As I have said over and over and over, writing fast does not mean typing faster. It just means fast writers, or writers who are perceived to be fast, spend more hours writing. Nothing more.
I’m lucky if I manage 750 words an hour. Not fast typing by any standard. But I am known as a fast writer and at times I get beat on for being a fast writer.
I am not fast, I just work harder than most writers. It is very, very simple, yet those of us with a real work ethic about writing get pounded constantly for having a work ethic. Just like all the other stupidities in this business like giving money to perfect strangers, writers seem to celebrate laziness. It has driven me nuts for years and now for some reason it finally drove Kevin J. Anderson nuts as well.
His great blog about this topic, and some very simple math, can be found here.
Even if you are one of the snobs (as Kevin called them) who thinks that working hard at your chosen craft is a bad thing, read this blog. It just might change your thinking.
Thanks, Kevin. Welcome to the windmill chasing.
I once read that becoming an expert required 10,000 hours of focused practice on an activity. Focused practice meant that the hours were spent not just on repetition, but on an attempt to get better. That translates to over 5 years at the 40 hr/week job, which will undoubtedly contain a large proportion of dull repetitive bureaucratic type work that doesn’t contribute to skill improvement. Additionally, the expertise gained might be more specialized than one would like. 10,000 hours practicing the perfect free throw doesn’t help the basketball player become better at guarding opponents.
So I’ve never understood why writing should be viewed differently than other professional arts. We wouldn’t begrudge a violinist from working at their craft 8-10 hours a day, or paying their dues for years in schools and small orchestras around the country. Similarly, it’s expected that master chefs will have busted their asses for years and put in those long hours before they even attempt to open their own restaurant.
It seems we want our writers to be like our fantasies of actors and our rock stars. In the tabloids, partying all the time, and showing up just in time for that perfect movie or concert. Most people don’t seem to realize that’s just a fantasy and that a lot of work actually goes into that movie or concert and that those who don’t put in the work, or stop putting in the work, tend to fade away.
Which means this “fast” myth is just one I’ve never really understood.
That said, I can’t help wondering–how much of it is related to the produce model? If an author has only one book coming out a year, it can be promoted as a Big Deal. But if it’s five books, the novelty wears off. Much like how strawberries lose their appeal when you can get them all year round instead of just in the spring.
Big Ed, I think you have hit on a good point. Writers write, and our focus is always on the project flowing through out fingers at the moment. Which is why I never have understood all this hype about making a book sell through tons of promotion. Just silly waste of time when you could be writing the next story instead. And trust me, when you are doing five or more books a year regularly, by the time one comes out you have so forgotten it and couldn’t care. I know, to young writers that sounds just silly, especially those focused on becoming authors instead of writers. (Writers write, authors are people who have written.) When your focus is on writing, what hits a stand two years later is just annoying more than anything else.
Great link, Dean. In a striking bit of serendipity, I was looking at a book called “Larger Than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage,” obviously about Lester Dent, where it said that he averaged about 65,000 words a week. Now all of that wasn’t on a manual typewriter, apparently he used a dictaphone too, but still that’s intense.
It also said that his best day was 56,000 words. That wasn’t a typo, he did that in one freakin’ day with a dictaphone and a MANUAL typewriter. In one two year period he managed to PUBLISH 200,000 words of fiction A MONTH.
But five books a year is just too much.
=shakes head=
Freakin’ snobs.
And you can still find his books in Safeway and in stores today. Yup. Lester Dent was my hero.
Oh, I believe it can be done. I’ve done it a few times myself, for short periods of time.
For me, my productivity tends to come in spurts. I’ll write 500 words a day for weeks on end, then suddenly I’m cranking out 10,000 words a day for the next few weeks.
Am I just lazy? I don’t know.
It seems, though, it often depends upon how many other “tasks” the wife has me doing at any given time. Ha!
So who beats on you for your output? As a reader, I don’t care if a writer writes a book a month or a book every five years. What I care about is the quality of the book. I enjoy good writing. I do judge a writer by the quality of the writing.
Mark, who beats on me? Oh, my god, it’s so common I seldom notice anymore, and it comes in from so many directions it’s stunning. From agents who have told me to slow down (because they didn’t want to keep making decent money I guess) to family and friends who make fun of the fact that I finish books, so much so that I seldom talk about writing projects or finishing anything anymore. Why do they do that? Because I bother them by working so hard I guess. I don’t know. The myth of writing fast equals writing poorly is so ingrained that it comes from everywhere, including lots of comments in these blog posts.
You are correct that readers don’t care. And that’s the hardest thing to teach a writer.
Dean’s Rule: “The quality of the final product has nothing to do with the writer’s experience writing it.”
And this works both ways. You can just swim along thinking it’s wonderful and it sucks, you can fight over every word and it will read easy and effortless. Long term pros learn to just ignore the process and get the words out and done.
Good article. I’ve seen the math other places. Can’t recall where, but showed how easy it was to actually write a book in a month or so. And I’ve done that for the last few years in NaNo (need to get back to it), part time since I work a full time job. And even getting a book done in a month isn’t overkill. I did 102K words last year and produced two novels.
But I thought this might be a good discussion topic that relates to this. Do you have any thoughts about a person who is writing part-time in the evenings, getting out one, maybe two books a year, but would like to transition to doing it full time? Wait until something sells well before taking the leap?
I’m currently on vacation, pretending to be a full-time writer.
R.L., the transition to full time writing has to do with speed and money in the bank and earnings from your writing. Over the years I’ve heard a hundred different writers give a hundred different guidelines for when a writer should go freelance. Things from having so many contracts to so much in the bank to so many books in the pipeline and so on. In the master class that’s what the game is about, staying off the day job and out of bankruptcy and selling and writing even with life issues beating on you.
