I love to write. I love when the words flow from my fin­ger­tips. It thrills me when my char­ac­ters begin to talk to me and I can’t type fast enough to get their dia­logue down. I adore pol­ish­ing each sen­tence until it has just the rhythm and cadence; the snap, crack­le pop I’m look­ing for. There’s an endor­phin high that comes when a real­ly good idea pops into my head. It’s eas­i­ly as won­der­ful as Ger­man Choco­late Cake, a ride on an ele­phant or a trip to Paris.

Maybe because I came out of adver­tis­ing writ­ing, I don’t have a writ­ing dis­ci­pline prob­lem. I got used to going to work every day and writ­ing from nine to six so that rou­tine seems nor­mal to me. But it didn’t always. When I first start­ed writ­ing adver­tis­ing it was real­ly chal­leng­ing to write all day. I remem­ber con­fess­ing to a col­league about how slow and tor­tured the process was for me. And she said: “It will either get faster and eas­i­er or you’ll find some­thing else to do.”

Obvi­ous­ly she was right. Writ­ing is like run­ning or weight lift­ing. You have to devel­op the mus­cles for it. It took me a year of writ­ing forty plus hours a week before I found my groove. And now I con­sid­er it a real­ly crap­py day if I haven’t tucked myself inside my pro­tag­o­nist for the bet­ter part of the day.

What’s been more dif­fi­cult for me in the last few years is bal­anc­ing mar­ket­ing writ­ing and the real thing. Mar­ket­ing writ­ing, as I define it, is speech writ­ing, pre­sen­ta­tion prep, web site writ­ing, blog writ­ing, Q&A writ­ing, newslet­ter writ­ing, answer­ing emails etc. I only get so much writ­ing juice every day and I have to man­age my time so that I don’t squan­der the mojo doing mar­ket­ing writ­ing. Not that mar­ket­ing writ­ing isn’t impor­tant — but I could eas­i­ly — oh so eas­i­ly — have no time for the juicy stuff.

So what then is my rou­tine like? Gen­er­al­ly, I do my cre­ative work first thing and then at the end of the day I answer emails and do mar­ket­ing writ­ing. But some­times I’ll answer a few emails first thing to get myself warmed up and then get going on the books. Some weeks I get absolute­ly no busi­ness writ­ing done at all and my email inbox gets clogged with red excla­ma­tion marks. Then, I’ll have to take the day off from my book and get caught up. But I try not to let that hap­pen, because it makes my char­ac­ters stamp their lit­tle feet and bang their lit­tle fists on the inside of my skull.

While I’m writ­ing, I do have lit­tle rules around the inter­net. I’m allowed to check my email, but not return it unless it’s from my edi­tor or agent and I’m not allowed to surf the net. I try to keep a list of things I need to research, and then at the end of the day I’ll go online and find what I need. I’m not rigid about this dis­ci­pline, but I find it to be a use­ful guide.

I know a lot of authors do word or page counts. I’m a huge fan of the work of both Lin­da Sue Park and Kather­ine Pater­son, so you can imag­ine my delight when I had din­ner with Lin­da a year or so ago and she told me the writ­ing rou­tine she learned from Kather­ine Pater­son. As Lin­da explained this to me, you start your writ­ing day by revis­ing yesterday’s pages and then gen­er­ate two new pages. That’s it.

I decid­ed to give it a try. And as it turns out I write many more than two pages a day. In fact, I blew through that nov­el. Whoa. Fastest nov­el I’ve ever writ­ten. The only prob­lem was … the nov­el stunk. Yep. Big time bad. And not the kind of crud­dy first draft bad that Annie Lam­ott talks about in her ter­rif­ic book Bird by Bird either.

Does this mean I’m going to dump this work? Nope. But because I went so far with it, before it was ready to be writ­ten, the revi­sion process is going to be a lot more like start­ing over than it will be about build­ing on what I have.

It turns out what works for me is time. I need to make cer­tain I block out unin­ter­rupt­ed hours to write or research what­ev­er nov­el I am cur­rent­ly work­ing on. The key for me is to feel my way along — like I’ve been dropped in a strange build­ing on an unknown street in a coun­try I’ve nev­er been before in the dead of night — and slow­ly I must feel my way build­ing the world of my nov­el as I go. The prob­lem with arti­fi­cial page gen­er­a­tion goals is they encour­age me to solve plot and char­ac­ter prob­lems quick­ly instead of well.

What works for me is: trust­ing myself and my process. What works for me is mak­ing sure I keep the world and its demands at bay so that I have the space I need to write the best books I know how to write.