Sometime last year I started writing a new piece of fiction. It was very dark, very nasty, and more than a little disturbing, and when I was about 15,000 words into it, I found I didn’t want to write any more of it. While I wasn’t yet ready to toss it, I decided to put it on the shelf.

It’s handy, that shelf. No matter how many projects I tuck away on it, there’s always room for one more…

And there it stayed, and a month or so ago I found myself once again thinking about that particular project. I’d sensed while writing it that it was apparently destined to be longer than a short story but shorter than a novel, and would probably wind up as a novella. That’s a length that has seemed to suit me in recent years; Keller’s Fedora is a novella, as are Resume Speed and A Time to Scatter Stones. If in fact A Man Walks Into a Bar were to come in at that length, its current run of 15,000 words meant it had reached, and very possibly passed, the halfway point.

One hates to abandon anything that close to the finish line. Could I get back in the virtual saddle and ride it out? Would I want to? Was the game worth the candle?

I printed out what I’d written and sat down and read it, and was surprised to find I genuinely liked what I’d done. It was certainly dark, and readers might well find it unpleasant, but I could live with that. I’d feel better for having finished it, and if I wound up hating it, well, there’d still be room on that shelf.

I spent a week thinking about it, coming up with ways to continue the story, deciding on each occasion that it was something I would get to in a day or so. And the days passed, and I went on thinking my thoughts, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to get started.

Writer’s block? Some might call it that, but I didn’t think anything of the sort was keeping me away from the computer. I just didn’t feel like the long slog of hammering out another five or ten or fifteen thousand words. I wanted to do it, but did it have to be today? Couldn’t I just let it go for a little while? Wouldn’t it be all the better for another day or week of contemplation?

Then I thought of my good friend Jerrold Mundis. As you can see, it’s no hyperbole to say the man wrote the book on writer’s block; Jerry invented a method for his own use and wound up with a sideline enterprise, breaking writer’s block for individual clients. Recently he began work on an introduction to a forthcoming collection of his short fiction. This was the first new writing he’d done in a while, and he used his own time-tested method to get into it, sitting down at his desk each day, setting a kitchen timer for fifteen minutes, and working only until the bell sounded. (I think he’s now up to something like fifty minutes a day, and the introduction has somehow grown longer than some of the stories, but there’s a purpose to it all.)

I thought about this, and instead of adding it to the list of things I would think about every day, I sat down the very next morning with my own kitchen timer, set for twenty minutes. I started writing, and after those twenty minutes were up I stopped on a dime, saved what I’d written, took my shower and fixed my breakfast.

And, except for a wonderful week of gluttony and sloth at the annual Rhubarb Festival in Aledo, Illinois, that’s how I’ve started every day since. I’m now putting in forty-five minutes each morning, and that’s enough of a daily stint. I don’t get all that much done each day, but I like what I’m writing and the way it’s coming together, and I don’t dread sitting down and looking at the screen and coming up with words. I’m actually enjoying it.

How long have you been doing this? A few weeks? 

Something like that. In my youth I once wrote a book in three days, and there were quite a few books that didn’t take much more than a week. And now I’ve spent several weeks, seven-day weeks at that, to produce a few thousand words.

And yet you seem to be pleased with yourself.

Uncommonly so, and it’s curious, isn’t it? You’d think I could have buckled down and knocked off that stretch of wordage in a single day, with one more day—two at the most—to finish the novella. But I’m a very different man, and a very different writer in the bargain, from the brash youth who sped through at a pace of five or six thousand words a day.

Age, to be sure, has much to do with it. The marvelous number 81, in addition to being nine squared and the fourth power of three, not to mention the atomic number of thallium and the number of squares on a shoji playing board, is how old I’ll turn come Monday. I’m of an age where it’s triumph enough to be sitting up and taking nourishment, let alone making up stories and writing them down.

Don’t they say that age is only a number?

Well, a lot they know. The years take a toll, on energy and imagination, and it’s not hard for me to understand the appeal of retirement. I might embrace it myself, but something always seems to come to mind, some idea that quickens the pulse of Ego and Avarice, the two dauntless steeds that haul my chariot. I’m able to let a lot of those ideas dry up and blow away, but not all of them, and now and then I actually find myself Writing Something.

See, I can still do it. I’ve learned a bit over the years, and haven’t had quite enough time to forget much of it. And, sitting down every morning and setting the timer and getting up after forty-five minutes, I’m evidently capable not only of sticking with it but,mirabile disctu, actually enjoying it.

There’s a quote of yours on the Internet—

I know the one you mean. I don’t know that it’s gone precisely viral, but the damn thing’s all over the place, because people who compile lists of quotes generally snatch them up from other lists of quotes. I don’t even remember writing that passage, but in it I point out that, by writing a single page a day, one can produce a substantial novel in a year.

The truth of the statement would seem irrefutable. But while that’s never been the way I’ve worked, a page a day, day in and day out, the estimable Anthony Trollope did just that, methodically jotting down 250 words a day. (Legend has it that if Trollope reached the end of a book before he’d turned out that daily quota, he drew a horizontal line under his last sentence, skipped down a couple of inches, and finished the day’s work by starting a new book. I have no idea if this is true. If you meet him in the afterlife, you could ask him yourself.)

Didn’t you write a book called Trailer Trollop? 

Indeed. That was 58 years ago, as the crow flies, and one of these days I’ll have to placate Ego and Avarice by reissuing it in my Collection of Classic Erotica. Be assured, though, that I did not compose it at a Trollopean pace. I’m sure I batted out 4-5000 words a day, and now all I can recall of the book is its title, and that it was an editor or publisher at Nightstand Books who suggested the theme, and may even have supplied the title, and—

Ha! There goes the timer, slamming the door on memory. Let’s move on to something else, something far removed from trailers and Trollope.

And what would that be?

German audiobooks. The Matthew Scudder novels, newly translated by Stefan Mommertz and Sepp Leeb, have been a triumph of self-publishing, gradually getting a foothold in the German-language market in both ebook and Taschenbuch form.

Taschenbuch? 

Oh, you’d probably say Paperback. Say what you will, Matthew Scudder’s winning new fans in Germany, and now he’s becoming available to those who enjoy reading with their ears. I’ve teamed up with Richard Heinrich, who’s narrating and producing Hörbuch versions of the titles. His rendition of—

I’m almost afraid to ask what a Hörbuch is. Oh, wait. I bet it’s an audiobook.

Indeed it is. The first Scudder Hörbuch, Die Sünden der Väter (The Sins of the Fathers), went on sale not long ago, and now it’s been joined by Matt’s second adventure, Drei am Haken (Time to Murder and Create).

I can assure you that Richard’s done me and Matthew a great service, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Listen to a sample and see—well, best to make that hear—for yourself. Here are some links: Audible  Apple  Buecher  Bookwire Claudio  eBook.de  Google Play Hugendubel  Orellfuessli  Thalia Weltbild  Amazon

Cheers,