A daily page beats a brilliant intention

Books are not written on bank holidays in a farmhouse, except in the blurbs of people who also wrote on wet Wednesdays. A modest, repeating appointment with the page will outrun talent that only visits in the mood. Put the session where a meeting would go.

Intention is cheap. Calendars are not. If the work only happens when the day happens to be empty, the day will learn to fill itself. A short session that is rude to interrupt — same chair, same time, phone in another room — teaches the rest of your life that the book is not a hobby you get to if nothing else turns up.

Modest is the word that saves people. A thousand words is a fine target until a sick child or a late train turns it into a reason to skip. Two hundred words, or twenty-five minutes, is a target you can hit while tired. Hitting it keeps the thread. Missing a grand target teaches you that you are the sort of person who fails, which is a story the block is delighted to repeat.

Track it plainly. A tick on a card, a number in a notebook, a blotter of the week's counts. Not because the number is holy, but because a visible streak is harder to break than a private resolution. The streak is allowed to be small. It is not allowed to be imaginary.

The farmhouse week, if it ever arrives, will be more use to a writer who has already been turning up. Empty days do not create a practice. They only reveal whether you have one.