Part 1 — Practice and attention

A writer says the novel has a structural problem, though she has not opened the file in nine days. Another says he has run out of ideas, and his notebook holds forty he has stopped seeing. A third calls it a confidence problem and waits to feel confident, which is a little like waiting to feel fluent before speaking a language. Each of them blames the Work. The trouble usually sits nearer, in the conditions under which the Work gets touched at all.

Those conditions come before structure, character, scene, and sentence, because you can only work on any of them once you have arrived at the page, in a state to look at it, on a day nobody else had claimed. The ten chapters here are practices in the plain sense, things you do repeatedly so that you can do them. Chapter 4 treats method as a continuum a writer can move along from one Work to the next, and a writing life has the same freedom. A routine you chose, tested, and adjusted is yours. One inherited from a famous writer’s schedule, or from last year’s resolution, may only look like discipline.

So the writers in these chapters are not offered as templates. A Victorian novelist wrote by the watch before breakfast. A science fiction writer rose at two or three in the morning to write before a factory or warehouse shift. A novelist has said she was never able to write regularly, and a naturalist published an abstract because the large book was still years from done. Each solved a particular problem of time, money, temperament, and form, and the solutions only look alike once you strip away their circumstances. Where a writer’s account is quoted or paraphrased, it comes from something the writer published or said on the record, and the chapter names it; the authors’ own reasoning is usually marked as such.

Fiction and nonfiction both appear, because beginning, protecting time, and noticing are not genre skills.

The part starts with the single session, widens to finishing and to the life around sessions, turns to reading and to fear, and ends on attention, which everything else seems to draw on. It can also be entered by problem. Practices 1 to 4 are for when starting is the difficulty, and 5 for things that start and do not end. Go to 6 if everything is in order except the life, and to 7 if you read a great deal and your own pages do not benefit. When fear is doing the talking, 8 and 9 are the nearest; when the pages are competent and strangely flat, try 10.

Each chapter ends with something to do, most of them with a stated time or count, meant to be done on actual pages. Some will not fit your life as written. When one does not, change it and notice what you changed, since that is already information about the conditions this part is trying to make visible.