I always knew I would write a book someday, but I could have never painted a picture of how my writing career ended up developing. In my 20 years of writing I’ve produced three health books co-written with doctors, one sole authored health book (Death by Supermarket), two cookbooks (don’t discount them because they were the most work I have ever done on a writing project), and two novels Karma and Love Children. Eight books in 20 years.
When I was 40 in 1990 I bought my first computer and announced that I was now a writer. I thought that you wrote a book from the beginning to the end and then wrote THE END and you were finished. It’s not at all the way it works.
I wanted to be a novelist so set out to write my first manuscript. To begin I wrote in ball point pen on a Post-It “Do not disturb for any reason,” and I put that Post-It up on my office door. It has a lot of power because when I was in my office with the door shut no one disturbed me. It took me two years to write my first manuscript, the novel that is now Karma. (That is too long of a story to get into now.)
A lot of people go to writer’s conferences. I signed up for one in Santa Barbara but it all seemed like a bunch of schmoozing and listening to amateurs (including me) read their works in progress out loud. I only went to a few classes and then felt like I should be home writing. So that’s where I ended up—though I did take a semester of Adult Ed night classes on how to write fiction that was very buttoned up and no reading allowed. So I learned from those classes.
I’m not discounting writing conferences, or discouraging you from attending. It was just not my thing.
My MO has been to write a draft, and then find an editor to copy edit whatever manuscript I was working on. I pay for these services—you can’t get professional feedback from friends. (FYI copy editing is when an editor does a massive sweep of your work looking for continuity, flow, characterization, plot, etc.) And then I take about 90 percent of what that editor tells me. Not all comments are created equal.
Rewriting is the majority of the work. I’m fortunate because I’m not very picky about my first drafts. I will write anything just to have words down on the page. I am not fond of writing first drafts. But when I have the first words down, no matter how dumb and unorganized, I then start to have fun.
Over the years I’ve developed techniques that have made my writing so much better. One important skill to hone is ruthless deletion. Shorter, terser is always better. Keep the pace moving.
The most difficult but the most important and productive technique is retyping rather than cutting and pasting. I used to “rewrite” by cutting and pasting. But then with Karma I forced myself to finally do what I’ve heard about from the masters of writing, and that’s to retype the manuscript. Retyping allows you to rewrite sentences and to embellish and cut in ways that you really can’t do when cutting and pasting. It’s much more creative. But it also separates the men from the boys. It’s brutal and takes a ton of discipline to do it because imaging retyping 90-120,000 words with all the punctuation. I don’t retype final drafts however because line editing would be crazy.
I don’t believe that writers have to write a certain number of words per day. I have a lot of interests (yoga, Charlotte and India, piano, reading, cooking, and of course developing my cult following for my health pursuits, ha) so I don’t have the time or desire to write every single day. But when I do write I am a machine. I get into the flow very easily. As drafts mature and my characters become fully developed I begin to live through them, thinking their thoughts and feeling their emotions. That’s when I tend to finish huge chunks. I’m not very much fun to live with then, as I’m pretty much glued to my laptop and carry it around with me from room to room.
Deadlines are crucial. I impose artificial deadlines on myself. I wanted the manuscript Love Children (my second novel) to be off to an editor this summer because I have a lot of traveling to do and I wanted not to feel disappointed in myself. So I made that happen and the manuscript is with an editor, Ron Kenner—who I am sharing a booth with at BEA this week in NY!
This summer I will work on my two next writing projects, my memoir Hippie Chick of my trip to India in 1968-69 and the book I’m developing to share with you what I’ve learned on how not to fall apart. I haven’t settled on a title. It will be a HOW TO on my entire personal program, with guest chapters on hormone replacement, etc. written by experts.
So even though I said I would take my 60th birthday summer off, I won’t, cause I love what I do!
Please feel free to ask me any other questions about the writing process. Om Shanti!
My blog is dedicated to my Life Mission: Living a happy and fulfilled life, caring about my body and spirit, women’s issues, and the planet. I hope you come back and read how you can define, explore, and live your Life Mission.
THE ETERNAL PROBLEM OF TIME MANAGEMENT FOR A WRITER
My primary goal every day is to begin the day with meditation. I find if I don’t meditate immediately then fires take control of my schedule. If I do meditate then I’m better able to extinguish fires during the workday. I don’t need coffee to wake up so I meditate before I leave the bedroom.
