A new biography of Edmund White, which has just been published, reveals that he works for only one hour a day. Bastard. Graham Greene used to write exactly 300 words every day. When he had reached 300, he just stopped, even if he was in the middle of a sentence. The translator Michael Meyer was living with Greene while Greene was writing A Burnt-Out Case. Each morning when Meyer got up, Greene had already finished his allocation and was free to spend the rest of the day doing other things, such as drinking or having affairs with other men's wives. Bastard. I read recently that Iain Banks doesn't work for nine months of the year. He travels, has fun, whatever. Then, at the beginning of October, without an idea in his head, he sits down and starts writing his new novel, which he finishes by the end of December. Bastard.

Sorry about those interjections. I couldn't stop myself. But there is a lesson in the differing stories. If you've published a novel, it is one of the main things that people ask you. There are other questions. Do you need an agent? (Yes.) How do you find a publisher? (See previous question and answer.) But mostly people ask: How do you write?

I don't know if I could ever give the sort of advice that is offered on writers' courses - I mean, looking at a piece of creative writing and telling someone how to make it better. But I think I could advise other people on the process of writing itself. Most published novels nowadays are between 80,000 and 120,000 words long. So if you were to write something around the length of this article (about 750 words) every weekday, starting today, you would have a manuscript roughly the right length for a novel by around the end of January - which isn't so far away.

Many novelists work much faster. Vikram Seth claims that, while working on A Suitable Boy, on certain days, he managed to write more than 12,000 words. Evelyn Waugh wrote Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies in six weeks each (bastard). Other writers are slower. Nevertheless, Greene's 300 words, which he produced every single day, would still yield a novel in a year. The crucial thing is regularity. Binges are for poets and short-story writers.

Jeffrey Bernard once wrote that he was depressed that his novel wasn't selling, and the reason that it wasn't selling was that he hadn't written it yet. All the horror stories you've heard about getting books published are true. Many major publishers now don't even pretend to read unsolicited manuscripts. Good books are turned down, and some crappy books are published. But one category of novel has no chance at all of being published, and that is the kind which you keep meaning to start, but which has to wait until you have a bit more time/have the plot properly worked out/do a bit more research/clear a space on your desk where you can fit your notebook. On the other hand, no novel, not even Anna Karenina or a la recherche du temps perdu, is ever quite as good as the one in your head.

Stephen Spender once said to T S Eliot that he wanted to be a writer. Eliot said that he could understand someone wanting to write, but he didn't understand someone wanting to "be a writer". But Spender probably had the right idea. Being a writer is fun. You get interviewed, get prizes, get girls (and/or boys). By contrast, writing is hard. You sit alone in a room for days, weeks, months. Sometimes a book results. Sometimes people are rude about that book. On the other hand, it's hard, but not that hard. It's like a coalface, but without the digging or the pneumoconiosis. Still, a coal miner doesn't have the temptation of wandering off to make a cup of tea and never quite getting down to work.

I collect examples to encourage myself and others. Here is my latest batch. The Broadway director George Abbott once walked into a rehearsal room and saw the choreographer and some dancers sitting around. He asked what they were up to, and the choreographer said he had no ideas. "Just do something," Abbott cried. "If you do something, then we can change it."

Degas, the painter, also wrote poetry. He once complained to Mallarme that he had been working on a sonnet all day and had produced nothing, although his head was full of ideas. "But Degas," Mallarme said, "poems are not made with ideas. They are made with words." Perhaps best of all is a sign that Philip Roth used to keep on his desk: "Stay put." But then, staying put isn't much good if you have a solitaire program on your computer.

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