It’s funny now that I think of it, but it wasn’t until recently that I’ve begun to really enjoy reading about writing from other writers. Perhaps that’s because I still consider myself a half-writer at best, and even that is a very recent achievement. But in the past year or so, I’ve become a bit of a writers-on-writing junkie. I read Stephen King’s excellent On Writing last year, and since then I’ve been collecting interviews with writers in a folder online. Just recently I read Neil Gaiman’s interview with Stephen King, McSweeney’s Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do, not to mention countless blogs on the process.

Part of it was healthy procrastination, of course, as I was writing my own book. But mostly I’ve become a junkie for those “Aha!” moments because I finally get what writers mean when they say things like, “It takes practice like running or swimming fast miles. When I haven’t written for a month or two I cannot access this part of being and I have to begin training in my fashion.”

That quote comes from the most recent piece in my collection, Tim Ferris’ interview with Fred Waitzkin, author of Searching for Bobby Fischer and The Dream Merchant. While I had heard of both those books before, I was unfamiliar with Waitzkin himself, and I had never read anything he had written. What struck me instead, were bits like this:

“Inspiration is frequently misunderstood. When I was a young writer I looked for it in all the wrong places. In my twenties, I lived with my wife in a studio apartment just off Washington Square. Somehow I decided that the best writing time for me was late at night–I guessed that was when the muses would be running wild and delivering intoxicating poetic secrets. Perhaps I got this impression from Thelonious Monk’s ‘Round about Midnight’ which I played over and over–it was so hauntingly beautiful and sad. In those days, after a late heavy dinner with a couple of beers topped off by more than a few drags of weed, I took my yellow legal pad into the chilly unsightly stairwell across from my front door and got ready to write the great American novel. Ugh, wrong move, Waitz. I recall sitting in the stairwell waiting for inspiration to strike until I was dozing off or feeling too cold. Some evenings when my wife was off taking classes at N.Y.U., for inspiration I maxed out the hifi with Ornette Coleman or John Coltrane blasting pure madness solos while I tried to compose my delicate pages. Wrong. Wrong. All wrong, Waitzkin.

Now, many years later, when I’m working on a book I write everyday except Sunday, when I watch football or go to the country with my wife. This routine has settled deeply inside. It gives me confidence. I’ve learned that pages will come if I go to my quiet office and stick with my routine. Back in the younger days, the unsightly stairwell seemed cool, but not now. I could never do my best work after a heavy meal or with the music blasting. It would be a distraction–an energy robber.”

Aha! Of course he’s right, and that’s something I learned very recently the hard way as well. I first tried to only write when I was in the “right mood”, in the perfect setting and with just the right combination of caffeine and alcohol. What did that get me? A good three months when I wrote maybe half a chapter in total. And then deadlines began to appear and I started setting aside blocks of eight, ten hours a day for just researching and writing, every single day, and while it took a whole lot longer than I ever expected, suddenly I had ten chapters done, then twenty, then finally all twenty-five and then editing went a lot faster because I was already thinking and living the book at that point.

There’s more:

“But what if there is no energy? I read the paper. I switch on sports talk radio. I look at my watch. I pace. I am eyeing the lunch hour. It’s getting closer to lunch. One hour before I meet my friend Jeff for turkey burgers. Forty-five minutes. Now I’m getting nervous. Thirty-five minutes before I have to leave my office! Suddenly I feel an urgency. I CAN’T leave for lunch without writing one good paragraph. I’m sweating, feeling the time pressure… and the words pour out. Sometimes a writer can do more in a fervent half hour than in a dreary eight-hour day. I’ve often played this game with myself.”

For me, it’s dicking around on the internets (how do you think I find all these pieces?), going for a bike ride, playing XBox, but the process is the same. And here I thought I was a slacker, a lazy, distracted procrastinator that’s only good at cramming. Now I know I’m not alone, because if someone as great as Fred Waitzkin dicks around for half a day before getting a paragraph out, maybe there’s nothing wrong with me after all.

There’s a lot more gold in this interview, and I recommend anyone thinking about writing for a living (or even for shits and giggles) to read parts one and two in full, take notes, save them in a folder, whatever. And then maybe read some more, for a little while, but not too long, because eventually it’s all about writing, and then writing more. Every single day.

In the past year or so, I’ve read a good dozen books on being productive. Books teaching me to be a ninja, to get things done, to get things done in a zen way, to develop new habits, to shed old habits, to eat better, to sleep more, to sleep less, and to do it all in four hours per week.

