Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

One of the main reasons I started this website was to ask the questions that I never had answered during grad school.

I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I think all fledgling writers need to know how published authors made it to their first book. I ask every writer a simple, crucial question: How did you survive the hard times, how did you balance your writing life and your dayjob?  

Today, I asked Brian Francis Slattery, a first-time novelist and editor who rocked the literary world with his trippy new novel, Spaceman Blues.

His answer will surprise and hopefully inspire you, part of my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
You have a dayjob as an editor. How do you find time and energy to balance your dayjob responsibilities and your creative writing side? How did you stay sane during those early lean years as a graduate student, writing this book with what I imagine was a pretty crowded schedule?

Brian Francis Slattery:
That's a good question. I'm not as disciplined about it as I should be; I just try to find time when I can. Continue reading...

In some ways, though, that's not hard because I really enjoy writing and to some extent have to do it, or I get a little grumpy. Before grad school, I really did write every day, producing hundreds of pages of material that nobody should ever read, and which I'm glad to have lost.

From the beginning of grad school to the present, it's been more like three to five times a week. I miss writing every day, but in some ways I don't think it's bad to write less frequently and in more concentrated bursts. I do find that some of the stuff I produce after a particularly long hiatus is the stuff that I end up having to revise the least.

During grad school (which was, by the way, a two-year program for a public policy degree, specializing in international economic development), writing Spaceman Blues was a really nice way to force myself to take a break from schoolwork and not feel guilty about it because I was ostensibly getting something done (though, really, I didn't imagine at the time that it would be published, or even publishable).

Now that I work from home, I usually write to take a break from editing--again, three to five times a week, for a couple of hours at a stretch. I can't write well for more than two hours, it seems, anyway.

If I write for much longer than that, the prose starts to get... well, not bad exactly, but kind of stale; I end up having to rewrite it all later.