“Television and your future self”

Terrific post by Barry Eisler on time management:

I’ve done 15 signings in the last two weeks, and a lot of people have asked for advice on how to write a novel. I tell them, “Don’t watch television.”

There’s a common misconception that novels get written in a mad rush over a month or two in an isolated cabin or on a mountain top. They don’t. They get written an hour or two at a time, day by day, over the course of many years (eight years, in the case of my first novel, Rain Fall).

“An hour or two at a time, day by day, over the course of many years”… well, that’s exactly how people watch television, isn’t it?

There are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in our lives. If you use those daily hours doing one thing, you can’t use them for something else. It’s that simple.

Now, of course, I could self-righteously puff out my chest and crow about how little television I watch… but that’s not the point. If I were to take the amount of time I spend reading other peoples’ novels, I’d certainly have time to write one (or more, given how much I read). Of course, that says nothing about the amount of time I spend doing other entertaining but ultimately non-productive things.

Interestingly, my first several computer books were all written in exactly that way: an hour or two at a time, every night after the kids were in bed. As we added more children, and as they grew, our lives changed, and so did my job; I was able to write full time, every day. Now I’m back to writing columns, articles, and so on in bits and pieces, whenever I can find time. For example, this morning I got up at 0500 and spent about two hours working on a paper. Tonight after the kids are in bed, I’ll probably work on a different paper. I guess I should start thinking seriously about whether I want to try writing long fiction (I think I do), and whether I have any interesting stories to tell (well, the jury’s out on that one.)