Writing A Novel? Easier Than You Think.

Tony Ollivier
6 min readAug 14, 2019

Applying butt to chair with a word deadline works wonders

image courtesy of Pixabay

Tom Wolfe squeezed out only 135 words a day; Hemingway averaged 500.

Both guys didn’t have the internet pounding on their door. Netflix wasn’t screaming for a novel they could monetize into a TV series. Both guys didn’t give a rat’s ass. They wrote to a schedule and a quota and with paper and pencil.

Photo from Wikipedia — Papa Hemingway

They were Tom Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. I’m not and you aren’t either.

But, I have a novel coming out this year. My first. And I have five other novels in various stages of draft, waiting for the right time and inspiration to turn them into saleable products. My drafts are above 50,000 words with a beginning, middle and mostly an ending with interesting characters and quirky plot lines. Too quirky, one agent told me.

I also work full time in a corporate job with two teenagers, a wife and a mortgage.

My about-to-be-published book gave me license to tell people I’m a writer. But most people I talk to say “I’d like to write one but could never do it.

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