We start the game with everyone writing full time, we give them a varied amount of money in the bank, two sold novels, a finished novel, and a writing speed. Then it goes from there. Within a year 11 of 12 are back on day jobs and usually the only person not on a day job was the one with low expenses and a bunch of money in the bank. But interestingly enough, the writer who could finish four or five or more books a year almost always got back off the day job fairly quickly. The one book per year writers seldom did. So speed is important, but going off a day job won’t increase your speed much. Actually, for the first half year it slows you down. (I know, sounds silly, but true. A person used to a schedule and outside work structure will have a horrid time with setting their own structure and defending it.)
So no correct answer, R.L.. Just what works for you. Speed of writing, cash flow from the writing, and monthly expenses all factor into the math.
Typing rate is pretty much irrelevant. I’m a slow but diligent typist; yet a little spreadsheet work tells me I could type the equivalent of 50 novels a year, if I had to. Even a one word-per-minute typist could still type a novel in a year, working part time. Anyone who thinks typing speed is relevant, hasn’t thought through the numbers.
The math (at its simplest) is:
Writing Time = Thinking Time + Revising Time + Typing Time + Diddling Around Time
Typing Time is the smallest contributor to that sum, by a long shot. You have consciously chosen a strategy which minimizes the Revising Time component.
That leaves you Thinking Time and Diddling Around Time. Somehow I suspect people who write slowly aren’t doing a lot more Thinking Time than you are…
Martin said “Writing Time = Thinking Time + Revising Time + Typing Time + Diddling Around Time”
Oh, wow, do I not agree with that. That kind of thinking is the quickest way to a death spiral that I have seen writers go down.
Writing time is ONLY creating new words on paper. The rest of that crap you mentioned is just excuses to not write. Sorry. But can’t let that go by. Writers are people who write, not diddle around, not rewrite, not sit and think. Writers put new words on the paper. That’s writing time. Draw the line there and you will discover you spend a lot less time on that other crap than you did before you set the line.
Sorry, Dean, you missed my point. Let me try again.
Writing Time means “How long does it take for the book/story to come out, from when you first decide to write it?”
And I guarantee — in fact, it’s axiomatic — that:
Writing Time = Thinking Time + Revising Time + Typing Time + Diddling Around Time
Thinking Time (what you call “creating new words on paper”) is unavoidable. Those new words on paper don’t think up themselves. You’ve gotta do it.
Typing Time is irrelevant, since even a painful 1 wpm can still produce 100K words in a year. I expect that you don’t even notice the physical act of typing. It’s subsumed into your Thinking Time. As someone once said, “…writing fast does not mean typing faster.”
What makes you faster is you set Revising Time and Diddling Around Time to 0.
So if someone wants to write faster, show them that equation, and ask them which elements they can change. They can’t think faster. (If they know a safe, legal way to do that, I want in!) And typing faster won’t make enough difference to notice. That leaves them only two elements they can control: revising and diddling. If they can cut those out, they can cut Writing Time very close to Thinking Time.
Martin, I see what you were getting at. But here is still my problem with it. Thinking time and typing time are the same thing. I make the story up as I go along, trusting the process of telling a story, and usually my thinking is ahead of my lousy typing speed, which I am working on improving every day. (Every so often I find myself almost touch typing, just flying along, and of course the moment I realize it I fall back into old methods. (grin)) So thinking time and typing time are the same to me. And I don’t revise because I hate that and get bored easily. And diddling around time I don’t count as writing time, since I do so much of that, like playing poker, working on eBay, going out searching for treasures, watching television. None of that is writing time.
But as I said to Gary, that’s just my way and I have trained that into existence. And I have trained my ego to shut up and let a project just go. My ego is just like all of yours I’m afraid. If I really wanted, I could make every story and every book I write better by my ego’s opinion. I could tinker with it, rewrite it, redraft it, do fifth and sixth drafts to polish a manuscript, and my ego still wouldn’t be satisfied with it, and so I would never mail it, and I would revert back to the years I wrote two stories and rewrote everything a dozen times and didn’t have the courage to ever show my work. But somehow I shut down that part of my ego. I have trained myself to know, without a doubt, that I am the worst judge of my own work, and thus if my first reader says mail it, I mail it.
No right way, every writer is different.
I hadn’t interpreted Martin’s equation quite that way, but I’m not sure my interpretation is relevant to his point. I have a lot of “thinking time” where I can’t physically write, but am working out the story in my head. It’s the times in the shower, the car, etc. I’ve never counted those hours as ‘writing time’ but I do sometimes wonder how they’d stack up if I were writing full time.
As is, often by the time I can actually get to the laptop, I’ve worked out the scene in my head and so all I’m really doing is typing. Would I be slower or faster if I was doing that mental work while in front of the keyboard? I don’t know.
I follow your articles with avid interest, Dean, particularly given I’ve been a pro writer for several years now but still feel I have a very great deal to learn, the business of writing not least amongst them.
As you’ve already said at other times, different writers have different methods, and I must admit I feel envy for anyone who can write a huge amount of publishable words or get out even two books a year. I can manage just one, and I don’t even have a day job at the moment, unless you count occasionally assessing manuscripts for an agency.
Maybe it’s a psychological block, but every time I write, say, two thousand words, I hit a point where I can’t go on. The well dries up, the fingers refuse to type, and my brain goes into shutdown. It’s the same if I try to write more than three or four hours in a day, if even that.
I’ve tried pushing past these limits, but here’s what happens: the more I write, the more I end up having to revise what I’ve written. And believe me, it *does* need revised. Any time I’ve written three, four thousand words in a day, I’ve spent far longer trying to sort it out and make it make sense on subsequent drafts. Maybe some of us are born to write first-draft publishable material, like I seem to recall Robert Silverberg could, and maybe some of us just have to try that much harder.