I schedule exercise (usually yoga) on my calendar. If it’s not on my calendar then when something comes up it might bump yoga off my day, and I don’t want that to happen. Because I’m a health and wellness writer I factor yoga into my work day with impunity!
I work every day, even on the weekends. I rarely skip a day. I may not work the entire day, but I get something done. I frequently work the entire weekend. Fortunately I’m in love with what I do. But I don’t always write. I would like to write every day, but I’m an industry of one so I have to do everything, including grocery shopping, bills, cooking. In the spirit of disclosure, I do have a housekeeper who comes once a week, an assistant who runs errands for me once a week, and now that one of our dogs is too old to give me a workout, a dog walker comes 5 days a week.
When I have time alone on the weekends I don’t “work,” I write. That is pleasure and those are wonderful stolen hours.
Every week begins with a To Do list. This list runs the gamut from personal to business. It’s all mixed up. The To Do list would take over my writing schedule if I didn’t create artificial deadlines. I know exactly what trajectory any given project is on and what state it needs to be in by a certain date. Then I set another deadline. This works well for airline travel because I have edited all of my manuscripts on airplanes. But you have to plan ahead and have the manuscript in a prepared state.
Because I create deadlines there are days when I simply have to devote the entire day to writing just to make progress. I have to read a manuscript through in total quiet without interruptions so that I can gauge its flow and continuity. That takes scheduling. On those days bathroom breaks and food runs to the kitchen are the only interruptions allowed. But it’s so much fun.
I only make business calls during the day. I’m not a phone talker by nature and don’t enjoy talking on the phone so I generally keep calls to the point and move it along. The phone can chew up a lot of a writer’s day. The same is true with the Internet. It’s very easy to get caught up in emails and Facebook.
Because I’m doing FB videos now, that takes a lot of my time. It requires “stage” makeup or I’m washed out. So just getting myself organized, and the camera set up with acceptable lighting takes a lot of time and then it takes time to upload the videos to YouTube. So I generally turn back to whatever I’m writing while the video is uploading. This sounds a lot like mult-tasking though it’s not. I’ve come to the conclusion that multi-tasking doesn’t really result in the optimal completion of tasks. You get stuff done but not in the spirit of excellence.
Right now I’m working on my proposal for Survival Guide. I’m thinking about it all the time, when I wake up and when I go to bed. I take the last draft with me to bed and read and edit it before I go to sleep. After I meditate, I take my laptop to the kitchen for breakfast and download emails and FB messages. I blow through them as fast as I can. Then I eat breakfast and I’ll work for several hours on my writing. I attend to emails and FB messages in between writing when I want to clear my mind of what I’m working on so I can have a fresh look at it.
I don’t go out very often at night. That would probably not appeal to a lot of people, but I like to go to bed early so I can be fresh the next day. I’m dedicated to my lifestyle of work and accomplishments. I haven’t been much of a vacation taker since I started my writing career. That needed to change for my health, sanity, and productivity, so the last few summers we’ve spent 4-6 weeks on Martha’s Vineyard. Last summer was a near total bust. I started working on my memoir Hippie Chick but mostly I goofed off the entire time. It was OK and it didn’t make me paranoid because I knew that I would crank in September. And since that time I have not stopped. But if that kind of slacking derails you, then I wouldn’t recommend it.
Because of my dedication to my work, I’m not a crazy social animal. I love entertaining, but I keep it to a reasonable amount of time. Socializing is a reward for work done, but at the same time there are times when I can’t stand the sight of my laptop. So socializing purges me of any pent up discontent.
Every single social, travel, or extracurricular event, book, magazine, newspaper, TV, movie, play, or opera is fodder for my writing. I never stop making mental or actual notes. Keeping my mind active saves me time because I never have to think, now what? I have so much creative stuff at my disposal that sometimes it builds up to a toxic level and that’s when I can’t sleep. So I have to monitor my drive a little.
One detail that I have always given priority to is making connections. I spend time networking regularly. I spend a lot of time sending review books out, scheduling radio interviews, preparing for interviews and talks and rehearsing. And in the beginning I always wrote thank you notes (on real stationary not emails) to agents who rejected a manuscript. They took time out of their busy schedules to read my work and I felt an acknowledgement is only polite. Now I don’t really get much information on who reads what because my agent does it for me. But if there is an instance where I have direct contact with a person who gives me any amount of time, I thank that person with a real note.
As I write I’m getting a pedicure. It’s taken me 45 minutes to write this. I planned it that way. I plan my entire work schedule. So I guess in a nutshell my time management strategy is all about planning.
Om Shanti.