And what has come of it? Frankly, I’ve found a great new way to procrastinate: reading about being productive. But as far as actual productivity goes, I’m pretty much in the same boat I was when I started: I have rare good days when I’m on from morning to night and get a week’s worth of work done in one day; I have somewhat less rare bad days when the thought of shedding pajamas or taking a shower, much less going anywhere to do anything I really need to do, is the least appealing concept in the world and I can somehow justify it to myself that watching twelve episodes of Battlestar Galactica in a row is OK and all that I should strive to do that day; and then I have average days most of the time, when I know I should spend less time checking emails and reading blogs, when I know I don’t really have to go to the grocery store before I start working, and when I do finally get in a “work mood” I can go for a few hours straight, but I always start later than I intended to the day before, so at the end of the night I don’t feel horrible, but I also know I could have done better.

So I kept reading these books and blog posts on productivity to try to discover the secret of having more good days, of making every single day a good day. Start early; don’t check email first thing in the morning; start late, after running all your errands; go for a run first; have a morning routine; don’t eat dinner until you’re done working for the day - all decent advice that has worked for plenty of people, I’m sure. And yet, so far only one trick has proven effective for me: actually starting. Sure, I still can’t make myself start working first thing after getting up, but if I allow myself to make excuses (“just one more episode”, “you know, I need to get cat litter… at the store across town because it’s a bit cheaper”, “I need to stick to my morning/afternoon routine of breakfast and BBC news and working out and shower and only then, a good two hours later, can I start working…”), then the scale keeps sliding away from good to average towards bad day, at which point, halfway through average I do just give up, call it a bad day and hope for a better one tomorrow.

But if I just start, at any point during that process, and will myself to not stop for any reason for at least half an hour or so, somehow the rest falls into place. The excuses become less tempting, the work becomes easier. I get a flow. I just have to start. Like, right now.

For the past month, I’ve been writing a book. Except that’s a lie. First of all, I’ve been working on this book since spring, though it was only in the past month, with a looming deadline getting ever so closer, that I have given this project the full-time attention it deserves, at the expense of all other work and my quickly shrinking savings account.

But that’s a lie too, because while I have tried to devote at least eight hours of each day to the book, I also managed to practice for and play a concert, take on a few unavoidable freelance jobs, go to Berlin for a weekend (though I did take my computer and work with me), and play far too much Civilization V.

Here’s another lie: I’m actually only writing half a book. I’m responsible for exactly 25 of 50 chapters, plus the editing of the whole and making it into a stylistically coherent, readable work. But I’m actually writing only half the words that will eventually be published.

Luckily, I have learned some valuable things in the process of half-writing my half-book. First of all, the second you tell someone you’re writing a book, you receive far too much undeserved credit. I’ll take the congratulations once I finally finish the damn thing and see it in my hands, though even then I’d rather wait to see if anyone besides my mother buys a copy.

Second, I completely understand how so many people can successfully finish a book for NaNoWriMo - they’re writing fiction. It’s relatively easy to spew out 50,000 words from the top of your head, and if you’re good, those words might even be worth reading with some polish. However, I learned that non-fiction takes an ungodly amount of time to research, so while I’ve written maybe 10,000 words in the past month, I’ve easily taken twice that in notes and read ten times that as background research, and I’m not even close to done.

Also, try as I did, I found it impossible to disconnect from the world. I wrote a long message on Facebook and proceeded to stay off… for about a week, or until I needed to communicate with someone whose email I only have on Facebook. Or until I needed to promote our concert. I tried to stay in as much as possible, yet I still managed to see my friends and have a few beers (though fewer than usual, at least). I tried to immerse myself in nothing but my subject matter, and I still failed at that - though that turned out to be a good thing. During the past month, when I needed a break or was on public transportation going to or from the cafes and library I spent most my days in, my “fun reading” was Guns, Germs, and Steel, a book I always meant to get around to reading (this is next on that list). It turns out that reading about world history and human movement at the same time I was researching and writing about Polish history and the movement of Poles greatly helped with putting things in perspective.

I also learned that if you have an understanding publisher, deadlines are thankfully flexible - to a point. Because one way or another, I have to finish this thing before my savings run dry, before my friends get sick of hearing about it, before the holidays and the inevitable massive distraction that time of the year will bring. So off I go, back to it again.