As for Lester Dent, well, I’ve got to be honest – and this is just my own point of view – I tried reading some of his Doc Savage books just earlier this year, and the writing was mindbogglingly awful. Yes, he’s still in print, and that’s remarkable, but if I tried to write that much and subsequently turn in prose of that quality, I’d never get published, not these days.
Gary, no right way of doing anything in this craft of producing words. Just your way, and if it’s working and you are making a living at it, why change it? Or even struggle to change it? Even Kevin J. Anderson, who did the blog and writes five novels a year rewrites as he freely admits, sometimes numbers of drafts. It’s his method. He also does heavy outlining ahead of time and that would kill me, since I have done it with dozens of novels now and hated every minute of it.
So if it’s working and you are making a living at what you are doing, why change? However, if it’s not working, then you need to retrain to a method that will work for you and that takes time.
Your description of just hitting a wall is a mental training. I have trained myself to have the same issue every four pages, so I stand up and move around. But I have also trained myself that once I stand up, get something to drink, walk around for a moment and sit down again, I’m fresh to go again for another four pages. It was training and it took years to get to automatic.
And if you do write more and faster, the training is that it must be worse, so you automatically think it is crap and has to be “fixed” and so on. That is also training. You could train yourself to think that the faster you write, the better it is and just release. It would take time, years, but with a focus at the training, it can happen as well.
The only thing that stops writers lives between our ears. What we believe is a reality. I have just taught myself over years that when I write and finish something, it is done. Could I go back and “fix” it and rewrite it and tinker with it for two or three or ten more drafts? Sure, I know how to rewrite. But I have trained myself to release and move on. I have much more fun making up something new than fixing or rewriting something I have already written. I think this comes from a short attention span for me and the fact that I am easily bored.
So are my stories perfect? Nope, never will be. But because I have trained myself in this method, I am getting to books and stories that using your method I wouldn’t have gotten to in hundreds of years. Is your method wrong? Nope, it’s your method. But if you believe you can’t change a method if it’s not working, then that’s another issue. But if it is working, why change it? Every writer is different. We all live between our ears and are limited by the beliefs we hold there.
Thanks for mentioning Lester Dent above–I looked him up and will be trying his Master Plot at least a few times, heh.
In looking for the LD MP, I found Michael Moorcock…of the 3-day novel. Basically, a long weekend.
There really are no excuses for not writing and sending it out!
Love this quote: Writers write, authors are people who have written.
This conversation reminds me of one of my more annoying creative writing professors in college. In answer to a question about writing to the market or writing what sells she replied, “If you are thinking about the commercial viability of your work, you have already failed as an artist.” I actually think she said “commericiality” which isn’t a word.
This “it has to be ART, and ART takes time” attitude is annoying. It’s like they are talking about some sort of mystical or religious experience rather than a skill to be learned.
Roguecyber, got that one. But art does take time to find an audience. All great art over the centuries found audience. And most great writers now celebrated were the bestsellers of their time. But sadly, most college professors just ignore that tiny little fact. If you write for an audience of 200 you will never be considered an artist. What is really art and what isn’t art is formed by the opinion of a large audience over time.
But that doesn’t mean the writer needs a lot of time to write past learning and learning and learning over decades and constantly struggling to become a better writer/artist in craft and skill. It is a skill to be learned, a craft to be practiced. (Oh, oh, used that ugly “practice” word around writers again. Sorry.)
On the “art for art’s sake” thing, I gotta whip out my favorite Neil Gaiman quote: “The only difference between high art and cheap entertainment is what people are reading in 100 years” (from memory, I might have butchered it a bit). In other words, we don’t really get to vote on whether we’re doing art or entertainment–that’s the business of the folks two generations down the line. Not being able to vote on that creates a lot of elbow room for the mind–my misspent youth chasing a lit degree just about killed my willingness to enjoy what I was writing and actually send stuff out, because it would never be good enough to be real art.
Bullshit comes in a lot of flavors, often wrapped in vellum.
On the issue of Martin’s writing equation and the areas one can streamline, I’ve found the lovely thing about thinking time is that you can do it while you do other things. Treadmill? Oil change for your car (you do it yourself, right? Good excuse to get outside, and saves gobs of cash)? Running Errands? Shower? All that time that life-stuff absorbs is the perfect back-burner time for letting your subconscious chew through things.
I’ve found that revising time shrinks a lot as I improve — I’ve gotten better at spotting potential continuity and voice errors (on those occasions where I’m writing in period voice for my Steampunk pieces) as I write, and I just flag them in the margins and move on (instead of fussing over them endlessly and derailing my composition groove). After it’s done, I take a couple hours and address the notes when they turn out to be substantive rather than just insecurity. My beta finds the pedestrian stuff like repeated words, typos, and redundant clauses, occasional mistakes in characterization, and those take another couple hours–maybe as many as five for a full novel–to fix. Sometimes, I have a freelancer I work with instead of my beta (generally for books where the scope and continuity are really intricate and outside my beta’s skillset).
Doing things this way has taken my revising time from 3-4x my writing time (once measured in months) to a small fraction of my writing time (now measurable in hours), to the point where I now fret more about the time it takes to format mss for different submission venues and ebook markets than I do about thinking or revising time. The formatting is a job I can’t outsource or double-up on (or haven’t found a way to, yet), where the revising and thinking are very amenable to streamlining.
I should mention that most of these work habits I’ve developed just in the last year and a half, and it has made a HUGE difference in productivity (over 10% of my lifetime output has happened this year). And they’re probably not optimized yet–I daresay in another couple years I’ll have a far more efficient way of dealing with the whole rigmarole. I offer it for what it might be worth, from a guy who’s going to crack his first million words next week (and who is thus a comparative newbie at this whole thing).
-Dan
Wow, Dan, great stuff. Clearly you have focused on the retraining of your own mind and that’s what is working. Well done.
