Re: JCO: Prolific

Gary,

Reminds me of Anthony Trollope in his autobiography. He often had a
day job, too, and wrote in the mornings before he did anything else --
IIRC, something like 1,800 words a day, a certain number of days a
week. It's been years since I read it -- was so sad to see it end.

The discipline to write regularly is wonderful, and yet you have to
have time to go over the previous day's writing plus do the present
day's, and it's still the re-writing and re-writing and re-writing that
takes so much time. Life seems to often gets in the way of that. Ah,
well. . ..

Cindi

Gary Couzens wrote:

> John Updike nailed this one - like JCO, he's a writer from a
> blue-collar background who's often accused of writing too much. His
> point was, if you treat writing as your job, and work office hours,
> you will inevitably produce a lot of writing in a year.
>
> JCO publishes one adult novel under her own name a year, which is far
> from unusual. What adds to the impression of prolificity are the other
> things: the short stories and their collections, the book-length
> novellas, not to mention the essays, poems and plays. And add to that
> the other novels - the Rosamund Smiths and Lauren Kellys, and latterly
> the children's and YA books.
>
> Stephen King (in On Writing) states that he writes 2000 words a day,
> every day. That would take me about three hours, assuming I'm not
> blocked or distracted. (And I'm not a full-time writer so I have a day
> job to go to.) It's quite feasible to do 2000 words in a morning,
> leaving afternoons for other work, revision, and all the admin stuff
> (proof-reading etc) that we don't think about but which has to be part
> of a writer's life. At 2000 words a day, you could write an
> average-length novel in up to two months, and quite a hefty novel in
> three. Even one the length of Blonde won't take more than six months
> at that rate. So JCO's output doesn't seem that unreasonable - what
> makes the difference is that she obviously has the dedication and
> focus to produce the amount of words that she does. It's too easy - I
> know this myself too well - to get distracted or sidetracked, or let
> other things take over, and you soon start losing days when you could
> have been writing.
>
> Gary
> ----- Origi

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