Mentor Monday: The Whens

I know writers who write only when inspiration comes.  How would Isaac Stern play if he played the violin only when he felt like it?  He would be lousy . . . the same is true for art of every type. 

                                      -- Madeleine L'Engle

I write only when I feel like it and whenever I feel like it.  I do it in a restaurant, on a plane, on a train in a car.  I wake up in the middle of the night to make notes to myself and never know when I'll sit down at the typewriter -- or the tape recorder.  The new book stays with me all the time . . . I think the longest uninterrupted stretch I ever had was twenty-seven hours.  I produced nineteen pages of the Painted Bird, which in the drafts that followed shrank to one page.  On an average, I probably produce about a page, maybe a page and a half, in a sitting.

                                         -- Jerzy Kosinski


In this profession you have to write something every day, because language is hard to control . . . You have to work five hours a day, even if you just describe what your milk dealer says.

                                          -- Use Johnson

Every morning between 9 and 12, I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper.  Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me.  But I know one thing: If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.

               -- Flannery O'Connor

When I sit down to write -- that's between nine and twelve every morning, and I have never incidentally, written a line in the afternoon or night -- when I sit down at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be till I'm underway.  I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't.  But I don't sit back waiting for it.  I work every day.

                          -- Alberto Moravia

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.  You feel dull, you have a headache, nobody loves you, write.  If all feels hopeless, if that famous 'inspiration' will not come, write.  If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not -- and the odds are clearly against it -- go to your desk, no matter what your mood, face the very challenge of the paper -- write.

                              -- J. B. Priestley