When you look at the bottom line, the entire series of Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing is about trying to help writers retrain their thinking to more business thinking, more logic thinking. Not right for everyone, granted, but for those who like business and think in business terms, it seems to have helped.
But yet there will be many writers who will read your post and shudder and just not understand at a deep level how only revising for a few hours can help you instead of hurt you. My last rewrite on my last novel (published under a pen name and about 100,000 words long) took me exactly two hours and ten minutes, with a ten minute break in the middle. That was fixing typos and such found by my first reader and spellchecking as I went along.
And speaking of a time waster, how about rereading your own work. Stephen King or someone at his level has a great story of a person who came up to him while reading and asked him why he wasn’t reading his own book. He said that he answered honestly that he knew the ending and the person seemed happy with that answer. Yet I know writers, usually beginning writers, who reread their own work all the time. Head-shaking. I don’t even reread in proofs. With copyedits I glance through making sure that the corrections marked are what I want or not, then send it back. (Yup, that’s going to make a lot of writers shudder in horror.) I just don’t understand and hate the idea of rereading something I have written for any reason. I have too many other great books by other great writers to read.
Now, I do make an exception when I find an old story that has my name on it but even after glancing at the first page or so I can’t remember the story, then I reread it. That happens more than I want to think about, to be honest. Especially lately when I have been digging through old files and old computers to try to put together inventory to get to WMG to publish.
Here is my rough count on short stories written in case anyone is interested. I did about ten from 1974-1982, my rewriting years. (Except for two published, they are all gone in the fire.) I did about 45 per year from 1982 to the spring of 1985 when my house burnt down. About one hundred and fifty stories, only a few published ones remain, including the story in volume #1 of Writers of the Future that is still in print. (I also lost two completed novels and part of others in that fire.)
From 1985 to 1994 I did another 200 stories or so. I found all the old files for these and was stunned there were that many because I remember not doing much writing in the Pulphouse years. Also three more novels in that period. Since 1994 I wrote about 100 more novels and another 200 plus short stories. So I have written somewhere between 500 and 600 short stories, over one hundred novels, and a ton of other stuff, including upwards of two hundred novel proposals. My word count is about 12 million words. So it’s no wonder I have forgotten a few of the stories. Heck, I can’t remember half the novels. (grin)
On Art, I can’t help but recall my old Shakespeare professor who said that poetry was “a shortcut to the heart and soul.” I’ve since realized that definition rightly applies to Art with the capital A. We make Art when we connect with someone else.
And by that definition, Art is forced to be individualistically defined. There are people who don’t get Shakespeare, just as there are people who don’t get Opera. It doesn’t connect, so it’s not Art to them, even if the hoity-toity or academic set says it is.
Part of the reason I like that definition is that, for me, the most incredible written story ever was not Shakespeare or some other classic. It wasn’t even an award winning story of its time. It’s “Creative Constructions, Inc.” by Kent Patterson, published in Analog in 1991.
Kent died in 1995, which is truly unfortunate, because I never got a chance to let him know how powerful that story was for me. I’ve re-read it a few times a year for nearly two decades now. Objectively, by the standards of the Science Fiction community, it’s not much, and by the standards of the literary world, it’s just a trifling entertainment.
But fuck ‘em. It’s Art to me. And that’s enough.
If we work hard as writers, we might be able to make a few bucks or even make a living. Maybe we’ll even be lucky and be remembered and studied in a couple of decades. Or maybe we’ll connect with someone in a way that what we thought was a piece of simple entertainment turned out to rock their world.
Sorry to be so dramatic, but that’s my response to the pretentiousness about what’s Art and what is not.
Big Ed, somewhere Kent is smiling. He was a very good friend of mine and one of the nicest humans to ever live on this planet. He showed up one night in our Tuesday night workshop in Eugene, OR and he and Ray Vukcevich sat on one corner of this huge table that could hold upwards of thirty people around it and Kris and I and Jerry Oltion sat on the other corner, and all the other editors and people who came though filled the other spots. Ray and Kent were the anchors to the workshop, keeping everyone and everything on solid ground, while Kris and I and Jerry were the engines driving people forward. It worked that way for years until Kent’s sudden death seemed to change everything and the workshop fell apart shortly thereafter.
Kent wrote some startling stories, ones that still to this day stick in my memory. So your wonderful words about Ken’t story made me smile and remember an old friend fondly. Thanks. He is still missed by all of us.
Kevin Anderson is amazing, and not just because he has a cool first name.
I’ve read his blog before; he has a great article on what basically amounts to “work ethic for writers” dated to a month or so ago.
The guy just treats writing like a serious endeavor, and works at it. He had achieved a high level of success as a result. Since a lot of effort and a strong work ethic are involved in success in most professions, it’s hard for me to see how people convince themselves that the two are unrelated.
Doesn’t mean that we can all sit down and type for 40+ hours a week. Job, kids, LIFE. Things get in the way. But it should certainly be the goal one aspires to, if they want to succeed at, well, pretty much any career.
I wonder if the myth perpetuates itself because so many people who aspire to “being writers” don’t actually want to write; they just want to “be a writer”. Telling them “being a writer” means working just as many hours writing as they would at any other job sorta takes some of the “lounging around living the cool writing life” luxury out of the daydream, I’d imagine.
That doesn’t explain why so darned many “known” writers seem to only write a novel a year, though. Why IS that? Are the smart ones all writing more novels, just under pseudonyms? Or is there something else going on? I write SF&F, and it’s rare to see folks there writing more than one a year, and just about unheard of to see more than two a year. Why?
The known writers who do only one book a year are usually only part time writers who have other jobs. That’s normal in science fiction and fantasy. However, my wife writes many books a year, works like Kevin Anderson, and publishes in science fiction. And in mystery. And in Romance. Actually, she has something like five or six books coming out next year alone in romance. And one in science fiction and not sure about mystery.
And I write in science fiction, mostly in short fiction, and I write a bunch of novels per year.
