I find Jesse Ball’s writing process fascinating, though I doubt I could ever recreate it myself.

Jesse Ball has written nine novels, and various shorter works, which have been both lavished and criticized within certain literary circles. Not that he seems to care about such either way, because the way Ball sees it, creating a novel is a performance, and like any other form of performance art, the result is based on whatever factors were present at the exact time and place in which it was written.

Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad, but his writing process is very short, and built upon meticulous preparation, as opposed to most writers who focus on editing and revision.

Indeed, Ball says that the typical writing process for his novels takes place over 4-14 days.

Note, that’s “days” not “weeks” or “months.”

Ball schedules a writing period, when he’s away from his day-to-day life, then he goes on, essentially, a writing sprint, and completes his novels in these comparatively short bursts.

Which is a very deliberate choice. 

As per Ball:

“I want to take the least amount of time possible. I want to be deliberate. I don’t want to take any missteps. I want to have a genuine technique that allows the things that I say to be clearly said and I want to say them in the order in which they are meant to be said, to most clearly elucidate the idea. The reader should be able take the same path that I took.”

Ball’s view is that the writer and reader should be as closely aligned as possible in experiencing the story, and while he’s also committed to reading and researching in preparation for such, the actual writing process, in his view, should not be drawn out. So it’s writing as an in-the-moment performance.

“I don’t edit – I think the original form is best. Sometimes [my editor] will ask me for more, and then I will add a section.”

Yeah, it’s pretty hard to imagine that many writers would be able to get away with the same, and produce anything of publishable quality within a matter of days. But again, Ball says that this is a failure of preparation, not of the writing process itself, and that the right steps to establish the project in your mind will enable you to create a fresh and cohesive narrative based on such sprints.

I would guess that most writers would have trouble even putting down 70k words in two weeks, but there is a logic to his thinking, and I definitely respect his commitment to such process. 

And maybe it’s worth considering, that rather than trying to push through writing 1k words a day, maybe you should spend more time on planning and research, then aim to have more free-flowing writing sessions in focussed sprints.

Either way, it’s another process to consider (particularly for National Novel Writing Month)