A Quote by Anne Tyler

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages. — © Anne Tyler
My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.
Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.
It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.
To write three series a year you only need to commit to writing 10 pages per day, or editing 50 pages of text per day. Plus, writing is my job, and I need to write to eat, so I'm highly motivated to get up and get to work!
If you're 50 years old or younger, give every book about 50 pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you're over 50, which is when time gets shorter, subtract your age from 100 - the result is the number of pages you should read before deciding whether or not to quit. If you're 100 or over you get to judge the book by its cover, despite the dangers in doing so.
When you look at the increase in the number of scripted series and the number of unscripted hours, the pool of producers hasn't grown at the same rate. So I think there's a bit of a creative tax on the system.
Generally, I don't attempt to produce a certain number of words a day. The discipline is to work whether you are producing a lot or not, because the day you produce a lot is not necessarily the day you do your best work. So it's trying to do it as regularly as you can without making it - without imposing too rigid a timetable on your self. That would be my ideal.
I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
With television, it's difficult to do some things. You have to shoot so many minutes a day, so you always have to be prepared or you won't be able to complete the number of pages that you have scheduled for that day.
A ten- or twelve-page story seems too easy, which is a funny thing to say considering that writing a decent short story is devastatingly difficult. Yet it still seems easier than a novel. You can turn a short story on a single good line - ten pages of decent writing and one good moment.
The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. The Web's ability to allow people to forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather than simply a network.
Time passes, as the novelist says. The single most useful trick of fiction for our repair and refreshment: the defeat of time. A century of family saga and a ride up an escalator can take the same number of pages. Fiction sets any conversion rate, then changes it in a syllable. The narrator’s mother carries her child up the stairs and the reader follows, for days. But World War I passes in a paragraph. I needed 125 pages to get from Labor Day to Christmas vacation. In six more words, here’s spring.
Strangely, I always have a lot of cut scenes. I keep writing shorter and shorter scripts, thinking that this time, I'll get all my scenes in.
I really do believe that chance favours a prepared mind. Wallace Stegner, who was one of my teachers when I was at Stanford, preached that writing a novel is not something that can be done in a sprint. That it's a marathon. You have to pace yourself. He himself wrote two pages every day and gave himself a day off at Christmas. His argument was at the end of a year, no matter what, you'd got 700 pages and that there's got to be something worth keeping.
I was a journalist. I was a drummer. I was everything. I didn't know what the heck I was. But with Jack Paar, the job was very specific - no confusion. You came in each day. You wrote five pages of jokes. You handed the pages in... The pressure was to write five pages of jokes every day. I did it, and I thought, 'This is what I like to do.'
I don't like to think in terms of writing ten or twelve pages a day. Usually I'm writing a scene, and it's always with the idea, "I wonder what is going to happen." Or sometimes I write about something that affected me emotionally the day before and that I don't want to lose. I'm very unorganized at first; but finally it comes into a structure where consciously I'm working on a novel per se.
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