There are three times I let myself re-read one of my stories from start to finish: right after someone buys it, when the galleys show up, and when the story comes out in print. That might seem a bit indulgent by Dean’s standards, but in each instance I feel I am getting something useful out of it.
1. The after-sale read is a pure confidence booster. I have no handle at all on my quality — in terms of me being able to tell what’s “good” in the eyes of an editor — so I like to re-read in the immediate aftermath of a sale as a reminder that my Internal Editor is full of shit, and can be ignored at will when writing current work.
2. Galleys. Gotta read ‘em. ‘Nuff said.
3. I don’t know about anyone else, but I experience a curious disconnect when I read my work in print. It’s almost as if it’s not even my work — the story has been “validated” by the world, and now it shares space with all the other “valid” fiction. Thus it can’t possible be “my” story anymore. It’s more “real” than it was before? I realize this is just my old aspirant self-doubt at work. Maybe that will fade in time? Who knows.
I will say this, the allure of having written — past tense — versus being a writer — active — is quite strong. I can see now why lots and lots of people get stuck in that state of mind. 2011 for me is going to be all about avoiding the resting state.
Brad, at your stage I’m sure I did the same thing as well. But give yourself another fifty or a hundred sales and trust me, the idea of rereading a story that often just will make you shudder. Sure, galleys and proofs you need to look at them to make sure no one else has put their grubby little fingers in your story, but beyond that, move forward. But I like the idea early on of rereading after you sold it to show your voice that says everything is shit that even something you are convinced is shit sold and that you are the worst judge of your own work.
Here is another danger in falling into the “author” state of having written instead of writing. The “author” starts thinking that because they have sold and it’s published, they must be good and thus think they can stop chasing the learning. And stop practicing the craft story after story, and stop studying what other writers are doing. As you said, being an author is a resting state. Being a writer is constantly moving forward and chasing knowledge and putting new words on paper. And trust me, it’s a lot more fun writing than not writing.
See, Dean, now you’ve just totally undermined your idea that it is a myth that writing is hard work. Obviously, it is harder work than sitting around thinking about world building between bouts of video game playing. I don’t get this work ethic thing of which you speak. Writing should just happen;)
Thanks for another great post.
Beth, LOL. I suppose that someone who thinks that sitting at a computer for eight hours, with breaks and naps along the way, without a boss or schedule, is hard work would argue that it is hard work. But I have dug ditches for pipe, I have worked construction, worked as a bartender for eight hours. Oh, trust me, sitting at a computer and making stuff up isn’t hard work.
And why some writers, usually beginning writers who are unpublished, think it is flat amazes me. Nope, this is the best job on the planet. It has its annoying sides, sure, like trying to get money out of publishers, but the actual physical sitting and making something up isn’t hard work. It’s just fun.
If a writer come at fiction writing as hard work, now we are back to the training aspect of that mass between the writer’s ears. Thinking of writing as hard work comes from college professors, unpublished writers, and writers who want to give themselves pats for finishing a few thousand words every year or so. It’s a trained thing and any writer can retrain that stupidity to the attitude of wanting to go to the computer, to having so much fun working on stories they have to be careful to get up and move around every hour. I can go down into a fantasy world for hours and hours, just typing and having a blast. I have to drink liquids regularly to force myself to get up every hour. And by doing that I trained my brain to shut down after four pages until I stood up, reset the switch on my butt, and sat back down, which then allows me another four pages.
That way I can do thirty or forty or more pages in a day without getting sore arms. Plus I have great chairs and great posture at the computer so all I am moving is my fingers.
Thanks, Dean, for the perspective on going freelance. It helped to give me some ideas and thoughts.
On the art vs. commercial thing, I have always felt that to be something writers tend to think in terms of when they aren’t selling well and think they should be. To have created “art” gives them some validity when the market is giving them little to none.
I think it can get in the brain of a writer as well, and shut them down when they are no longer “enjoying” the writing and it feels more like “work” simply because it needs to make money, to pay the bills, so the writer doesn’t feel they are writing to enjoy the experience of writing itself–it becomes a job.
But that as has been touched on by Dean and others here is simply a mental construct, a belief, that in reality doesn’t need to exist. We write, for me in the hopes that many people will get to read it, and that only happens if people buy it, like it, and tell that to others, who buy it, like it, etc.
I like that quote given above, that what is art is determined by people 100 years later. IOW, don’t try to write art, simply do the best job you can to write an entertaining story, and let the readers in the next 100 years vote by buying it and reading it what is art.
To me, the only time you’re not writing commercial fiction is when you don’t intend to get it published.
Of course writing is hard work. It’s just a different type of “hard.”
Ya see, I long ago realized that for many people, self-discipline is harder than physical labor. It’s more “work” to keep doing something with no immediate payoff than it is to go get sweaty and smelly in that ditch that needs to be dug.
I also think what’s truly “hard” for many new writers is pushing through the fears and the self-doubts and the insecurities that accompany trying to write professionally. That requires some internal ‘work’ that’s much more challenging than physical labor.
The talk about mental training brings up a question for me, Dean: I’ve never been able to write more than 6000 words in a day. Don’t know why.
Since the marketing workshop 3000 is pretty simple, I don’t hit it everyday, sometimes work just kicks my butt, but it’s not that hard. I’ve done 6000 several times but after that my brain just sort of shuts down, like I hit a wall. Thankfully, I don’t have any of the physical problems (sore wrists, back, etc) that a lot of people do. I think I got just lucky in that department.
I think part of it is that I’m not used to sitting and staring at a computer screen for that long but I’m not sure. Any suggestions for moving past this? I’d like to step things up a bit as were.
Thanks,
Steve
Hey, Steve, let me say that 6,000 words a day just made most writers shudder at the idea of doing that many. (grin) Ain’t nothing wrong at all with that pace. In fact, do the math at 5 days a week, 6,000 words a day and you get a novel every three weeks or so.
