Five Minutes

I’ve been writing my whole life and I just finished my third novel. I wrote it in four months, five if you add a month for the massive rewrite after my main beta readers gave me their feedback. A 400 page scifi dystopian thriller, and I think it’s fairly complete and not half bad. I know that no one does that, except maybe Ann Patchett. I am in no way comparing my writing prowess to hers. But when people, my students or an interviewer, ask me how to have that kind of discipline, I have only one answer: obsession. No. That’s not it. Five minutes a day.

All it takes is putting the buttox in the damn chair for five minutes. Writing takes practice like playing a sport or an instrument. There is a muscle memory or something akin to that. And if your butt is in that chair and your mind in working in that way each and every day, even if it’s just to write one page or for five minutes, in a year you’ll have a novel. But you won’t just write for five minutes.

Once you begin to write that drip becomes a whoosh and the ideas pour forth on many if not most days. You’ll fill that page and five or ten more until you have 400 and then you’ll be writing agent querys and crying in your coffee for a totally different reason.

So … butt in chair … hands on keyboard … mind engaged … it’s just five minutes … it’s just one page …