say it takes two months to do a first draft, then another month playing around with it, then send it off to a few friends, then do another draft, then send it off to some publishers. Three or four months in total?
Oh how I'm going to regret saying that, and how any writers amongst the six people reading this will be laughing into their soup at my naivety, but I can't see why it shouldn't take any longer than that.
Unless you've got tons of research to do or something. Basically, writers that take three years to knock out a novel are just lazy. There. That's writers dealt with ... next!
No - I really don't know if I can even complete this project, and I certainly don't know if I can attract a publisher, but I'm going to give it a good shot and try and avoid the standard 'start strong, fizzle out after a fortnight' syndrome that's normally the cancer of all my projects.
This is why I'm mentioning it here. If I tell all six of you that I'm writing a book and it should be done in about three months then I'm under a bit of pressure to do it just so I don't look like a boastful liar.
And if there's one thing I'm not, it's a boaster.
- Post to:
del.icio.us
Digg
Newsvine
Nowpublic
Reddit
« Previous | Home | Next »