"Back in my pulp-mag days I worked from about 8:30 to noon, took an hour off for lunch, and worked again from one to three, for a work day of five and a half hours or so. I wrote 20 to 30 pages of copy in that time, doing it all first draft, so that I was able to produce a short story of 5000-7500 words in a single day. If I had 3000-worders to do, I usually wrote one before lunch and one after lunch. At three o'clock I poured myself a shot of rum or mixed a martini, put a record on, and sat down to relax until dinnertime, reading and perhaps sketching out the next day's work on a scrap of paper. This was the Tuesday-to-Friday routine. I never worked on Saturday or Sunday... In weeks when I was writing a novel, I followed a five-day schedule, doing about thirty pages a day, so a typical Ace novel would take me six or seven days to write. I produced a lot of copy that way—a million words a year, or more."--Robert Silverberg in conversation with Octopulps, Francesca Myman's website highlighting SF, fantasy and adventure pulps "featuring the wily octopus." (Hat tip to BoingBoing for the link.)
(Sixteenth in a series.)
2 comments:
He knew how it was done. Makes me a little ashamed to be proud when I'm able to produce 2 or 3 thousand words a day.
And in the process of all this he wrote some of the most revered and important science fiction of our time. Dying Inside alone would get him into writer's heaven.
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