Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

My great editor, Hiram Haydn, was a very busy man. He started or ran publishing houses, had a wife and a bunch of kids, was editor of The American Scholar. And wrote novels. He was my editor from Soldier in the Rain through The Princess Bride, was a wondrous father figure for me. Once we were talking about a novel of his, The Hands of Esau, that he was close to finishing, and I asked him how long since he began it and he said probably eight years. How do you stay the same person for that long, I wondered? You just do the best you can, he replied. You hope. When do you write? Sunday morning, he said. Every Sunday morning. That was the only time available to him. The rest of his life was kids and work and family and commuting and meetings and dealing with crazy writers; Sunday morning was all he could carve out, so he played it as it laid. You have to protect your writing time, he said then. That’s the best basic advice I can give to any writer. You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.