The speaker emphasizes the importance of quality over quantity in writing, noting that excessive content can dilute the substance of a story.
The speaker learned that the true challenge in writing involves making careful choices about what to include rather than just adding more content.
A daily routine is highlighted as crucial for productivity, showcasing the speaker's transition from habits like smoking and coffee to a calming tea ritual.
Establishing a consistent schedule in a conducive environment significantly enhances the speaker's writing process. (Time 0:00:00)
Quality over Quantity
Summary:
In the digital age, the ease of typing on a computer led to longer stories being submitted for an anthology, often lacking substance.
The speaker learned that adding content was effortless, but the real work lay in choosing what to include. To maintain quality, the speaker had to resist the temptation to let their writing expand excessively, understanding that excessive additions could lead to diluted and insubstantial work.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
Not much. Five, six, seven years, mid nineties. Everybody is now on computer. And I edited another short story anthology. And the stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between six and 9,000 words long. And they didn't really have much more story than the 3,000 words ones. And I realized that what was happening is, it's a sort of a computery thing. If you're typing, putting stuff down is work. If you've got a computer, adding stuff is not work. Choosing is work. So it sort of expands a bit like a guess. If you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If you have the stuff you want to add, you add it. And I thought, okay, I have to not do that. Because otherwise my stuff is going to balloon. It will become gaseous and thin. So what I love, if I've written something on a computer and I decide to lose a chunk, it feels like I've lost work. If I delete a page and a half, I feel like there's a page and a half that just went away. That's (Time 0:15:28)
Finding Routine and Environment for Productivity
Summary:
Transitioning from smoking and coffee to tea, the speaker realized the importance of a daily routine for successful writing.
Creating a repetitive, Groundhog Day-like schedule, in a conducive environment such as a serene house by the water, proved most effective for the speaker's writing process.
Transcript:
Speaker 3
And I was a smoker and a coffee drinker, and it was great. I moved to America in 92, gave up smoking 93, stopped drinking coffee, went over to tea, and tried carrying on being a late night writer, and gradually realized that I wasn't really anymore. What tended to happen was somewhere around one in the morning, I'd be writing away, and then I would lift my head from the keyboard at four o 'clock in the morning, and have 3,000 pages Of the letter M and just go, okay, this doesn't really work anymore for me. And then I started rescheduling, trying different things out. Part of what I discovered particularly about being a novelist is writing a novel works best if you can do the same day over and over again. The closer you can come to just Groundhog Day, you just repeat that day. You set up a day that works for yourself. The last novel that I actually wrote, I was at Tori Amos's wonderful house in Florida. She has this lovely sort of house on the water that she's lent me many times to go and write in. (Time 0:24:12)
