On his podcast, Matt Lewis interviewed Douglas Kennedy, who has written ten novels (including “Leaving the World”) and three travel books. He says he has a mathematical method for writing: two pages, 500 words, a day, five days a week, with four weeks off, yielding close to 500 pages.
He was 39 when his first novel was published and it was his fifth book that broke through. Even after writing thirteen, every new book is a new challenge.
He points out, “In the ‘American Idol’ culture … Simon Cowell will pass his blessings on you and you will get a recording contract and suddenly you’re Leona Lewis,” Kennedy said. “But basically most things happen through work.”
He believes guilt is a good motivator--for instance guilt about not hitting your quota for the day. He says one of the key questions facing every aspiring writers is, “Can you talk yourself into doing this every day?”
[My note: although this is a good way to get your work done, not every writer does write every day; some write in bursts and find it helpful to take time off to re-fill their minds in between writing sessions.]
Kenneday also believes that a bit of anxiety is helpful to keeping a certain edge—even though his books sell 300,000 copies hardcover in France (where he lives part of the year) and movies have been made of several of his novels, he still worries that it will all end.
By the way, I like his comparison of selling the movie rights to your novel to selling your child to Romanian gypsies. This may have been prompted by the fact that a dark novel of his was turned into a musical comedy.
If you’d like to hear the entertaining interview, it’s at Matt Lewis’s podcast:
http://dailycaller.com/2011/09/08/douglas-kennedy-on-writing-well/
(If you want some easy to implement techniques for making time to write, get my book, "Focus: use the power of targeted thinking to get more done". It's published by Pearson and you can get it now from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)