The Grahame Green School of Writing

In January, I made a new years resolution to write more - as I suppose most wannabe writes will. June, and it's going... okay... However, I have made an amendment. I found an interesting old post on author, William Landlay's blog about Grahame Greene.

Grahame Greene, (who wrote one of my favourite books, Brighton Rock, among lots of other classics) wrote 500 words a day. That's not really a lot - just under about 2 pages. And did that five days a week. Later in his life, as William Landlay noted, it dropped to only 300, and perhaps not every day.

I think this is great idea - to write 500 words a day shouldn't (in theory!) take that long to do and means that if I wrote every day (except for Christmas day, of course!) I would write 182,000 words. Enough for about 2 and a half average books. (Although, what is an average book?!) I tried it out last night - it was a struggle to get started at first (I'm a little stuck in my latest story) but then when I did get closer to the magic 500, I found it flowed a lot easier and ended up writing about 900 words instead. (I work full time - actually, more than full time - so spare time to write is a rarity). Grahame Greene was a little bit more OCD about it - he would stop dead on the 500, even in the middle of a scene (or sentence, I think). I think I will try for a minimum of 500 and hopefully more should the muse permit it! Of course, I have the advantage of a word count on my word processor - poor old Grahame Greene would have had to counted each word himself!