A productivity method for writing lots of fiction and having fun doing it
According to his Wikipedia entry, Anthony Trollope wrote 47 novels, 42 short stories, and several non-fiction books – many of them popular in his lifetime.
Despite his prolific output, Trollope didn’t look back on a life of drudgery. Quite the opposite. “Few men, I think, ever lived a fuller life,” he says in his autobiography.
Today, we’re going to take a look at how Trollope wrote and what we – roughly 150 years later – can learn from him about getting work done. And still having time for other things.
Show no mercy – and get a groom to make coffee
Trollope attributes the fullness of his life to his disciplined work schedule:
“It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. During all those years at Waltham Cross he was never once late with the coffee which it was his duty to bring me. I do not know that I ought not to feel that I owe more to him than to any one else for the success I have had.”
I love that he allowed himself no mercy, but then, just to be sure he didn’t slip up, he took the matter out of his own hands by hiring a groom to wake him and bring him coffee. This principle still works today, and I see some writing tips we can adopt.
1) Commit to your writing and hold yourself accountable.
Trollope’s idea is simple – set a specific time for writing and show up for the work. This is the essence of committing to the work and then doing it:
- Schedule a time and add it to your calendar
- Set your alarm to wake or notify you
- Don’t allow yourself to hit snooze or dismiss the alert
Of course, this may require reorganizing your day. But if your writing is important to you, what are you willing to change in your day? Getting up early, like Trollope, requires going to bed early. Can you commit to being in bed by 9:30 or 10 pm? Why not? Note down what’s keeping you from committing to an early bedtime and early start. Maybe it’s TV. Maybe you like to read books in the evening. Whatever is on your list, consider how important the items are compared with your writing. If you really want to write a novel or stories, what are you willing to give up?
2) Get someone else to hold you accountable, too.
Who can serve as your accountability partner? Notice that Trollope didn’t ask his wife, Rose, to hold him accountable. Instead, he paid a groom to do the task of waking him and making sure his butt got into that chair for his morning writing session.
A lot of the tasks that Trollope needed his groom for can be handled by electronics today, from alarm clocks to coffee machines. But only a human being can serve as a real accountability partner, reminding you of your commitment.
A fellow writer is a good option, someone who can send you a message during the day: “Hey, did you write this morning?” Alternatively, you can hire a writing coach to help you. Either way, it should be someone who, as Trollope says, “allows no mercy.”
3) Eliminate the tasks that stand in the way of your writing.
Don’t underestimate the importance of Trollope’s investment in coffee making. Every task that stands between you and your writing can be a distraction. Trollope knew this. Which was why he eliminated other morning tasks.
Once the groom woke him, all Trollope had to do was slip out of bed, pull on his slippers and robe, and then go sit down to his pen and paper – and coffee, of course.
Short of hiring an old groom to make you coffee, though, how can you automate the coffee making? If you have a coffee maker, many models have timers on them, so they automatically brew a cup of coffee for you at, say, 5:30 am. Or you can make a big batch of cold brew coffee, so you have enough for each morning of the week (the coffee does degrade, so better make a fresh batch every week or even every few days).
Let’s assume you’ve committed to your writing – and to showing yourself no mercy. Once you’re sitting at the desk with your pen and ink (aka laptop) in front of you, what do you then do? Do you start writing right away?
No, Trollope tells us. There’s something else you must do first.
Read yesterday’s writing
According to Trollope, a writing session doesn’t start with writing; it starts with reading:
“I always began my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases. I would strongly recommend this practice to all tyros in writing. That their work should be read after it has been written is a matter of course,—that it should be read twice at least before it goes to the printers, I take to be a matter of course. But by reading what he has last written, just before he recommences his task, the writer will catch the tone and spirit of what he is then saying, and will avoid the fault of seeming to be unlike himself.”
Tone of voice is obviously important, and your state of mind may be different from day to day, so Trollope’s advice is good: check yesterday’s writing, so you can slip into that voice, ensuring your draft is consistent.
