Television and Your Future Self

I've done 15 signings in the last two weeks, and a lot of people have asked for advice on how to write a novel. I tell them, "Don't watch television."

There's a common misconception that novels get written in a mad rush over a month or two in an isolated cabin or on a mountain top. They don't. They get written an hour or two at a time, day by day, over the course of many years (eight years, in the case of my first novel, Rain Fall).

"An hour or two at a time, day by day, over the course of many years"... well, that's exactly how people watch television, isn't it?

There are only 24 hours in a day, and only so many days in our lives. If you use those daily hours doing one thing, you can't use them for something else. It's that simple.

Television is seductive in part because when you watch an hour-long show, it feels like you've finished something. By comparison, an hour spent on something that's going to take you years to finish feels like nothing at all -- certainly it feels like something that can be skipped without consequences.

But those hours add up, one way or the other.

Think of what you can do with an hour a day for, say, four years. Become a black belt in a martial art. Acquire a foreign language. Learn a musical instrument.

Write a novel.

Or you can have watched many award-winning prime time television shows, all of which are no doubt excellent entertainment and thoroughly enjoyable.

What you can't do is both. You have to choose. There's no right answer; it's a question of what's important to you. But you should choose knowingly. Don't delude yourself into thinking, as you plop down on the Barcolounger and fire up the remote, that one day you're going to rent that isolated cabin and write that novel you've always been thinking about. It won't happen. That one day is today. It's right now. It's every day to come, however many you have.

Having trouble deciding which to do? Here's something that might help.

Have you ever wished you could send a message back in time to your past self, warning yourself to do or not do something you did in the past? Wouldn't it be great if we could do that? Sad that we can't.

But we can do something just as good as sending messages to the past. We can receive messages from the future.

If your future self could send a message to her (or his) past self -- you, today -- what message would she send? Listen hard, and you can hear it.

Is she telling you to watch television for an hour a day? Or is she telling you something else?

Listen to her. She's smarter than you are because she's lived longer. You know she has your future interests at heart. If you listen, really listen, she'll show you the way.