One of the most maddening things about writing is the occasional impossibility to get your bum in the chair. When writing time looms, it suddenly becomes absolutely imperative that the laundry be folded, the desk tidied, the todo list re-written, the emails sorted, the gym attended, the cat vacuumed, the bookstore ransacked, the obscure detail researched and the ceiling stared at.

I love writing. I love story and character. I have a corkboard by my desk with story ideas plastered over the top of each other, because I ran out of room, and I can't wait to get to them. Except right now, I really have to do my accounts.

What is it about writing that makes everything else look so important? Perhaps it's not that my accounts are more important - perhaps it's rather that I can see immediate improvement. My accounts will go from a state of 'not done' to 'done', with the transition clearly visible. I can finish them in under an hour, and at the end I am rewarded with the satisfaction of them being done.

Novels don't work like that. I have a 'progress meter' for Shadowren, because I look forward to the day when I can start listing "Final Draft: 90%" there. But it's hogwash. I have a vague destination for my story, but I have no idea how many words it will take me to get there, or how many scenic detours or complete wrong-turns I'm going to make. I've just finished the first 'act' of the novel, but I haven't yet determined if that was act one of three, five or seventeen. I have no reliable way to quantify my progress as a fraction of the final - it depends where the story goes.

Which means, when I finish my writing session, there's not that sense of achievement to reward me. I break my writing into scenes and chapters, but what constitutes a scene or chapter is an arbitrary decision on my part. There's no clear-cut point that marks that scene as 'done', like there is with my accounts. The scene could continue. Sometimes I even go back and add to them later. Sometimes I remove them altogether. And they're all written with the knowledge that I try to ignore, which is that I'm almost certainly going to rewrite everything here.

The ten minute rule

To write a novel, you need to develop your Bum Glue. Ways to keep yourself in the chair, writing, instead of folding your socks or surfing youTube. A trick I use, when I'm finding it particularly difficult, is what I call the Ten Minute Rule. It works thus:

1. I am permitted to do [activity that sounds more fun than writing], but first I must write for ten minutes.
   • The ten minutes must be spent making new sentences appear on the page. Time spent editing, rewriting, re-reading and navel-gazing do not count towards the ten minutes.
2. Once I have written for ten minutes I may do [activity that sounds more fun than writing] for ten minutes.
   • When that ten minutes is up, see Step 1.

I use ten minutes, because ten minutes is nothing, unless it's ten minutes in a vacuum. Ten minutes is hard to argue against - must harder than half an hour or "until I've written 2000 words". It's difficult to protest that you really can't stand to do something for ten minutes, or that the Really Important Thing You Just Remembered can't wait for ten minutes. It's also, usually, a slice of time you can find each day.

Setting an alarm helps, especially if you place it so you can't read the time remaining. It means you don't think about how much time there is left, you just get on with it. Usually, I don't need Step 2: I find that in the course of ten minutes, I get drawn into what I'm writing. The ideas start to flow, and when the ten minutes is up, I silence the alarm and write for another ten, twenty or forty minutes until the idea is down. But it only works if you give yourself that 'out'.