1 Hour + 2 Pages Per Day (+Coffee) = Kate DiCamillo
February 19, 2011
If you have children in your house, or if you’re a godparent, grandparent, aunt, uncle or mentor who invests time reading to a child (and therefore invests in the future), you’re surely familiar already with children’s writer Kate DiCamillo.
Her splendid books, including The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane (my personal favorite), The Magician’s Elephant, Tiger Rising, Because of Winn Dixie deal beautifully with love and loss and human growth in ways that children can understand, but that also take the breath away of any adult with pulse. If not, there’s no time to waste. Jump in the car this moment, pajamas still on or not, or stumble to your laptop and track down her books. Without ever being pedantic or preachy, her books explore forgiveness and mercy in ways that will have you not only reading the stories again and again (with tissue box nearby), but also wanting to own them in hard back so you can pass them down.
If you’re a writer yourself, or someone still trying to carve out the time to begin, you’ll find encouraging the interview below in which Kate discusses her schedule: stumbling out of bed at 5 o’clock for coffee, then writing just one hour a day, stopping after two pages, no matter what kind of roll she’s on.
One hour.
Even that’s a challenge for most of us, sure, to capture an hour all to ourselves. But it does shoot down the excuse for many of us that we’d produce heart-warming stories, too–if only we could quit that job, hire that staff of household servants and pay someone to dress like us and show up at our meetings.
One hour. Two pages. Coffee.
And an alarm clock that will deride, ridicule and beat us over the head–whatever it takes.
It’s possible…. Don’t you think?
Enjoy the interviews with Kate DiCamillo below. The first is an amateurish quality, but it’s worthwhile: brief and to the point about her writing schedule, self-discipline…. The second is about 20 minutes and focuses more on her themes and development as a writer from, in her words, an arrogant, disdainful writer wannabe to the humbled, listening, “better self” who tells these beautiful tales.
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Joy, I so needed to watch these videos today. I’d read some time ago that she faithfully writes two pages a day but I didn’t realize that’s where she stops. I wonder if I could bestow the same grace on myself?
Absolutely, you deserve the same grace and patience with yourself! You’re doing so much valuable with your life, and your writing is an important part of that, but not the whole of it!
Hi Joy, Julia Cameron says something similar, only she goes for 3 pages a day. 2 or 3 pages doesn’t sound like much, but at the end of a month, you’ve got either 60 or 90 pages, which is a lot! And it continues to amaze me how hard it is to accomplish this sometimes. Thanks for the reminder.
I agree, Charlotte–it’s a reminder I need to hear! My Protestant work ethic operates most days in over-drive, and that’s often not a good thing. I can produce my self-appointed number of pages, but when I’ve set unrealistic page goals, the pages take on a kind of work-man like quality. Like a shed built with planks that will make it stand up for a time–but no beauty or imagination or real strength.