In Praise of Dribs and Drabs

People often ask me, "How do you find the time to write a novel?" To tell the truth, I wish I could produce more work that I have so far. But for what it's worth, here's my secret.

Last week I was off from work and decided to catch up on some well-needed rest. This semester I'm teaching seven classes in addition to working on my writing, so sleep is one of the several activities that have gotten short shrift recently, meaning I usually manage about five, six hours a night during the week, sometimes as much as six and a half.

So last week I slept as long as I wanted, enjoyed nine to ten hours of sleep a night, and during the day I was a zombie, drifting around Manhattan like poor shell-shocked Septimus Smith from Mrs. Dalloway wandering around Hyde Park. By contrast, now that I'm back to my regular sleep-deprived schedule, I'm buzzing from class to class, tearing through a staggeringly accomplished lost classic novel called Three Cities by Sholem Asch, churning out revisions on my new novel, a couple of essays, and this blog that's in front of you right now.

In the same way, I've often found that when I've had plenty of free time to write, long empty stretches of hours with nothing to do but focus on my work, it can take me forever to get anything done. But when my schedule is full and I'm forced to carve out half an hour on the subway, an hour when I get home, plus another hour after dinner and then maybe sneak in another fifteen minutes before bed, I'm much more productive.

You'd think that working in these dribs and drabs would result in a pile of scraps with little relation to each other. In fact, my new novel Faith for Beginners was almost entirely completed this way, and I'm knee-deep in the middle of another novel whose first draft was composed drib by drab on the subway ride home from Brooklyn.

How many times have you heard the complaint, "I wish I could write more, but I just don't have the time"? Or "I'd write if I didn't have to work, but I can't afford to quit my job to be a writer."

The reality is that few writers, even ones who've been published, have the luxury of quitting their jobs to pursue their life's calling. Luckily, there are always little wasted bits of time every day that can be recaptured and used for valuable work time. I recently read that the effects of exercise are cumulative, and four fifteen-minute blocks of exercise scattered throughout the day are equal to a continuous one-hour workout. It's my firm belief that the writing process works in much the same way.

Many writers I know invest an almost mystical belief in the necessity of deep concentration to get their pens moving. Maybe that's why there seems to be a general belief out there that if you can't work for three hours at a time, there's no use in trying to get anything done in two hours, one hour, or even half an hour. For me, the trick has been to break down the process into smaller tasks that can be completed in thirty minutes to an hour and a half. These tasks might include re-reading the previous day's work and making light revisions, re-writing a stubborn paragraph that hasn't been working, or jotting down notes for a scene that hasn't been written yet. Sometimes I'll just work on one or two pages that seem to form some kind of thematic unit in themselves, then take a break to tackle some chore I need to get done, and then pick up my book where I left off.

I'll confess that at some point in whatever project I've worked on, I've needed stretches of uninterrupted time when I could focus for longer than an hour or so. In the past, I've used holidays or vacations to block out that kind of prime writing time. However, those precious stretches of free time would have been worthless if I hadn't generated raw material during my usual hectic workweeks. So if you have a life outside of writing, as most of us are required to do, and you want to generate enough material for a collection of stories, a novel, or a book of poems, you may find the drib-and-drab method could work for you.