“How Writers Create Their Fiction”: Laura Lippman

I uncovered this month-long NPR series “How Writers Create Their Fiction”, originally run in November 2006. I found many of the ideas presented by the various writers to be informative and inspirational, so we’ll be featuring one writer from the series per day during February.
 
 Today’s writer is Laura Lippman:

How She Writes: “I write a book a year, which tends to inspire verbs such as “churn,” “grind,” or, my personal favorite, “crank,” which seems to imply I have the writer’s version of the Play-Doh Fun Factory: I press the raw material into a little tube, push down on the handle and voila.

“But I’m a former reporter, so trying to hit a minimum quota of 1,000 words a day, five days a week, seems pretty reasonable to me. And if you can do that, you can complete a first draft in less than five months. So my schedule allows me to do three to four drafts of every novel.”

Writer’s Block Remedy: “First of all, I don’t concede that it exists. Again, a life in newspapers prepares one to write when tired or uninspired. There are days when I can’t move the story forward, but I have lots of little tricks. (Notice I didn’t say I had to write 1,000 stellar words every day.)”

Come back tomorrow at 9AM PST for more writing wisdom.