What's the best way to finish your book? Drunk in a roach motel or handcuffed to a day-planner?
Over at Urban Muse, writing guru Kelly L. Stone advises writers to apply fanatical care to the business of writing; planning their schedules with an iron spreadsheet.
After interviewing over one hundred writers, she concluded these techniques work the best: "setting a writing schedule, adhering to that writing schedule under all circumstances barring illness and true emergencies, creating deadlines for getting the various stages of their projects completed, using some type of “quota” system to ensure that they complete their work consistently."
On the other end of the writing scale, Slate's Jack Shafer blasts all writers who adhere to such rigid codes. His essay touches the messy corners of every writer's brain, explaining "Why Booze and Cigarettes Are Essential for Good Journalism": "journalists identify with larger-than-life personalities, because that's how they see themselves. Deny the journalist his self-image as a rule-bending individualist and you might as well replace him with a typist."
I'm an ex-smoker who can drink Scotch like a hardboiled hero, but without an inner typist I'd never get through my next draft. Still, whenever my inner typist wrestles my inner hardboiled hero, the hero usually wins. That's why I'm still plowing through the billionth draft of my novel.
Who do you believe, the hardboiled hero or the boring typist? Are you stumbling madly through your book or are you following a time-clock?
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