Have you figured out yet if you’re a morning person or a night person? It makes a difference because morning people often do their best work before God or the sun get up. Night owls tend to like the relative quiet of the evening hours when the house or apartment is dark and the only sounds are perhaps your music and the clicking of your keyboard.
Finding your timing helps you focus your whole day toward that time when you sit down to work on your latest project.
There are many writers who haven’t “made it” as a writer well enough to quit their day-job and so rise early before the rest of the family and write before dressing and going to their other job.
I remember seeing a story in “People” magazine years ago about the Western novelist Louis L’Amour (Hondo, The Sackett series, How The West Was Won and many, many more) who claimed he could write anywhere, any time. There was a picture of him sitting at a typewriter stand in the middle of a busy intersection writing away just to prove the point.
What I’m getting at here is that you should write at whatever time suites you best, but do so in a place that becomes your writing place, where ever that is. If you are serious about your writing you’ll have to treat it seriously and “get to it” on a business schedule – be that five, six or seven days a week – at the same time.
Here’s the simple mathematics of it. If you can write five pages a day, in a week you’ll produce 35 pages, two weeks, 70, a month 140 pages. Nobody “sits down and writes a novel, story or script” in a single sitting.
If, for example, you’re a night person, you’ll be surprised how things you see, read, and hear during the day will help focus your mind down to your writing time. Those snatches of dialogue, the interesting appearance of someone you saw for just a fleeting second, or a song to just happened to hear during lunch, can all help you keep moving your story forward.
Even if you’re a morning person, you’ll awake with thoughts and bits of dreams that are relevant to whatever you’re doing.
Find your time and train your muse (she works for you, remember, not the other way around) to be there at your appointed time.
I remember a cartoon in “Playboy” years ago of a harried, frustrated writer looking up to see the arrival of his muse looking like she just crawled out of the sack with a mystic lover of her dreams and the writer shouts at her, “Where the hell have you been?”
It really about training yourself to be professional at your craft. It’s very true what poet, satirist, and wit Dorothy Parker once said, “I hate to write but I love to have written.” She also said, “The two most beautiful words in the English language are, “’Check Enclosed.’”
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