But since you asked, when looked by the page, 6,000 words is about 24 pages and both Kris and I do that at times. I tend to like the 20 page a day number as an average. But on days you are under deadline, there are a few tricks to push past that to huge numbers. Trick #1 is set your day ahead of time. If you can manage four pages an hour with a break inside that hour (you know, four pages in 50 minutes, then a ten minute break). Then I tend to work two hours on, an hour for lunch, two hours on, two hours for a nap and dinner, two hours on, a long break. That hits 24 pages. If I want to go farther after the long break, I do another two hours (remember each hour has a break), another half hour break, then another two hours on. That gets you to about 40 pages in a day or about ten thousand words. At that pace, that gets you a novel in about ten days. And you work about ten hours, with lots of breaks, a nap, and so on. That’s trick #1, plan your day ahead of time.
Trick #2, take naps. And get a good night’s sleep between days.
Trick #3, don’t let your mind tell you that you are too tired or blanking. Just sit at the computer, glance at the last few paragraphs and figure out the next line, and then the next, and eventually the mind will snap back in. However, if you believe that you can’t do the next session, and never sit down, trust me you won’t do it. (grin)
But let me stress again, there aren’t a lot of reasons to go above a 6,000 word day. In fact, unless you are ghosting or writing WFH, I see no reason to. I did a book of about 90,000 words recently in 20 days. That’s less than 5,000 words a day and I was comfortable. So maybe except for the challenge, not much reason to push past 6,000 words a day. And remember, this is my job, besides screwing around with collections and such, this is all I do.
I’m not Dean, and my highest day’s total has only been a touch over 10,000 words in my pre-myth inhalation days, but what worked for me then was to have an idea of what the story was and what I needed to have happen, and work around that. Throwing trouble at the hero and having him work out of it is always good for keeping the pages moving.
Now that I’m de-mythifying myself, I like Moorcock’s suggestion to have lists (great for pantsers AND plotters, IMO) to refer to while in the white heat of writing, but I haven’t actually used it yet so it may or may not work for you.
Also, Lester Dent and 56,000 words in a day–that’s a whole book!
Not sure if that 56,000 words in a day is a myth or not to be honest, but I do know of writers who have written books that long in two days. To do 56,000 words you would have to write about 2,200 words an hour for 24 straight hours. That is a very young person’s sport. A novel is six days hurt enough a couple years ago. (grin)
Keep in mind folks that at a certain level, physical typing becomes a trained exercise that needs to be worked up to and you have to be careful to not hurt yourself. That’s why I call writing 10,000 words in a day every day a sport. It takes that kind of physical conditioning. You think I’m kidding, go ahead and type out ten thousand words one day, then see how your arms and shoulders feel the next day. (grin)
A 10k day is definitely something you’d have to train up for, lol. I would probably need a sauna afterwards these days.
I still want to give the 2 or 3 day novel a go, just to see if I can do it and how it feels. I feel like a slacker for having struggled with 500 words a day for so many years after buying the myths.
Dent’s 200,000 words/month does break down to a nice 6,667 words a day, which is a good chunk of time and wordage but doable, I think.
Speaking of physical conditioning these days compared to before, I now get sore from playing a few hours of ping pong on the Wii! LOL
Having a good ergo setup is a prerequisite–I would never try to do all this on standard keyboards, for one. My 10ks were on Microsoft Ergo Natural boards and my wrists still tingled afterwards.
Thanks, Sam. I’ve read the Moorcock book and it’s great. He was one of my favorite writers as a kid.
Also, the 56,000 words in a day for Lester Dent might be a myth, not sure obviously, but the book I read it in said that only 24,000 words were actually typed. The other 32,000 were with a dictaphone, so maybe that’s how he pulled it off. Either way, a hell of a lot of words.
I grew up in the computer age, and learned to ctouch type (more or less by default, not by formal instruction) by the time I was ten. When transcribing, I can do about 100wpm (not fast enough to keep up with Cory Doctorow, but with most interview subjects it’s okay). Even with all that, it wasn’t until I broke into fast fiction this year that I started to run into any ergo problems from typing.
Word to the wise, most keyboards branded as “ergonomic” aren’t. Microsoft ergo keyboards just about crippled me in August. Sticky spacebars are enough to do it when you’re doing upwards of 6k-7k wds/day, and the pain and inflammation got to be so intense (even swapping out for new MS Ergo keyboards twice in two weeks) that it was a strain to grip a glass of iced tea with a straight arm (under normal conditions, I can straight-arm my 90lb niece).
Needless to say, this put a bit of a cramp in my style–one day of writing cost two days of physical recovery time (including massages from a physical therapist), and even then the best I could manage was to start the day with a dull ache and work up to sharp pain by the end of a day’s work. On the advice of said PT, I wound up going to Goldtouch reconfigurable ergo keyboards (the first one was so nice I got one for every machine in the house), and the only twinges I’ve gotten since are from wasting time with a mouse and a web browser–typing actually relieves it. Nice minor incentive to keep writing!
My best one-day effort to date was a little over 25,000 words in one day. That was November 30th, 2009 – yup, end of NaNoWriMo.
I wanted to finish the darned thing, but had not given myself enough time earlier in the month. I did finish it. That day. All 25,000+ remaining words.
No, I really don’t want to make a habit of that.
Something that KJA wrote got my attention:
“Or how about a factory worker being reprimanded because he produces more than his coworkers, or an accountant who balances the books and finishes the tax forms well ahead of schedule?”
He asks some excellent rhetorical questions there, and it immediately made me think that the writing community, by and large, has the bad type of union mentality.
We’ve all heard of it or seen it. A new guy or girl gets a job in a company with a union, and he or she works very hard because there’s a spouse and kids to feed, and before long, one of the elder statesmen from the union comes up to that person on a break and tells them to slow the fuck down because they’re making everyone else look bad.
