How to (Actually) Be a Writer →
Todd Moss, writing for Penguin Random House, on Medium:
That was just the beginning. Putnam asked for three more books in the Ryker series, one per year. This meant I needed a disciplined system to write and still hold down my day job. (I also drive my son to high school, coach middle school basketball, and pick up my fourth grader from dance class.) Thus the questions: Where do you find the time? How can you keep everything straight in your head? Do you ever see your family? When do you sleep?
Every author has their own system that works best for them. Here’s mine.
Look past the link bait-y title of this piece. This is about as close as I’ve ever seen to what the optimal setup of a functioning writer looks like. It’s a little dry for my taste (he’s not creating what I would call Literary Fiction, which demands a bit more of Artistic Process) but it’s a damn good starting point. They should hand something like this out to all the 20-somethings in MFA programs who (as I once did) think that hanging out with our buddies Charles Bukowski, Jim Beam, and Nat Sherman is the only way to write anything of worth.