« – Have you any observations to make on adherence to a working regimen or routine, which is often cited as a discipline necessarily associated with being a writer?
Different kinds of writers devise different strategies. My own experience is primarily that of the novelist, and a novel is a long, long agony.
You must submerge in a novel – or I must. It must be real to you as you work at it, and the only way I know to make it real is to dive into it at eight in the morning and not emerge until lunchtime. Then, for the space of each working day, it can be as real as the other life you live – the one from lunch to bedtime.
I know no way to become convinced, and stay convinced of the reality and worthiness of a novel but to go out every morning to the place where writing is done, and put your seat on the seat of the chair, as Sinclair Lewis advised, and keep it there.
It is not an easy discipline for everyone. Young writers often rebel against it, because when they go off by themselves, day after day, they get restless.
It is the dullness of writing that they must invoke; they must actively seek it; they must put themselves in a prison and stare across a typewriter at a wall for four or five hours a day, seven days a week. It had better be seven, too, not six, not five – certainly not two or three.
It is a good test of the depth of one’s commitment, actually. Nobody can make you go there except yourself, and you will make yourself go there only because that is where you want to be, that is what you must be doing. »
From an interview with Wallace Stegner (one of my favorite writers), from On Teaching and Writing Fiction.