I think that’s all it is. And given the magnitude of all the myths in this industry, it seems to be spot-on. A lot of people want to become a writer for the same reason people want to become rock stars or athletes. It seems like an easy, fun job where they can just mess around all day and earn millions of dollars. Not true, but people think that.
And when someone hears of a person like Kris, Dean, or Kevin who is releasing multiple novels in a year, one of two thoughts likely occur: 1) if these people are writing this quickly, my publisher — or agent, or spouse, or parents, or fans — might expect ME to work that hard, too; and 2) that person over there is hitting me over the head with my weakness of laziness that I know full well about and am hiding beneath a mountain of excuses. That guy’s a bastard, so I’m gonna tell everyone he can’t possibly write well in that amount of time.
I’ll also add a number 3) to that; all my MFA program professors told me that writing is tough, and to write well I have to rewrite a billion times, so that person’s writing has to be crap. That’s all there is to it.
I know that’s a very Dean-like rant, and I don’t mean to offend any union-affiliated among us, but that’s the way I feel. That union mentality has run a lot of our companies into the ground, and subsequently our economy and our country.
If we all worked our assess off with the goal of producing 5 major products per year, nobody on earth would be able to touch us, and that’s what makes people like Tiger Woods the best at something.
I remember watching an interview with Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin from about 12 or so years ago, and Robert was wearing the colors of his favorite football (soccer) team. The host asked him about it and he got all pumped up and the crowd went with him on it. Then he asked Page if he had ever followed football in his youth, and Page said, “Oh, hell no. I spent all my time playing the guitar.”
Dean’s saying the same thing, more or less. By the way, I loved the assessment of your quantity of material over the years, Dean. I’d estimate that you might say 1994 was when you “got serious,” though you might have said that about other times earlier, or even another time later, like now with ePub.
Another example and I’ll stop (I can keep going all day with these). A lot of people can recite thousands of pieces of trivia about a sport. It’s incredibly impressive, actually. They’ve just trained themselves by spending literally thousands of hours practicing that hobby so they can entertain themselves and others at the local pub. Nothing wrong with that. We are good at what we do the most of, even if it’s just watching television.
Good points, Jeremy. Thanks.
And to be clear, I started writing back in the early 1970s, got serious on January 1st, 1982 (by kicking out rewriting and mailing everything and writing one story per week). I came back to writing from publishing in 1994 and got serious about catching up with the electronic revolution in April of 2009.
Oh, the MS keyboards are definitely not the best ergonomics. I’ve killed two, even at my glacial pace, and never bought another. I have a Freestyle, a vertical keyboard, and a Kinesis Contour, Dragon Naturally Speaking, a voice recorder, and regularly switch between them. (still haven’t made the switch to Dvorak/foot switches or Kevin J. Anderson-style vocal story-composition, though!)
Any tips on what desk/chair setup you’re using, Dean, and how you arrived at what worked for you?
I’ll be taking Dean’s advice very closely on a sustainable fast writing pace until I find my own doable max (for the time being) as heck, he’s been in this game a long time and I’m barely past the starting line! (big grin)
After all, there’s not much point in doing 10-25,000 words one day or for several days and be burned out or injured and unable to write much or at all afterwards and dreading writing. Keeping it at the fun and exciting threshhold sounds like a great long term plan.
Sam,
I use a desk layout that keeps my arms at a perfect 90 degrees from my body, the lower part of the arms resting comfortably on the arm rests, the wrists resting comfortably on a soft pad in front of the keyboard. Mouse is at the same level as the keyboard as well so I am not reaching for it either and I have a mouse that all I have to do is move a finger to scroll and move around, so no arm movement either with the mouse.
Also key is feet flat on the floor, knees at 90 degrees as well, good back support. My chair at my writing desk was built specially for someone and I found it at a sale and it fit me perfectly. Fantastically expensive chair with pads that pump up and fantastic support. My chair at this computer, my internet computer, I bought at Staples. It is expensive also, leather, and feels like it wraps around me. Best money I ever spent on both chairs.
Ah, a question about reading your own work, Dean. I don’t normally read what I write once it’s done either, but I am also not writing anywhere near as much as you are in a year.
But suppose you were writing a series. How would you stay abreast of details? Or would you write them all in succession so the whole story stays fresh in your head?
Jeremy, on the question on how I keep track of the details of even one book, let alone a series is this: I have the worst memory on the planet so when I finish a chapter I write down what I wrote in that chapter, sort of building an outline after the fact. Also, when I have a character wearing something, I write it on one of the white boards covering my office, so by the time a book is finished, I have a ton of information about the characters not only in the outline I have done as I write the book, but also all over the white boards. If there is a chance I will do a second book, I copy down all the white board information into a notebook and put it with the outline.
In other words, I make notes as I make stuff up so I can remember it later without having to dig back through the manuscript.
I wouldn’t suggest that the “union mentality” is what ran the US into the ground. Look at Germany – highly unionized and an economic powerhouse. If your theory held water, Germany would be a basket case.
I switched to an Aeron a couple of years back and that removed a lot of shoulder pain that would build up in very long writing sessions. Expensive chair, but earned back its cost in increased writing productivity. Many authors seem to also use them. I also use the Kinesis Freestyle VIP keyboards. Expensive, but give more flexibility for position than the Goldstar kit.
As someone else recently said though about “Neil Gaiman’s Gazebo”, writers shouldn’t worry too much about their writing environment until they’ve actually got the writing part down.
Sheesh, you guys are talking about chairs that cost more than my entire office setup.
I realized that my worst enemy is the internet when I write. If I have internet at a computer, I’m always being tempted to peek at some site, check some email, whatever.
