Dame Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time. Her detective novels featuring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple have sold more than two billion copies. That’s right, billion with a B. She wrote 66 mystery novels, 6 romance novels, 14 short story collections, and 33 plays.
Most self-employed professionals and creatives have plenty of writing that needs doing. You may publish a blog, create course materials, compose emails and web copy, or even write on behalf of your clients. So, what advice does a prolific writer like Dame Agatha have about getting your writing done? “Write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you are writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.”
Whoa. Just picture what that would be like. You wake up with the intent to write, but you’re not in the mood. You sit down at the keyboard anyway, and start working. The writing doesn’t go well. You’re not liking what you’re producing. In fact, you think it’s awful.
But you keep going.
That’s right. You just keep on writing anyway. Bad mood, bad writing, and all.
Now, you may think that approach makes no sense. You may hold the view that when you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you should do something else. Or that you should only work on what you feel excited about on a particular day. Or that when you’re getting poor results, it’s a sign that you should stop.
But have you written anywhere near the equivalent of Dame Agatha’s 86 books and 33 plays? Her books average about 50,000 words or 200 pages, and her plays run approximately 120 pages or 48,000 words. Multiply that by her output and you get a total of 5,884,000 words or 21,160 pages.
You may wonder how long it took Dame Agatha to write those many, many words. Her writing career began in 1916, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She wrote her last novel, Postern of Fate, in 1973. Not counting the works she wrote that were never published (yes, she had failures, also), this shows she was producing 103,228 words or 371 completed pages per year, every year, from 1916 to 1973. “Completed” means she researched, organized, wrote, revised, and edited all that material.
I don’t know about you, but I would be thrilled if I produced 371 completed pages in a year.
And if you, like me, are only a part-time writer, you don’t have forty hours per week to do nothing but write. You may be lucky to find four hours. Some weeks, you may only have forty minutes.
This is why Dame Agatha’s advice becomes even more important to writers like you and me. Let’s review it one more time: “Write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you are writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.”
I think Dame Agatha was onto something.
(Image credit: agathachristie.com)
