Trollope’s watch
Anthony Trollope worked for the Post Office for nearly thirty-three years, and for the last twenty of them he was also a novelist. By the end of his life he had published 47 novels, along with short stories, travel books and journalism. He explains how he fitted the two careers together in his Autobiography, which came out in 1883, the year after he died.
Writing before breakfast
It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 A. M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy.
An old groom woke him, paid £5 a year on top of his wages to do it, and Trollope records that in all his years at Waltham Cross the man “was never once late with the coffee”. Starting at half past five meant he could finish his literary work before he dressed for breakfast. Three hours a day, he thought, “will produce as much as a man ought to write.”
The watch and the diary
He wrote with his watch on the desk in front of him and required of himself 250 words every quarter of an hour. That comes to a thousand words an hour and, by his own reckoning, “over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day”. He reported that “the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went”.
He also kept a diary for every book. Whenever he began a new one, he divided a diary into weeks and allotted himself a number of pages for each week, more or fewer depending on how heavy his other business was. Each day he entered the number of pages he had written. If he slipped into idleness for a day or two, he wrote, “the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied.” He explained why it worked for him:
Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.
He didn’t leave gaps between books either. He finished Doctor Thorne while travelling in Egypt, and, in his words, “on the following day began The Bertrams.”
How readers took it
The Autobiography did his reputation no good. Many readers did not like the picture of a civil servant turning out fiction against a watch, and for a time after it appeared he was taken for a mere journeyman. His reputation has since recovered.
Sources: Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883), chapters VII and XV. The Trollope Society, timeline.