Twenty Minutes

 

There are so many romantic notions about being a writer. Some are perpetuated by writers themselves (it's always advantageous to make your work sound more mysterious than it really is) but the worst, the most pernicious evil of this sort, comes from People Who Could Be Writers, aka LFS (Lazy Fucking Slackers). This is the idea that one needs time to write, i.e. "If I could only find the time to go away and really write, just write, I could get that [screenplay, novel, memoir, essay, perfect tweet] written."

Well, yes: How nice. I wish I had a chunk of time where I had nothing to do but write. I also wish I had a second home in the Bahamas, a private jet, and the answer to world hunger, but none of these are liable to show up this afternoon, and I'd like to finish the novel I'm writing before I'm dead. So in the meantime, all I've got is this little office room in my current apartment (thank goodness for that), a car that really ought to be in the shop, and just enough cash on hand to feed our dogs and cats. But I am writing a novel.

I'm currently holding down three jobs, and I'm a married man. I work full-time at Universal Pictures as a story analyst, I teach at UCLA Extension and at seminars around the world, and I'm a private script consultant who also runs a weekly writing group, while often maintaining my relationship with wife Judith (an empathetic journalist) via watching our favorite TV series together. Nonetheless I do have little dust-grains of that most precious commodity, writer's gold: minutes in the day when I can fit in a little writing.

Minutes?! you say. What am I supposed to do with that?

It can be done this way. I have lived to tell. Some years ago, I wrote the first draft of a first novel in a year by getting up an hour earlier than I had been, six days a week, and said novel was sold to Random House and published some 3-4 years (and some 7 drafts) after that. These days, the commitment is by necessity even shorter: I'm working on my second novel for twenty minutes a day.

Okay, I cheated - it's outlined, and it's based on an old project, so a lot of the grunt work was already done before I embarked on this Writing By Tidbit gambit. Still! At the point where I was complaining about NOT HAVING ENOUGH TIME TO WRITE to my longtime friend and writing soldier-in-arms Mr. Bob, he asked me, What amount of time could I reasonably find in a given day to devote to writing? And thus...

Sometimes I don't get to my 20, first thing. Sometimes it's "Hey, Judith, how much time before that lasagna's out of the oven?" That's when I grab my 20+ (yes, sometimes you get to Plus - I often go past 30). And here's the thing: This first draft will be erratic, all over the place; the quality will be wildly uneven. As with any first draft, it will include blind alleys, tangents, overlooked gold mines... all manner of mistakes will (and have already been) made. But it will exist.

That's the one obvious major accomplishment - creating that all-important something where there formerly was nothing. The other is that by working even 20 minutes a day, you feed the beast. It lives and thrives. The work stays with you. It ferments in your fevered brain. You're "in" the work, even unconsciously, 24/7. And that's immensely valuable, even if the draft itself seriously blows.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain—where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better. 

--Bernard Malamud

The ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.  Oh great gods in heaven, the wisdom, the zen and the art of creativity inherent in Malamud's phrase.  When you're writing a first draft, perfection is not just the enemy of the good, it's the Death Star.  It will zap you and your big ideas into oblivion before you can get a single passable page out of your printer. 

No, you have to be brave enough to write badly, to write it awful. You need the courage to write a really shitty draft, the sooner, the faster the better. Be wrong fast, as the Pixar guru Andrew Stanton famously put it. After all, a draft is just something to change.

So go for twenty minutes, and go for bad. If you sincerely, consciously embrace the premise that your first draft will suck, you won't compare it to all those paradigms of good writing you've studied, you won't worry about what anyone will think of it, and you won't beat yourself up for any of your multitudinous easily available beat-yourself-up options. Because it sucks! It's supposed to. That's its job.

A lot can happen in twenty minutes. One thing that will happen is: you'll be writing. You'll be a writer, as opposed to a LFS who dreams of that perfect script or book that's always next month, next year, next life. Writing this way may not fit the romantic paradigm, but stick with it, and it will get the damn thing done.

If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. 

--St. Thomas Aquinas *

Stop thinking about writing as art.  Think of it as work.  If you're an artist, whatever you do is going to be art.  If you're not an artist, at least you can do a good day's work. 

--Paddy Chayefsky

* See the comment by Jeff Takacs re: the proper attribution for this quote 

Comments

[E.C. Henry]

Hey, it's been nearly 2 months since you had a new post--and now this! Great post, worth the wait. And so topical--at least for where I'm at in life right now, writing an epic fantasy novel of my own.

Of all of what you said, the most interesting thing was that you were leading a writers' group. Too cool. How is that going? Are the people in your group writers with credits to their names, students, or just friends who like to write?

Just this last week writing for me, I experienced one of the funniest phenomenoms a writer can go through, and that being in a new draft when you reimmagine chacters and mishmashed their traits together as existed in the earlier draft that you mind remembers--just not all the details. A general's son suddenly became a minter of coins, a tailor became a raiser of horses. All were supporting Elf characters, happening in chapter 5 then error found in chapter 7, about 225 pages into a 1000+ page story. It kinda reminded me of that scene in "Alex and Emma" where Alex, as he's reciting his novel to his stenographer, changes the nationality of a key love interest from Swedish to German. Do you remember that scene?

Anywho, writing is very humbling. It's funny the mistakes you can make even with a draft at your dispoal. Writing well, is Herculean task. Glad you have a writers group to help you find your issues and iron them out early in the process. That in itself, Billy, puts you way ahead of the curve.

[Barbara Abercrombie]

Bravo! xxoo

[Bradford Richardson]

Billy, Thanks for the kick of inspiration. Fantastic line: "When you're writing a first draft, perfection is not just the enemy of the good, it's the Death Star."

[Chrissie]

Great advice. Thank you.

[mernitman]

EC, I'm in one writing group as a longtime student of my writing mentor, Deena Metzger, and I run a writing group of my own which is largely made up of former students and writers of their acquaintance... Meanwhile, writing IS humbling, for sure. I look at the architecture of something like George R.R. Martin's best GOT books (and even more brilliant, Benioff & Weiss's Martin-guided revision of the books for the TV series) and can only bow down before it and feel like a rank punk slacker.

Barbara hug here: ( )

Bradford, happy to kick.

You're welcome, Chrissie!

[Jeff Takacs]

Billy,

Wonderful blog. Thank you. Small correction: the quote you use is often misattributed to Thomas Aquinas. It is actually from the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, which significantly predates Aquinas. It's one of the best quotes ever. Would be my tattoo, if I were the tattooing kind.

Thanks again for the great blog!

[mernitman]

Jeff, thank you for the info - I've directed readers of the post to your comment, via an asterisk (coincidentally reading "Zealot" at the moment, with all its exhaustive parsing of ancient attributions, so I can understand the need for clarification).

[Jeff Takacs]

You're welcome! Another nutty coincidence: I just picked up that Christopher Moore "Lamb" book the other day! Huh.

[mernitman]

Jeff: GMTA (Great minds...)

[Michelle Duffy]

Reminds me of a great quote from Irish comedy writer, Graham Linehan: "The first draft is toilet paper. Just get it out!"

[mernitman]

Michelle: And Annie Lamott on "shitty drafts" and Hemingway, too ("All first drafts are shit"). There's a grand tradition of literary ca-ca profundity.