So I took an old PC with a dead hard drive, stuck a 40gb hard drive into it, loaded Ubuntu/OpenOffice, and parked it in the other room from the internet router, without a wifi card. I haunted the local used furniture shops for weeks, and happened across the old blue wooden desk that I wrote my first short story on thirty years ago, which my mother got rid of when it broke. It was sitting there, repaired and for sale (really – one of those surreal moments in life). I talked them down from $30 to $25, paid $1 for an old typing chair with good lumbar support, and went home.
Now desk, chair, and internet-less computer sit in a corner, out of the way. An old but still working lamp, earphones for music, and a couple of notebooks and pens round out the ‘office’. No fiction to distract me, no internet. Just me, and the page.
Working well so far.
Dean, thanks for the tips about the timing for writing. The “four pages, break, four pages, longer break, repeat” concept really appeals, and I’m going to give something like that a try myself.
Yes, those are good tips on the breaks, Dean. I should have mentioned that.
When I get writing, I usually do something like that. Write for about 45 minutes, then pause, lie on the floor to stretch out my back and shoulders, and think about the characters. (This can come sooner if I get stuck.)
Things usually quickly work themselves out and I can get back to writing.
That’s also an interesting strategy on the post-writing outline, and I never would have thought of that. I make no comment on your memory, but I know it would be impossible to maintain continuity without some record of where things stood. But your method is good because it gives you a sort of Cliff’s Notes to your story so you don’t have to spend the time watching the whole thing.
I imagine another reason you don’t read what you write is you don’t rewrite, so if you do read your own work you tend to see things you might have done differently, particularly on stories you are far removed from. That could be brutal. There are a lot of artists, particularly actors, who do the same thing with their own work for the same reason.
Jeremy, actually I don’t reread my own work because I see it as a total waste of time, nothing more. I never tinker with a story for any reason because I learned over those seven years of no sales and constant rewriting from 1975-1982 that I have no clue how to rewrite my own work. Some writers have trained themselves to see parts of their own work and rewriting works for them, but for me (and every writer is different, remember) I find rewriting a fantastic waste of time. I honestly don’t have a clue if I am making my own story better or not.
Folks, I can take another writer’s story and help them make it better, no issue. Reading a billion stories as an editor can do that for you. But for my own stories, the story is in my head. I have no clue how my subconscious put that story in my head on the page. And when I read the typing I did, the story in my head comes back clearly. Why? Because it’s already in my head, that’s why. Where with other writers I don’t have their story in my head, I only have their typing to relay the story.
So with the story clearly in my head and zero trust in myself that I can make anything better than my subconscious already did, why should I bother to reread? And rewrite? Why not just work on writing the next story?
But again, every writer is different. I rewrote stories to death for seven years and didn’t sell a one of them. Then I went to Heinlein’s Rules and have been selling ever since. That is what worked for me. And Heinlein. And Ellison. And Rusch. And Bradbury. And so on and so on… But it doesn’t work for many others. As many of you remember, Laura rewrites and has a long and solid career and makes no bones about how she does many drafts. I would NEVER try to change her because her way produces fantastic stories that I enjoy reading.
So the key on rereading and rewriting is that every writer is different. If you are rewriting and not selling, try getting the courage to send out a first draft of stories for a year or so and see what happens. But if you are writing only one draft and mailing them and not selling after a couple of years, maybe learning how to rewrite your own work might help you. No right way, just what works for you.
But with that clear (I hope), remember rewriting and using workshops and doing promotion and all that other crap can become a crutch to not mail out your work. You must do one method or the other and then mail it and move to the next story. Always move forward to the next story. And when you learn something new in craft, don’t try to apply it to an old story. Practice it on the next story. And the next.
So for me, who loves to learn and practice on the next story, rereading my old stories or rewriting is a complete waste of time.
Blarkon wrote: “I wouldn’t suggest that the “union mentality” is what ran the US into the ground. Look at Germany – highly unionized and an economic powerhouse. If your theory held water, Germany would be a basket case.”
Perhaps, but I would posit that Germany is doing it differently and better.
“Union mentality” is perhaps the wrong phrase. “Entitlement mentality” is probably better. I was talking about this the other day at work.
We have a society that believes that pay increases should outpace cost of living increases. Granted, pay increases very often don’t keep up with COLA’s (Cost of Living Adjustments), but they shouldn’t exceed them, either. In the past, if we wanted to earn more money, we had to work harder or retrain into a higher-paying position. Now we just lobby our representatives (union, government, etc.) for higher pay for the same work.
A very caustic statement I made the other night was something like, “People blame companies for moving production to other countries, but in some cases they should blame themselves. Their unions keep pushing the cost of labor up, while the workers are pressured to work at half their capacity to avoid putting other people out of work. So the companies can go to a place like Mexico where they can find workers who will do twice as much work as our capacity of for $10 per day.”
It’s certainly not the case everywhere, but in a lot of companies it’s been the way it’s gone. GM is a prime example in my mind. The cost of labor keeps increasing, but the quality of cars remains the same, at best. And they nearly folded and the government had to protect them. Sure, there were a thousand or more other reasons, but I think that is a big one. But this discussion is probably better left off this site, so that will be all I say about it. But by all means, go ahead and answer me and I will happily read your comments.
I equate that mentality exactly to that of the writer who gets upset with the writer who writes 5 novels per year. On the surface, it seems like it’s for different reasons, but ultimately the emotions are the same. And the result is the same; the 5-book writer expands her business and the 1-book writer who thinks the 5-book writer is crap barely breaks even, if he’s lucky.
I say that due to the number of comments I’ve seen from highly successful writers who say the very same thing: that you can’t earn a living writing one book per year, except in extraordinary circumstances. And there is overwhelming evidence that writers who produce dozens of short stories or a half-dozen novels per year do not write any worse material (and often far better) than a slower writer.
Maybe I’m wrong but I doubt it.
Crystal clear.