NONFICTION - April 20, 1986

A WRITER’S TIME: A GUIDE TO THE CREATIVE PROCESS, FROM VISION THROUGH REVISION by Kenneth Atchity (Norton: $12.95). A hybrid of time management, popular psychology and how-to-write, “A Writer’s Time” offers sprinklings of common wisdom and a game plan for getting a book written. Kenneth Atchity advises the writer that discipline--not the muse--turns out pages; that positive thinking rather than nay-saying nurtures discipline and the muse; that the more one knows about oneself, the more productive one will be as a writer, and that there is always time if one can only learn to manage it.

“A Writer’s Time” analyzes how the writing mind works, how the rational and intuitive work together or against each other, according to the writer’s ability to integrate the two. Atchity offers some thought-provoking observations: “The blank piece of paper produces a ‘block’ because it’s flat and your mind isn’t.”

However, when he attempts to address this and other problems in his own vernacular, labeling the rational the “Continent of Reason” and the intuitive “the islands” and inserting a “Managing Editor” sailing between them, the writing and the analysis produce their own labyrinth in sentences such as: “Both (nonfiction and fiction) leave your Managing Editor pulling ideas out of the Continentally inarticulate but highly enthusiastic islands and putting them into the language forged by the Continent’s cultural and grammatical conventions.”

The book argues that time can be a writer’s ally if understood, though Atchity’s ambitious plan of actually writing and revising a book in 40 days (many more days are spent researching and outlining) presumes a friendship with time few writers have shared.