Quote of the Day (Michael Connelly, on the Importance of Writing 15 Minutes a Day)

“Something I was taught by a professor in a creative writing class, is that if you’re going to be a writer then you’ve got to write every day. Even if it’s only for 15 minutes. He added that—‘even if it’s only for 15 minutes.’ And that is actually the cool thing. The heart of that cliché is that even if you only write for 15 minutes a day, the story never leaves your head. It’s still churning in there. And that’s what’s important, because if you have that story turning in your head all the time, you reach a point where you just want to—you need to write it down. You want to get to that laptop or whatever you write on.”—American crime novelist Michael Connelly quoted by Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview With Michael Connelly,” The Strand Magazine, Issue LXXVII (2025)

What Connelly writes is true, and I would add other elements that operate in my case. First, 15 minutes don’t sound like much, but if you put enough of these segments together over time, you’ll eventually have something (even if it’s only a short blog post like this one).

Second, even if you’re struggling with the right words, transitions, or information to be conveyed, you don’t want to let the piece lie there. You want to finish the darn thing.

At the same time, don’t underestimate the importance of finding the best time of the day when your mind will be sharpest and you’ll have the fewest interruptions. For me, that’s when I’m in a coffee shop, with nobody calling, staring at a computer screen.

(BTW, my guess is that the professor that Connelly was talking about here was Harry Crews. In this YouTube video interview with David Perell, the novelist mentioned that this same advice was offered by Crews, “a Southern Gothic type of writer” who was teaching in Florida. Crews, who died in 2012, could be a hell-raiser, but at his best he could be evocative, as in this passage from his 1979 essay collection, Blood and Grits when he recounts slumping over a typewriter and popping pills in shame over his heritage, until he realized: “in that moment I literally saved my life, because the next thought…was that all I had going for me in the world or would ever have was that swamp, all those goddamn mules, all those screwworms that I'd dug out of pigs and all the other beautiful and dreadful and sorry circumstances that had made me the Grit I am and will always be….Since that time I have found myself perpetually fascinating.")

(The image of Michael Connelly that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 15, 2010, by Mark Coggins from San Francisco.)