“I work 10- and 11-hour days because in long sessions I fall away more completely into story and characters than I would in, say, a six-hour day,” he explained.
“On good days, I might wind up with five or six pages of finished work; on bad days, a third of a page. Even five or six is not a high rate of production for a 10- or 11-hour day, but there are more good days than bad.”
Koontz used to write outlines for his novels, but after he “decided to wing it” with his 1986 novel, Strangers, he discovered it was the “best decision” for him, and hasn’t used outlines since. “I start with a bit of an idea, a central theme, a premise, and then I think about it for a little while — not for weeks and months, but days — and then I begin,” he explained.
He also doesn’t use the internet, afraid of it’s time-sucking abilities. “E-mail can eat you alive, which is why I didn’t even have it until about three years ago,” he revealed. “And I never go on-line for research. I leave that to an assistant, because I have seen more than a few writers waste endless hours on-line.”
In the HBR interview, Koontz described a typical day in his life when he’s working on a project:
I usually get up at five in the morning, get ready for the day, walk the dog, read the Wall Street Journal. By 6:30, I’m at my desk, then I work until dinner. I rarely have lunch, because if I eat, I get furry-minded. I do that six days a week or, if I’m at the end of a book, seven. If it’s the last quarter of a book, where the momentum is with me, I’ve been known to work 100-hour weeks. That’s all normal for me because when I’m sitting at the screen for 10 hours or so, the real world retreats, and I fall away into the novel more completely. Sometimes I’m in some scene and laughing out loud or moved to tears, and people walking by my office door probably think I’m at the edge of losing my mind.
LIFE’S WORK: AN INTERVIEW WITH DEAN KOONTZ | HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
The following is taken from a Havard Business Review interview.
What does a typical workweek look like for you?
This will sound grueling, but it’s not. I usually get up at five in the morning, get ready for the day, walk the dog, read the Wall Street Journal. By 6:30, I’m at my desk, then I work until dinner. I rarely have lunch, because if I eat, I get furry-minded. I do that six days a week or, if I’m at the end of a book, seven. If it’s the last quarter of a book, where the momentum is with me, I’ve been known to work 100-hour weeks. That’s all normal for me because when I’m sitting at the screen for 10 hours or so, the real world retreats, and I fall away into the novel more completely. Sometimes I’m in some scene and laughing out loud or moved to tears, and people walking by my office door probably think I’m at the edge of losing my mind.
As a perfectionist who constantly revises, how do you ensure that you still make progress?
All I can say is, it works for me. I don’t know that it would for other people. Every time you go through a page, you’ll find ways not just to tighten but to say things better, with more vivid figures of speech. And there’s a momentum to that, too. You’re not necessarily advancing the story 10 pages a day, but you’re advancing its quality. And then, because this slows you down, you can recognize that you’re going to hit a problem 30 or 40 pages on. With my pace, I find that when I get to that moment, I have two or three ways to resolve it even though I wasn’t consciously thinking about them. Writers I know who don’t work this way, when they bump up against a problem, they can’t get around it. They have writer’s block. I never run into that. And I think it all has to do with this way of working.
Sources:
- https://www.balancethegrind.com.au/daily-routines/dean-koontz-daily-routine/
- https://hbr.org/2020/03/lifes-work-an-interview-with-dean-koontz