Adam Becker

getting work done and getting it done on time or getting it finished um and i i had by that point you know moved past that i finished my my degree and whatnot but i still had this mental image of myself as someone who had difficulty getting work done on time and so i was really extra scared um

But I decided, okay, the only way that I'm going to get through this is if I plan it and then just only pay attention to whatever's in front of me.

Because I can't write 90,000 words, but I can write 600 words a day.

and if i do that for a while eventually i'll have 90 000 um so so yeah so i outlined it and i went over the outline with my publisher and they liked the outline um of course it changed right no no plan survives contact with the editor um so for each chapter i'd outline the chapter

and then i just sort of work through that outline and write a really shitty first draft and try to do 600 words a day and what i do is i would do 50 minutes on and 10 minutes off and in the 10 minutes off i wouldn't look at anything with a screen and i wouldn't read any non-fiction i would i read exclusively novels and that really helped my brain work because i found that if i didn't read at all i couldn't write

Because if there's nothing going in, nothing's going to come out.

So I would write 600 words a day and then get the shitty first draft done and then walk away from it and then come back and clean it up and fill in all of the blank spots where I knew I had a quote, but I had to find the quote.

And stuff like that.

And things would change.

And then eventually I'd have a chapter draft that I wasn't embarrassed about.

And then I'd send it to my editor and move on to the next one.

It was terrifying.

There was a lot of research involved.

There was a lot of running around and interviewing people, like a lot of people.

If you look in the references there, the very beginning of the references of the book has the list of interviews I conducted.

I think it's like

42 interviews or something like that, most of which were in person.

It is.

I don't know if it's actually 42.

I know that it's, like, it's somewhere around 40, I think.