It was interesting to write ad films and scripts for TV shows before I moved on to writing a feature film. That helped me grow as a writer, and I also found out how long I could sit in front of a computer and see something through.
Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.
When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.
If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.
What I've become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you'd rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself - if I'm not going be able to write, I'm not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait.
Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.
At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.
I used to say when I was younger, 'I'm exhausted; writers can only write for four hours a day and that's done.' Now I find, as I'm getting older and I'm more aware of time, I can actually write all day.
When I made the decision to really get serious about my writing, I set myself a goal of 1,000 words a day for seven days. If I got to 7,000 words before Monday I could take a day off, but I had to get there. I had to do that every week.
Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.
I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.
I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half!
How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
'Monstress' has been hard because I want to keep writing longer, but I can't.
Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.
I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.
A one-hundred-thousand-word novel might take a year or several years, and then you just come to 'The End' one day. But it takes hundreds of days to get to 'The End.' As a writer, you have to put in those hundreds of days.
I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious.
Producing 1,200 words every day, when you're already working a full-time job is a lot.
I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?
I'm almost back to being able to write as much as six hours a day .
At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.
Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.
It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.
