Photo By Amy Tharp
Four Pages A Day or I Gotta Be Out Of My Mind
by Jeff Baker
I didn’t expect to do one of these columns involving Frederik Pohl again. Pohl (1919-2013) being the very heterosexual sci-fi writer whose story “Day Million” I profiled a few months ago https://www.queerscifi.com/day-million-jeff-baker-boogieman-in-lavender-january-13-2026/ here.
But I’m going to and it ties in with the act of writing.
Several years ago I picked up a copy of Pohl’s 1984 collection “Pohlstars,” where Pohl collected several of his more recent short-stories and also offered introductions to the stories, entertaining little snippets about how (and sometimes where) the stories came to be written. In the midst of it all he mentions a couple of times his “self-enforced habit” of “defacing four clean pages of paper with writing” every day.
That is; the guy wrote four pages a day wherever he was. A habit confirmed by several other writers I read who said that Pohl would routinely excuse himself from a party he was hosting to go off and type for a couple of hours.
Pohl kept at it for at least forty, maybe fifty years only deliberately slowing down the mass-production when he was approaching Ninety. He mentioned this in his blog which, alas, is no longer on line.
So, I got to thinking late last year; could I do that? Four pages a day? Could I pull that off, even though I’m no Frederik Pohl? In December I made it one of my New Years Resolutions and set out to try, starting early about December 21, 2025. I sat down with my laptop that afternoon and when I realized to my surprise that I had written four pages in about two and a half hours I decided “Why not?” It helped that I have a bunch of stories that I started that I lazily or drunkenly left unfinished. But with the motivation of doing four daily pages I had a reason to tackle the unfinished stories and I finished a couple of stories that December.
Of course, my writing wound up being doing about four pages for five days a week and sometimes not making the page count at all but it is a heck of a motivation.
The end result of the first thirty-one days of doing this is that I finished ten stories, including the weekly flash fiction ones I do, as well as started or worked-on several others. The progress has kept up and it is rewarding but I am still pretty lazy and I don’t always even try to make the daily goal. But I am even more motivated now and my productivity level has increased. In addition to finishing some stories I wrote several complete ones using the four-pages-a-day-system, and it has been a potent motivator.
I also have sent off a good many more stories to markets than I would have at this time last year.
This is something all writers should know; finding something to motivate you will steady your productivity or increase your productivity.
Reading through Frederik Pohl’s autobiographical book “The Way the Future Was,” he acknowledges he didn’t always make the daily goal; sometimes went weeks without it. He had a few good excuses, and sometimes I get busy with other things and I do slack off now and then. But the motivation and the feeling of accomplishment is a powerful one. And it seems to be working.
Oh, and I’m counting non-fiction too. Like this column. Two pages. Whew!
Jeff Baker writes about reading and writing sci-fi, fantasy and horror and other sundry matters on or around the thirteenth of every month. Another motivator to his attempts at productivity is that he once met the comics artist Mike Grell who advised Jeff to “Write!Write!Write!” He posts weekly fiction on his blog https://authorjeffbaker.com/ and wastes time on Facebook https://bsky.app/profile/jeffbakerauthor.bsky.social and Blue Sky https://bsky.app/profile/jeffbakerauthor.bsky.social as well as Mastodon (as “Mike Mayak”) https://mastodon.otherworldsink.com/@MikeMayak