Subject: RE: The Uncollected 22
From: Malcolm Lawrence (Malcolm@wolfenet.com)
Date: Tue May 20 1997 - 20:18:45 GMT
>And thanks for the book advice, Malcs. I hope it doesn't take me 22
>years. D'ya think it's worth having a go at over the summer? You say you
>got the bulk of yours done in 3 mos. How long did you spend at it each
>day? (I hate to nit-pick, but I don't know any other writers)
I was living in Bournemouth, England (my hometown), had a wee flat and a
position doing brain dead data entry at British Telecom eight hours a day.
So I'd work, come home, and write until I went to sleep (so about five or
six hours of writing a day. I wrote the first hundred pages out in
longhand, ostensibly because I didn't have a clue what I was doing or where
it was going to go. Then when I realized what I was doing and where it was
going I bought myself a Silver Reed 2600 typewriter (only 50 quid. Cheap!
Never let me down either.) and typed from there on). Go to work the next
day, come home, and write until I went to sleep. Weekends I'd write the
same amount as well, sometimes more (towards the end of the summer I got a
Saturday night job at a Bingo parlour as well). A very "boring" summer, but
by the end of it, I had a book under my belt.
Go for it. Trust your muse and let it lead you. As I was writing my first
novel I suddenly started to get ideas for the second, third, and fourth
novels (it's a cycle of novels with the same characters) which I'm still
writing about to this day. So you never know what the muse is going to
offer you.
Of course it can be done, and I heartily encourage you, and if you want any
further encouragement, advice or inspiration please let me know. Anyone can
do it. Half the battle is just sitting down and doing it. (Making sure you
have no distractions is pretty key too. I didn't have a television, nor a
telephone, nor a computer. Just me and the paper.)
Malcs
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