Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-schedule"

Raymond Chandler wrote that a writer shouldn’t read letters until lunchtime. The energy that ought to go into his novel would be diverted to correspondence.

If email had been invented 50 years earlier, we might never have had “The Big Sleep.”

Email has an itching urgency that letters don’t have. And a letter leads only to the end of the page – the internet clicks you on into endless pages and seemingly into other worlds. So I’m with Chandler. If you’re a writer, don’t even open your email until you’ve finished writing for the day. Given that most writers have enough creative energy for a three or four hour day tops, you’ll only have to wait until lunchtime, after all.

I’ve interviewed dozens of writers for my blog and I always ask about their writing routine. Many of them say that they dabble on the web until they “feel guilty about wasting time,” then they start writing. Trouble is, by then I think they’ve blown their concentration for the day.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.<\a>

My wife is in labor. Though by the time you read this, she’ll probably have delivered a baby girl. In days gone by, fathers hung around in the waiting room sharing cigars with new fathers. I’m glad that’s no longer a tradition – if I wanted to suck on something long and dark, I surely wouldn’t be becoming a father, if you get what I mean.

But here I am, waiting. Our birth coach is giving my wife reflexology in the bedroom, so I’m taking advantage to pen my little blog missive for the week. Which is all about doing…very little.

It’s my new technique. Up until the book I’m currently plotting, I’ve been a fairly compulsive worker. I’m from Northern Europe; born Protestant; first in the family to attend university and cocktail parties. That sort of thing. This worked pretty well for me, up to a point.

However, since I completed the manuscript of my novel about Caravaggio in late April, I’ve been experimenting with a work method I would describe as “decisive indolence.” I’m still on the plotting stage of my next book. Almost everything about it has changed over those months. It was a historical novel set in London, 1914. Now it’s…not. The characters, the plot, everything’s different.

With my old technique, I’d have had a draft completed by now. But it might’ve been the wrong book. It’d be the book I abandoned already at the plotting stage.

So how have I perfected this decisive indolence? First, I work a little bit most mornings – but not every morning. But I allow myself time for other creative projects – music and painting – which keep my mind alert for the brief moments of creative concentration when ideas about the new novel come to me.

Second, no more car or bike to and from the gym. I’m walking home from the gym several times a week. It’s not the only time I walk somewhere, but it’s the only time when I don’t really need to get anywhere in particular and where my mind has been relaxed already by an hour of exercise.

As I listen to my wife’s contractions, I realize that labor is very much like the writing of a book. So many people these days are scheduling caesarians, and writers are rather doing the same thing – forcing their creative acts. I don’t advocate waiting around doing nothing, but I do think writers need to find a more natural formula from conception to delivery.

And with that, the reflexology is over, and I have to go back to stroking my wife’s back…