Writing a book in 40 minutes; and the uncanny in historical fiction

#4 in the series of lessons gleaned from my books

Photo by Silverius Trandafir on Unsplash

The last piece I posted was about slowing to write, and not trying to one-up AI.

And here I am, writing about what can be done in “40 minutes.” I’m not saying you write a book in 40 minutes; you write a book in 40 minutes many times over.

Or 10 minutes. Ten minutes times four many times over. Because ten minutes is ten minutes.

Writers are blessed that we can even do our creating in mere minutes. Unlike other art forms that require team-work, collaboration, setting up and tearing down, equipment, and more, we can take hold of a pen and paper and make use of five minutes in a parked car or a cashier line-up. Or anywhere. Even those who say they need time to get in the “flow” can still pull off 10 minutes of scribbling a note about plot or a snippet of dialogue/conversation or a flashback. Something. They might find that the next ten minutes is some substantial bit of story, emerging from some dribble of flow—’cus flow is, after all, still a collection of droplets.

This series

If you are new to The Unschool For Writing, and this series, I’m writing a post for each of my dozen books on “lessons absorbed.” There’s two for this first book, Thunder Ice, all those years ago in 1996.