One of the podcasts I regularly listen to (see – I promised I’d be listening to more podcasts again soon) is actually produced by a huge chain book store that I actually don’t really like that much, but their podcast series is great. I guess I have to tell you what I’m talking about – it’s the Barnes & Noble Meet the Writers series and the interviewer, Steve Bertrand, just does such great interviews with various writers that I always enjoy listening to them. That, and they’re short – usually under 15 minutes, so it’s a great podcast to listen to if I’m nearly home.

Anyway, this week I listened to the Meet the Writers interview with Jeffrey Archer. Sorry, Lord Archer, as he now is (I think). Personally, I’m not a fan, but he’s undeniably a very successful writer, and there’s got to be a few reasons for that.

Something Archer said that really made me prick my ears up was that he writes in a very disciplined way. And I mean disciplined. He has some beautiful sand timer (I was going to write egg timer, but it’s longer than that) that runs for an hour. He always writes for two-hour sessions, meaning he turns the timer over once. And I can’t remember exactly his pattern, but it was something like writing from 6am-8am, 10am-12pm, 2pm-4pm and 6pm-8pm, every day.

Now obviously writing a novel in such a way is not going to pay the bills for me in the same way that it does for Lord Archer, well at least not yet. But it did inspire me to re-think my approach to my writing buddy system for writing my second novel, which requires me to write one chapter per week. Apart from being a little behind schedule, I also only manage to sit down to actually write these chapters when the deadline is looming very near (or has already passed). I’m making more progress than I would have, but I’m still writing under a pressing deadline and therefore writing stuff just to fill the page at times, or just to move the story in the right direction.

But the sand clock idea got me thinking, and I’m going to try a new idea this week. If I wrote a bit of my novel for 15 minutes every day, I’d have a good chunk of it done when I got to the weekend and needed to finish up and submit a chapter. I can set the timer on my phone to ring after 15 minutes and then sit down and just type. I know, it sounds so simple, but I hope other struggling writers out there appreciate how difficult it sometimes is to get these things done. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Posted in Goals and Motivation, Inspiration for Writers | 3 Comments »