Trollope doesn’t mention another important benefit. By checking yesterday’s writing, you can refresh some of the character, setting, and plot details, ensuring that those are consistent, too.
So, our next takeaway is:
4) Read yesterday’s writing to ensure consistency.
But don’t spend the whole time reading.
Trollope wrote in 3-hour sessions. If he devoted 30 minutes to reading the previous day’s work, then that left 150 minutes for new writing. Or, put another way, the half hour is about 16 percent of the session.
So, if you devote 2 hours to your writing, you need to carve out the first 20 minutes for reading yesterday’s work. Or if you have 1 hour, you devote about 10 minutes to reading yesterday’s work.
The trick is to leave plenty of time for new writing – and please don’t tinker with yesterday’s writing. It’s a surefire way to procrastinate and avoid today’s work.
Track your progress
Once you’ve read yesterday’s writing, it’s time to write. But for how long? And how much should you write? In answering these questions, Trollope has developed a very modern approach to productivity based on measuring progress.
He describes how he counts his words, tracking his progress as he goes:
“It had at this time become my custom,—and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself,—to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went.”
Trollope’s approach reminds me of the Pomodoro technique, invented in the 1980s, according to which you work in intervals, with short breaks in between each session. The difference being that Trollope didn’t take breaks. In fact, his intention was to set goal posts and to track his progress.
And there’s no denying this methodical approach – combined with daily persistence – resulted in progress:
“This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year…”
In other words,10 pages a day of 250 words per page results in 2,500 words a day. Not bad.
So what lesson can we take away from this?
5) Set a timer and track your progress.
A timer going off every 15 minutes may sound annoying. It may even sound silly. Why bother keeping track of word count every 15 minutes? Well, it’s another way to hold yourself accountable. There’s no point to getting your writing done, if you’re spending the whole session daydreaming about other stuff.
(Daydreaming is important to writing, you may say. And I agree. But I recommend finding time elsewhere in your day to daydream about characters or plot – when you’re taking a shower or going for a walk or cooking dinner.)
If 15 minutes is too often, try setting a timer for every 30 minutes or even 60 minutes, depending on how much time you have to devote to your writing in every session. Or you can tally up your word count at the end of your session.
When the timer goes off, check your word count and make a note of it. Make sure that noting down the number is as easy as possible, whether it’s on a notepad on your desk or in a notes app on your computer. Then get back to writing immediately.
At the end of your session – or later that day – put the word count number(s) into a spreadsheet, so you keep track of your progress. Some writing apps, like Scrivener or Ulysses, track your progress for you. That’s fine. But when you’re starting out, I would recommend tracking your progress in a spreadsheet – you’ll pay more attention to it. Like Trollope did.
Anthony Trollope’s “method”
Here’s a summary of the points above:
- Commit to your writing and hold yourself accountable.
- Get someone else to hold you accountable, too.
- Eliminate the tasks that stand in the way of your writing.
- Read yesterday’s writing to ensure consistency.
- Set a timer and track your progress.
Work hard and have fun
At this point, you may be convinced that Trollope paid attention to productivity. But didn’t he say something about living a “full life”? Yes, he did. Here’s what he says in his autobiography about his early morning writing routine:
“By beginning at that hour I could complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.”
Trollope had a goal and he stuck to it. By strictly committing to a daily production schedule and confining it to the early mornings, he could devote the rest of the day to other responsibilities or interests. I picture him moving through his day blissfully free from feeling guilty or distracted by his thoughts on writing. After all, he’d done it. And he knew that tomorrow he had time set aside to do it again.
If we don’t do any of the things he suggests above, we can at least try this three-part idea: commit to the work, find time to do it, and then do it. No excuses.
Part of the joy Trollope felt, I believe, was the joy of having accomplished what he set out to do – day after day. It’s a good feeling. I hope you’re feeling it too these days.
