A Word with Doug Wilhelm

Years ago, I was young, living in Asia, teaching English for a meagre living, and trying to write a book when I didn’t know how. I had been a newspaperman back home, and that helps in some ways: You do write for a living, but you learn to do it in a hyperated rush on deadline. You come to depend on that deadline, on that external pressure. If you leave a job like that behind — and I, living then in Kathmandu, Nepal, had left mine a long ways behind — and you’re trying to write a book on your own, you can wonder:

How do I do this?

Today, about 28 years later, I resumed working on a new young-adult novel, which if it gets published (always a big if) will be my 12th. I started it last winter. Recently I’d had to take a break, to get married on Labor Day weekend (it turns out this, like writing a book, involves a lot of work), then to work again through the first half of the story-in-progress, revising the draft, getting back to the point when the first draft stops — then to spend a week reading, making notes and trying to brainstorm the second half. Which I hadn’t started yet.

And all that is fine, necessary; but there comes that point when you do have, once again, to start writing. Today, Monday morning, that’s where I was. And no matter what I do, how well I try to research and generate ideas and otherwise prepare, when I face that blank screen I never know what is going to happen. I just don’t.

But I do start. That’s the key — just to start, and not to go back over and over but to push ahead. It doesn’t have to be great; it’s just a start. A rough draft. Once I do get started, I work on the project every day that I possibly can, from 8 to 10 a.m. if I can make that time, or later in the day if I have to. Before my two hours end, my goal is to write at least 1,500 words.

Today I did that, a little more in fact. And when I had moved on to other projects in my day, I remembered something I once read in a book. It was in a long, very wonderful novel, War and Remembrance, written by a very successful author, Herman Wouk. The book came out in 1978 and I read it not long after that, when I was living overseas and trying to write. Wouk’s novel is 1,056 pages long — and it encompasses, in a thrilling, absorbing and moving story, virtually all of World War II. I’m pretty sure I read it twice, along with Wouk’s previous novel, The Winds of War. (I was a long way from home, I had time, and they were worth it.)

One important character in War and Remembrance is an elderly, successful Jewish scholar and author who, for much of the story, is a refugee on the run from the Nazis. Amid all the adventures and dangers and horrors he experiences, this character tries to keep his work going. He mostly does, too. At one point he says, of his morning’s work, something like this: “I did my 1,500 words.”

I was impressed by that, even then. I thought, Is the real author telling us something? Is this how he got these massive, world-scale novels written — by doing his daily 1,500 words?

This morning that line came back to me. I don’t know if I’m remembering it exactly, but I’m almost positive about the 1,500 words. And I do think Wouk was telling us that this how to do it. Set a daily goal for your writing, then meet it every day.

Myself, I find that setting and meeting this particular goal, which is challenging but achievable — 1,500 words is a fairly good workout, especially if you’re finding those words inside yourself and you start out not knowing where they are — allows you satisfaction. A book is a very big project, and you may or may not be able to achieve the one you dream of; but each day you can do 1,500 words. And over time, those words do do add up. You and I may never write anything like War and Remembrance … but we can do a certain number words a day. We can.

And if we do … who knows where we might end up?