I’m writing a novel. The plan is twenty-one chapters of about ten pages each, roughly two hundred and ten pages in all. When I made that plan, I had written none of them.
Some evenings I sat with the manuscript for three hours and came away with half a page. Other evenings I wrote a full scene in forty minutes. The number of hours spent on the task didn’t predict the amount of pages I produced.
Everyone knows a book takes work, and what most people mean by work is time. You put in the hours and the pages come. That view accounts for part of what happened at my desk. It doesn’t explain how three hours could produce less than forty minutes.
When I studied mathematics and physics, I learned a stricter definition of work. It fits this problem better than the everyday one.
Time is one factor out of two
In physics, when a force moves something, it transfers energy to it, and that transferred energy is called work. Work is what takes a system from one energy state to another. When power stays constant, the formula is short: work equals power multiplied by time.
Writing a book is a change of state too. At the start I’ve written zero books, and at the end I’ve written one. The progress between those two states is the work. In the formula, work has two factors. Time is the one everyone already counts. Power is the one that decides what an hour is worth.
So what is power, for someone sitting at a desk?
Only the part of the push that points forward counts
If you’ve ever pushed a car, you’ve felt the answer. Push from behind and it speeds up. Push on its door and you can strain as hard as you like; it rolls on no faster.
Physics writes this as
Force is the push: how hard, and in which direction. Velocity is how fast the object moves and where it’s heading. θ is the angle between the push and the motion. When you push straight along the motion, θ is zero, its cosine is 1, and all of the push counts. At ninety degrees the cosine is 0, and none of it counts, however hard you push.
For mental work, I map force to focus. The size of the force is how deep your focus is: how much of your attention sits on one thing. Its direction is what the focus is pointed at. The direction of motion is wherever the goal needs you to go next, which for the novel is the next scene. Progress, then, is the depth of your focus, times how closely it’s aligned with the goal, times the time you spend.
Deep focus at ninety degrees moves nothing
Picture an hour of scrolling on your phone. You’re absorbed. You don’t notice the time go, you don’t hear your name the first time someone says it, and when you look up the hour is gone.
You can argue that this counts as deep focus. However, no matter the depth of focus, the angle between the direction of that focus and the goal of writing a novel is clearly ninety degrees, so the hour adds nothing to the book.
Most misalignment is harder to spot. An hour spent on the book can still point slightly the wrong way: rewriting a scene that already worked, or drafting a chapter before knowing what it has to accomplish. The cosine of a small angle is close to 1, so that hour isn’t lost, but part of it goes sideways.
A small angle is where a plan earns its place. Before drafting chapters, I wrote a sheet of world rules and planned a beat sheet for each chapter: what happens in it, and what the reader needs to know by the end. A beat sheet is the direction of motion written down. Without one, the first part of every session goes to working out which way is forward.
In a previous piece, I argued that direction is the only lever the conscious mind has. The formula shows how much rides on that lever: aim is the factor that can multiply everything else by zero.
Once the aim is right, the question becomes how hard you can push.
Depth has to be built before it can be used
At its best, depth is what people call flow: the stretch where the next sentence is ready before you finish typing the last one, and an interruption is hard to recover from. It rarely arrives in the first few minutes, and one interruption can reset it.
There’s a physical side to focus that is well documented. When a region of the brain becomes more active, blood flow to that region rises within seconds, bringing it more oxygen and glucose. The response is called functional hyperemia, and it’s what fMRI scans rely on to show which regions are working.
The more interesting finding is what happens before the work starts. In a 1999 study led by Sabine Kastner, people in a brain scanner kept their eyes on a point in the centre of a screen and were told that something would soon appear off to one side. Before anything appeared, activity rose in the part of their visual cortex that handles that side of the visual field. fMRI tracks activity through blood oxygen, so what the scanner picked up was oxygen-rich blood arriving at the regions about to be needed, ahead of the task itself. Expecting the task was enough to start preparing for it.
The people in that experiment were waiting for a spot of light, not writing a chapter, so applying the result to a writing session is my reading rather than what the study showed. If it carries over, some of the depth I reach in a session is decided before I sit down, by whether I know what I’m about to work on. Sitting down with the next scene already chosen gives the preparation a target. Checking my phone halfway through starts it over for something else.
The practical point doesn’t depend on the study. Depth takes time to build, so a session that keeps getting broken up spends most of its time building and little of it at depth.
That leaves time, the factor nobody needs convincing about.
An hour multiplies whatever you bring to it
Two hundred and ten pages don’t get written in one deep, well-aimed evening. Nothing in the formula lets you skip the hours.
What the formula changes is what an hour is. It’s a multiplier. Multiplied by deep focus pointed along a beat sheet, it moves the book. Multiplied by an hour of scrolling, it gives zero, however many of those hours you stack. Three hours at a bad angle can lose to forty minutes at a good one, which is what I’d experienced at my desk many times before.
Most advice about goals is about the hours. The other two factors are harder to see, and they decide what the hours are worth.
Somewhere ahead is the state where the book exists, two hundred and ten pages I can hold in my hands. Between here and there is a fixed amount of work, and I can’t make it smaller. What I can choose is which way I’m facing when I sit down.
You have a way with words. Keep writing!