Nalini Singh is a New York Times best-selling author who specialises in paranormal romance novels. Her books have been translated into 20 languages and she is frequently spotted on the USA Today and Der Spiegel bestseller lists.
Singh started writing as a teenager and submitted her first novel when she was 18. Nine books later, an editor in the US picked her book out of the slush pile. During those unpublished years, she graduated from The University of Auckland and worked as a junior lawyer in a major commercial law firm.
She was 25 when Desert Warrior was published. It was decision time.
“I’d studied for a long time so to give up my law job was a big deal,” she says. “It was my day job. But I sold my first book, and I thought, right if I’m going to do it, it has to be now.”
By then she’d learnt the masterful trick of learning to utilise what time she had. If she found a spare hour she would switch off her phone and the TV and write.
“That was actually quite a good skill to learn. So, now that I’m a full-time writer, I think of it in the same way. If I have pockets of time where I sit down and the internet is off and the phone is off, I just write and that’s how I produce. It’s getting into that deep headspace to really write.”
These days Singh sets daily goals for word counts or pages edited and carves out writing blocks of two hours.
“It’s a fallacy to think that discipline is the enemy of creativity. If you’re disciplined about giving your creative-self space, the creativity thrives. We get used to shallow interactions. We’re constantly thinking of something else, like Twitter or an email or whatever. I read somewhere that each time you are interrupted it takes 15 minutes to get back into the book, so I just literally stopped the potential for interruptions.”
“Probably the most important thing I would tell anyone who is wanting to get into the writing zone is that you have to create this bubble of silence around yourself. And it can be as simple as leaving your phone in another room. I’m still working on that, in this world with all the internet distractions.”
“I read a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport and he talks about how deep work is becoming more and more rare in our world. And that’s what I aim for. Because, in the end, that’s what I’m really passionate about – my writing. I don’t get the satisfaction from being on Twitter for two hours. It’s fun for five minutes, and it’s fun when I’ve done my work and I’m just playing. But it’s not fun if I look back at my day and see like, ‘Oh my God, three hours on online stuff, what was I doing?!?'”
“I’m a creative person, but I’m grateful for my law degree because it taught me to think in quite a rational way. And that’s really important because basically, every writer is a one-woman business. You are your own employee that you have to manage.”
She wrote a draft of her latest book Wolf Rain on a train travelling between Perth and Sydney. The soundtrack she listened to is rather surprising, yet makes complete sense.
“I put my noise-cancelling headphones on, and played the sound of rain,” she laughs. “Sometimes I switch it up by the sound of rivers. It’s always some kind of water sound. A favourite at the moment is Afternoon in the Ruins which is the sound of stalactite water dripping in the caves.
“It’s all kind of white noise, but it’s really calming and gets me into the headspace and because I’ve been doing it for so long, it’s become a trigger. I put on my headphones, the sound comes on and boom, my brain is like, ‘Okay, now we’re writing.'”
Singh usually writes on a laptop though sometimes uses dictation or handwrites chapters to mix things up. Like many novelists she prefers to edit on paper so she can get deeper into a text.
She says, “When I started, I wrote all the time. I still write on my holidays. But I didn’t understand the idea of balance, of refuelling the creative self and refuelling yourself as a person. I’ve just become much better at it as I’ve grown older and more mature. I still have that passionate love for writing but now I know that I’m even better if I give myself those breaks, just to recharge.”
[ This article is an abridged version previously published on Newsroom. ]
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