This Year You Write Your Novel by Walter Mosley Page A

lose. There’s no time to wait for inspiration. Getting your words down on the page takes time. How much? I write three hours every morning. It’s the first thing I do, Monday through Sunday, fifty-two weeks a year. Some days I miss but rarely does this happen more than once a month. Writing is a serious enterprise that takes a certain amount of constancy and rigor.
    But will and regularity are only the beginnings of the discipline and rewards that daily writing will mean for you.
    The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity. What do I mean by this? I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, moods, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words. Sometimes you will be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted journey through your protagonist’s ragged heart. These moments are when you have connected to some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal that made you want to write to begin with.
    The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day. Or not even writing. Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting there scrolling back and forth through the text. This is enough to bring you back into the dream of your story.
    What, you ask, is the dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind—a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel.
    You may have spent only an hour and a half working on the book, but the rest of the day will be rife with motive moments in your unconsciousness—moments in your mind, which will be mulling over the places your words have touched. While you sleep, mountains are moving deep within your psyche. When you wake up and return to the book, you will be amazed by the realization that you are further along than when you left off yesterday.
    If you skip a day or more between your writing sessions, your mind will drift away from these deep moments of your story. You will find that you’ll have to slog back to a place that would have been easily attained if only you wrote every day.
    Some days you will sit down and nothing will come—that’s all right. Some days you’ll wish you had given yourself more time—that’s okay too. You can always pick up tomorrow where you left off today.
    In order to be a writer, you have to set up a daily routine. Put aside an amount of time (not less than an hour and a half) to sit with your computer or notebook. I know that this is difficult. Some of you live in tight spaces with loved ones. Some of you work so hard that you can’t see straight half the time. Some of you have little ones who might need your attention at any time of the day or night.
    I wish I had the answers to these problems. I don’t. All I can tell you is that if you want to finish your novel this year, you have to write each and every day.
    learning how to write without restraint
    Self-restraint is what makes it possible for society to exist. We refrain, most of the time, from expressing our rage and lust. Most of us do not steal or murder or rape. Many words come into our minds that we never utter—even when we’re alone. We imagine terrible deeds but push them out of our thoughts before they’ve had a chance to emerge fully.
    Almost all adult human beings are emotionally restrained. Our closest friends, our coworkers, and our families never know the brutal and deviant urges and furies that reside in our breasts.
    This restraint is a good thing. I know that my feelings are often quite antisocial. Sometimes I just see someone walking down the street and the devil in me wants to say things that would be awful to hear. No good would come from my expressing these asocial instincts—at least not usually.
    The writer, however, must loosen the bonds that have held her back all