The tools and process of a famous writer: John Grisham

For the past couple years I've been trying to professionalize my writing habits, and rearranging my life to make a lot more time for writing. Cutting out TV has helped: unless I'm with someone else, I'm highly selective about what I'll watch. I'm still trying to reach a goal of completing a first draft within a season (three months).

I write better when I start in longhand. I feel closer to the challenges of each scene, and typing it up affords a second layer of writing. There are notebooks for each book project, so the initial drafts go in there, and I prefer gel pens. And perhaps because I was a single mom, over the years I'd learned to write whenever the opportunity presented itself: in the carpool line, waiting for my kid; in a bookstore between client meetings; on the plane during business and personal travel. (My 10th grade English teacher told me a long time ago, "You're able to write at the drop of a hat.")

Back in the early 80s, John Grisham was a defense attorney. One day he overheard some people talking about a brutal case, the rape of a young black girl, and he started wondering what would happen if her father shot and killed her assailants. It took him three years to write A Time to Kill, and he had 900 pages of manuscript, 300 of which had to be eliminated before publication. Since then, he's started every book project with an extensive outline — two paragraphs of synopsis for each chapter. "Sometimes the outline is more painful than the actual draft," he told one interviewer, "but it makes the book a lot easier to write."

Here's what I learned about Grisham's other writing habits:

•  He writes one book per year, usually from August to November, drafting 6 AM to noon, five days a week. And he likes to sit in the same spot, the same table and chair, with the same coffee cup and brand of coffee (sorry, didn't get that). He used the same computer for years until it finally gave out.

•  He used to analyze great books to understand their structures and plot movement. When you write a suspense thriller, he believes, you have to keep the pages turning rapidly, so sometimes you wind up foregoing details such as food, music, clothing descriptions.

•  He's very disciplined. When he was still practicing law, if he had to get up at 4 AM to get in two hours' writing before going to work, he'd get up at 4. If he had a half hour to an hour between cases, he'd hide in a law library to work on his book. (He did go through a period when he was broke, during which he sat writing at a desk between the washer and dryer of his family's utility room).

His favorite writers are John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Pat Conroy, and John Le Carre. Grisham's bottom line? 

"Write at least one page every day, without fail. If you’re trying to write a book, and you’re not writing at least one page a day, then the book is not going to get written."