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The Writing Process

How do you prepare yourself for writing? How many hours do you spend writing, compared to what you spend thinking about it?

Well, to me, the most important thing is my routine. I don't wait for new ideas or inspiration to come out of the sky. I sit down at my desk every day and I write for about an hour a day. That is when I'm doing the first draft of the book. I'm making up the story and trying to figure out who the characters are and what happens and how they get from place to place and chapter to chapter. With each subsequent draft — I normally do about five drafts of a book — I am able to write longer. I know the story better, and so the second draft, I might write an hour and a half. The third draft, I might write two hours a day, then maybe three or four hours a day for my fourth and fifth drafts.

I understand your dogs don't let you write for too long.

It used to be that after two hours they would say, "Okay, it's time for a walk." But now they have taught me to take them for a walk before I even begin writing. When things are going well, when I am really excited about what I am writing, I usually think about what I am going to write while I am on the walk.

So how much thinking do you do, compared to writing?

It's hard to answer because I don't just sort of sit in a chair and think. When the story is going well and I am really into it, part of my mind is thinking about it all the time. And probably even when the story isn't even going very well, I'm sure part of my mind is thinking about it all the time, because I will often be stuck at a part and not quite know what I am going to write next and won't consciously think about it. But the next morning when I wake up and take the dogs for a walk and sit down to write, suddenly I have all these ideas and I have to wonder where they came from. So clearly some part of my mind has been working on that problem.

Do you write in the early morning or late afternoon?

Early morning.

 

How do you create the characters in your books, and how do you think up their names?

Well, the books and the characters and stories and settings all develop together. I start with a small idea — a small piece of a character or setting. And as I write, all aspects of a story develop from there. Names are always a little difficult. Right before my daughter was born, my wife and I got a book called 10,000 Baby Names, and I still look through that book when I look for names. The kids of Wayside School are all named after kids in an elementary school where I worked while going to college. And then the nicknames in Holes were just fun names to think of.

 

What process do you go through in arriving at a final draft?

I usually begin a novel with just a little idea, perhaps no more than a character trait. That idea will lead to another until it snowballs into a full-blown story. Since I do not plan or outline beforehand, I normally don't know what's going to happen next. I go through several drafts. The first draft is very unorganized, often with ideas at the end that are inconsistent with those at the beginning. In the second draft, I organize it better because I now have a pretty firm grasp of who the characters are and what is going to happen to them. By the time I get to the last rewrite (which may be the fifth or sixth pass), I try to convince myself that the story is all true, and that I am simply telling it, not making it up. After numerous rough drafts, I send the final copy to the publisher, but that's still not the absolute final copy. I then work with an editor, and I may do some more rewrites. Somehow I've now written 18 books. I'm always amazed when I finish a book and realize, hey, this actually is what I set out to do.

 

When you write, do you seek feedback and opinions from others?

No. I never talk about a book until I'm finished writing it. And, I like to be alone when I write. It took me a year and a half to write Holes, and nobody knew anything about it, not even my wife or my daughter. I think that is helpful for writing, as well as for anything else that takes a lot of self-motivation. The more you talk about something, the less you tend to do it. By not permitting myself to talk about Holes, I was forced to write it. The story was growing inside me for a year and a half, and I had no other way to let it out. I write mostly for myself. I can never imagine my readers. I just try to write books that I would enjoy reading. I figure if I like them, the kids will too.