MM: What is your day-to-day writing process? How do you avoid distractions and manage your time to write? How do you split your time between research, writing new material, and revision? AH: I work every day unless I am teaching. I still tend to give student work priority, and that takes time. But a normal day for me would begin with exercise, followed by 2-3 hours at the desk. Writing first drafts is the hardest for me. It demands focus. So no email, no music, no nothing. Just the blank pages and my notes. After I’ve spent a couple of hours doing that (and the time flies by), I can attend to other matters. Revision is actually easier for me than the production of a first draft. I can spend hours at revision. I somehow have faith that I can always make a sentence or a paragraph or a scene better. I tend to do my research when I need it. You don’t really need that much research for a short story—unless you insist on writing about things like work trains or muleskinners, which I sometimes do. A short story can be very convincing if you get the human behavior down, then support it with some sensory detail—smells, tastes, textures, colors that give your reader a powerful sense of the physical world your characters are in. Research can be an excuse not to do the hard work that needs to be done on a story or a novel. So I keep that in mind. I make myself sit down. And I’m pretty good about staying off the computer or my phone or whatever. I need to be. Fiction, particularly the labors of writing a novel, is very demanding. And it doesn’t wait for you to be ready for it. Fiction comes, and it will go--good stories and good books will leave you—unless you honor it. theMeadow 79
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQ3NA==