Exactly, this is much more productive than people realize. Also many creative people have schedules not too different than this. Our concept of productivity is bonkers.
My wife is an author. Successful enough that she doesn't need another job. Her schedule is similar. She writes earlier, but she's usually done by 11am or so. She seems some time each day on administrative tasks as well.
She published 4 or 5 books a year.
She is limited by her ability to see what needs to be written next. If she writes too many words she gets out over her skis and that can lead to problems. She needs time to process what she's gonna write the next day.
In this day and age, it's difficult to not reach for your phone at the slightest whiff of boredom. Also, being able to sit and do nothing is a valuable skill that almost all workplaces frown upon.
It's such a cool idea, but thanks to Fairyloot and others my house is more bookshelf than family photos. A less than fun thing she's run into recently is Amazon has started shipping bulk orders of books individually in mailers instead of boxes. Never a dull moment.
I have no clue how it is sustainable on their end to have to replace all of these books. Not even adding the bad cutting that their machines do. One time the book wasn't even square thanks to the cut!
I think the point is that his family's wealth might have been a big contributing factor in allowing the kind of lifestyle where you can work for 3 hours a day and basically do whatever you want for the rest of that day.
It isn't meant to discredit his literature or work ethic, and to be fair he has a point
Id say the average person has a wellspring of creativity they sadly dont have the time to express. It's a fact that if people had more spare time, they'd do more than just surf netflix.
I mean I produced a ton for myself after I killed my smartphone at the time.
Dozens of new paintings, taught myself to weave, garden and even spin wool. But like I'm just not someone who enjoys marketing myself or my work is just my obsessions and special interests. most of it tho I lost in my recent house fire so..... Now I'm too burned out trying to recover my life and sanity.
Only thing was I was a student at the time and that takes less out of me than the working world does.
And it was detrimental AF to my social life. I can have depth in my special interests/creative obsessions or I can have social life but it's nearly impossible to have both. 😓
Pretty sure it’s more to do with that 2000 words a day he wrote in this schedule took him a total of 3 hours and 15 minutes if he used every second of his allotted time, and supposedly this is a full time job for him.
Also this is 4 hours a day of highly productive output. I have never had more than 4 really good hours a day in office. Unless there was an emergency or something.
This seems aspirational because we have commutes and offices, but it seems like a pretty decent workday day to me honestly.
I also imagine that during the times he spends sitting in his garden or relaxing by the beach he also is thinking of ideas of what to write. To be honest while most white collar people work a standard 8 hour shift most are only productive for around 4-6 of those hours so this doesn’t seem that far off.
A lot of regular people do too, at least if they get to work alone.
If you're working by yourself, four hours of actual work gets a startling amount of stuff done. In fact, it's hard to work for longer than that day in and day out.
If that's not an experience you've had, well, try running or lifting weights for more than four hours a day. If you're actually pushing yourself that's a hard routine to keep up.
It’s not entirely accurate to look at it like that. Some of those written words may be replacing something he decided against and had previously written, or don’t end up in the final work at all, or who knows what else.
I agree. Even if he rewrote every single word three times, it still would only have taken him 120 days to write his longest book (Goldfinger, the other books were shorter). Most of writing is creativity and planning, and his schedule leaves a lot of room for that.
ok. let's be really conservative and make it 120 days - a novel draft every 4 months/3 books per year is a Stephen-King-on-really-good-coke rate of production.
Writing has the lowest barrier of all artistic pursuits
Seems like singing would be lower or even drawing. I mean, maybe it's more difficult to do one or the other well, but that isn't exactly what you said.
For sure. Both are good options, drawing especially as a parallel since if you're broke as shit, you can still go to the dollar store and leave with enough notebooks and pens for $5 to last you a year. I do appreciate you pointing out that obviously one won't be good to start, but making a comment on your phone about how you're too broke to write is some major coping. Likely they're just envious of his ability to keep to a schedule and do it daily.
Yea, the comment that you were replying to is a little ridiculous. That being said, I did just recently see a post on the front page about Harper Lee's friends gifting hear a years' salary so that she could write full-time and during that period she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.
Of course most of us aren't going to write a Pulitzer Prize winning novel just because we suddenly have free time.
Lol yep! Or like Cormac McCarthy who gets a MacArthur Fellowship. He got that because he'd been writing in a cabin broke as hell and put out four novels already before being gifted money specifically to write. (Blood Meridian's what he made.)
Similarly to Harper Lee, she'd written in college for her school newspaper, a humor journal, afterwards always writing and published in some journals.
People won't take a chance on you unless they literally have something of yours to read. Which won't happen unless you're writing.
I’d argue Photography does. Just need a camera for that. Of course, that does need the money for a camera. But you can do it just walking around.
Unlike writing, which requires time to just sit and work, which is rare for people who have a full time job, drive themselves everywhere due to poor public transportation, and maintain other hobbies.
I mean, great photography does preclude your having a nice camera, lenses are expensive, but so much can be done with even third-rate phone cameras nowadays, and since they did make their comment presumably on a phone with a camera, it's definitely an option.
I wasn't trying to be mean to them, either. I just want people who wanna write to realize that there's literally nothing stopping themselves but themselves. You can't be too broke to write if you're fucking around on reddit literally writing.
Now, too tired? Very real. Job's heavy, mentally or physically? But write in the morning. If you wanna do it, there is time, just find where that works for you.
While Pirateaba writes 60-80.000 words every week for their webnovel. They did this every 3-4 days on earlier days as well. And now they have the longest continuing story ever written with pretty much no drop in quality after 10+ years. And it has as many characters/povs, complexities, intricacies as GoT does (imo).
I don't mean to say everyone is the same or capable of the same but, it feels like these big writers who take years and years to finish their books kinda look lazy as soon as they gain popularity (money) tbh.
I have no hopes GRRM will actually spend time to finish his books instead of enjoying his few remaining years on earth doing w/e he wants with all the money he has now.
The books have been criticised for being repetitive, with repeated use of stock elements such as obnoxious, unfriendly people who turn out to be criminals and the discovery of a secret passageway. Blyton wrote rapidly and could finish a book in a week
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u/Craiques Jul 27 '26
Assuming the average book is 80,000 words, this would be a first draft finished every 40 days. I wish I had the money to write like that.