I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
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Oliver Burkeman wrote in the Guardian back in February of Anthony Trollope . . .
. . . each morning, before leaving for his job at the post office, he wrote for three hours. (“Three hours a day,” he reckoned, “will produce as much as a man ought to write.”) So far, so disciplined. But here’s the kicker: if he finished a novel midway through a three-hour period, he just started writing the next one.
That’s how he wrote so many books I suppose!
thanks for adding me to your blogroll – I have reciprocated
@Tom
Thanks Tom! I like that idea – that three hours a day is as much as I ought to write. Makes me feel better about all the time I waste in the afternoon and evening! The way he started a new novel immediately after the old one is just scary, though.