It’s Saturday. What do writers think about on the weekend? Well, lots of things.
First, it depends if the writer has a day job. Believe it or not, most do, because it’s getting harder and harder to make a living writing. Decades ago, a writer who was one of the chosen few could do this, but even then, most couldn’t. One sale with a royalty/advance publisher does not guarantee the next unless you one of the very very few who has made it into that reader favorite category. I do know a few who have made it like that, but not many. Most are like me, it’s a good side income, but not guaranteed enough to pay the mortgage or put food on the table every day.
That means, for most writers, not including spending time with friends and family, the weekends are the days the major amount of writing gets done. Unless you are one of the very few who gets up two hours before you have to leave for work, and that’s your writing time.
I’m not one of those.
Many writers only have the weekends to spend big blocks of time writing. In Steven King’s book – On Writing – (which is great, by the way) he says something that I truly believe in. In his section on what does a writer really need in order to write, he says, and this is not a direct quote, the only thing a writer really needs is a door that they can shut.
Writing is a solitary profession. We need blocks of time to get ideas, sort them in our heads, and write them down in an understandable and interesting way. I type over 100 wpm (I have no idea how many keystrokes that is in the other way of counting typing speed) but writing time is usually not speed typing type. We are not copy typing. We are thinking of every word as we write it, and there are times a writer can do a whole scene in a few minutes, sometime it takes an hour to just write one paragraph until it works. Sometimes I sit there and think, just looking at the blank screen, or looking at a few sentences that didn’t work, and I need to get them to work. The key to that is, no interruptions, and for the strong, no falling victim to distractions.
There is a saying I know the hard way is true. The easier a book is to read, the harder it was to write.
What do I think about on the weekend? For a lot of time it’s when can I get to that place where I can shut the door.