Don’t loaf and invite inspiration

Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.

Jack London, author. Cited in: James Knapp Reeve (ed.) (1905) Practical Authorship. The Editor Publishing Company, New York, p. 143.

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