Yes, That’s Volume 29 of Handwritten Short Stories.
FRIENDS, when you have achieved the summit of midlist author success (or, like me, if you’re stranded at base camp coughing up blood but insisting you’re going to make the ascent any day now), you get asked a lot of questions. One of the most popular questions that writers get in interviews or when buttonholed outside the restroom at conferences concerns process. Everyone is curious about the disciplined, specific routine and schedule you follow in order to produce sellable wordage (did I just coin that phrase? can I sell T shirts with SELLABLE WORDAGE on them?). How many words do you write per day? How many hours? What’s your routine?
My answer is, I don’t really have one.
Which is strange, because I am a man of habits. Of routines. Of deep, deep ruts. If you followed me around for one day you would know precisely what I’m doing the next day, and the day after that, because I deeply love a routine. And yet, when it comes to writing, one of the most important things in my life, I have no routine.
Oh, to be fair, I do keep regular working hours for my freelance writing. That stuff is usually on a very short deadline, and I don’t get paid until I turn it in, so I’m inspired to work regularly on that stuff. So yes, every day between certain hours you can usually find me working on a freelance project. But when it comes to fiction, there’s no schedule or routine whatsoever, and it’s because I didn’t start writing seriously until college.
“my parents became alarmed at my mediocre grades and apparent belief in a benevolent god who would always take care of me”
COLLEGE: BEST SIX YEARS OF MY LIFE
I started writing fiction when I was around 10 years old, but throughout grammar and high school I wrote novels, believe it or not. As a kid I read epic fantasy almost exclusively, and thus I thought of fiction in terms of trilogies—massive books that told massive stories, the sort of tomes that would break a toe if you dropped them. In later high school I joined the literary magazine as a way to pad my college resume, because my parents became alarmed at my mediocre grades and apparent belief in a benevolent god who would always take care of me. Thus, I started writing short stories on my trusty Commodore 64, but my main focus was still novels, which I worked on haphazardly. But the secret is, when you’re fifteen years old you have so much damn free, unstructured time you can work on a novel haphazardly and finish it in three months.
Then I went off to college, and started to have the first inkling that I might want to write, you know, professionally. So I started working on short stories more seriously, for two reasons: One, I didn’t have a laptop (or a computer at all, really; this was the early 1990s when mobile phones were the size of a shoebox, don’t forget), so writing in a notebook was the only way to work on the fly, and Two, college forced me to start reading more widely, and I thought every idea I had was amazing, and short stories allowed me to play with concepts and approaches fast and furious.
And in college, I spent a lot of time bored out of my mind at lectures. So I wrote instead of paying attention. This is why I barely got a degree and had to do a make up course the summer after my supposed graduation, but I have no regrets.
I wrote on the bus going between campuses. I wrote when I should have been paying attention to class. I wrote when people invited me to study with them at night. I always had a notebook, and I just generally wrote whenever I was sitting down, and this meant there was no schedule. It just sort of happened.
When I graduated (again: barely) and got a job, I carried over the habit. I wrote during boring meetings in the conference room. I wrote when I was sitting at my desk, when I went out to lunch. The notebook just came with me wherever I went, and I prayed fervently that people thought I was just a very, very prolific note-taker. And thus, I have no routine, no schedule. I work on fiction whenever I feel like it, even though I can now make my schedule be whatever I wish. Possibly related: I also no longer have a day job. Let it drift.
Which means I have a strange bicameral life. I am very regimented in just about every other aspect of my existence: When I eat, when I sleep, when I go for a walk. But writing remains this gloriously messy, disorganized orgy of creation that I engage in at random moments when the mood strikes. It makes no sense, and I like it that way.
Thank goodness I make some money at it, because I am apparently unemployable.