“Hilary Mantel once wrote that you should write ‘with the maximum uncertainty you can tolerate,’” Hawkins said. “That is what I endeavour to do.”
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“At five in the morning, I’m too sleepy to do anything but think about what I was last working on. My mind is clearer.”
“I usually try to write five to seven original pages a day,” she told WSJ. “If I go over that, I’m often really depleted for the next day, and I find it’s better to hold onto the continuity.”
“It’s quite easy to talk in grand terms about why you write,” he’s said, “but a lot of the joy is solving the problem.”
“The first thing I do when I wake up is write,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what nonsense it is. You break the resistance before you’re fully conscious.”
“I assumed if I had six hours a day to write, I’d be six times as productive,” he’s said. “It didn’t work out that way.”
“Writing may be creative and all those terms,” he says, “but really, I treat it like a job. A plumber doesn’t wait for inspiration to fix the pipes.”
"When I am writing, I get up and start working at 4am. I am a morning person, luckily, so this is pleasurable for me to do."
"Sit myself in my chair and threaten myself like a recalcitrant child: you will sit in this chair and you will not move until you get this scene written, missy."
"I still work in two hour blocks – and I have a huge hourglass, which was a present from Mary, on my desk to ensure that I work for the full 120 minutes of each session."
"It's not a matter of time. I set a realistic objective: how can I inch along to the next paragraph? Inching is what it is."
