This is the first chapter, actually not the actual first chapter, but a chapter in a book I am putting together called Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing. Given time, this will all come together and be sold in New York somewhere.
A good alternate title for this book might be Killing the Myths of Publishing. Over the years in teaching young professional writers and talking with more experienced professional writers, it has become clear to me that there are some huge myths about the publishing industry and creative fiction writing in general.
Kris (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) and I have made it a mission to knock down some of these myths when we go to writer’s conferences and in our workshops here. And the reaction is always in a range between “Now I understand” to anger and name-calling when the myth we try to dislodge is a central belief of a writer.
That said, I don’t expect everyone to agree with my positions here, and I welcome comments, which on some of these posts is half the fun, and will help direct me and allow me to talk about other sacred cows (myths) as time goes on. But remember before you yell at me in anger, I have sold over 90 novels in just about every genre and been making a living writing fiction for over 20 years now. I have also been a publisher and an editor. So make your arguments reasonable.
With all that said, here we go after the first sacred cow.
Speed of writing.
Or said in myth fashion: WRITING SLOW EQUALS WRITING WELL.
Or the flip side: WRITING FAST EQUALS WRITING POORLY.
This comes out of everyone’s mouth at one point or another in a form of apology for our work. “Oh, I just cranked that off.”
Or the flip side… “This is some of my best work. I’ve been writing it for over a year.”
Now this silly idea that the writing process has anything at all to do with quality of the work has been around in publishing for just over 100 years now, pushed mostly by the literature side and the college professors and made worse by the pulp magazine era. It has no basis in any real fact when it comes to writers. None. If you don’t believe me, start researching how fast some of the classics of literature were written.
But don’t ask major professional writers out in public. Remember we know this myth and lie about how really hard we do work. (Yup, that’s right, someone who makes stuff up for a living will lie to you. Go figure.) So you have to get a long-term professional writer in a private setting. Then maybe with a few drinks under his belt the pro will tell you the truth about any project.
So, let me put out my position clearly right up front and then discuss this topic.
My position: NO WRITER IS THE SAME. NO PROJECT IS THE SAME.
And put simply: THE QUALITY OF THE FINAL PRODUCT HAS NO RELATIONSHIP TO THE SPEED, METHOD, OR FEELING OF THE WRITER WHILE WRITING.
That’s right, one day I could write some pages feeling sick, almost too tired to care, where every word is a pain, and the next day I write a few more pages feeling good and the words flowing freely and a week later I won’t be able to tell which day was which from the writing. How I feel when I write makes no difference to the quality of what I produce. None. Damn it, it should, but it just doesn’t.
And I just laugh when a myth like this one attempts to lump all writers into the same boat and make us all write exactly the same way book after book after book. No writer works the same, even from book to book or short story to short story. Talk to any writer, and I mean privately, getting them to tell you the truth, not the public line, and you will discover that one of the writer’s books was written quickly, maybe even in a few weeks, while another book took the writer a half year to finish and he was deathly ill during half the writing time. And you, as a reader, reading the two books, would never be able to tell the difference.
But yet, New York publishing, college professors, and just about anyone who even thinks about the writer behind the words has a belief system that words must be struggled over to be good. Well, yes, sometimes.
And sometimes not.
Sometimes a writer gets into a white-hot heat and a book flows faster than the writer can type, getting done in just a number of days or weeks. And sometimes it just doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes a writer has a deadline to hit and pushes to hit it, writing fast. Some writers think and research a book for a few months, then write it in a few weeks. Some writers spend a month or two on a detailed outline, then take a month to actually write the book. Some writers start with a title, some write chapters out of order and then put it all together like a puzzle. And on and on and on.
Every writer is different. Every writer’s method is different
There is no correct, mandated way to write a book.
For a moment let me talk about why the myth of writing slow to write better actually hurts writers.
There are two sides of our brains. The creative side and the critical side. The creative side has been taking in stories since the writer started reading, knowing how to put words together at a deep level. The critical side lags far, far behind the creative side, learning rules that some English teacher or parent forced into the critical mind. The creative side is always a much better writer than the critical side. Always. It never switches, no matter how long you write.
Long term (20 years and up) professional writers have learned to trust that creative side and we tend to not mess much with what it creates for us. Of course, this lesson for most of us was learned the hard way, but that’s another long post.
A new writer who believes the myth that all good fiction must be written slowly and labor-intensive (called work) suddenly one day finds that they have written a thousand words in 25 minutes. The new writer automatically thinks, “Oh, my, that has to be crap. I had better rewrite it.”
What has just happened is that the top writing the creative side of the mind had just produced is then killed by the critical side, dumbed down, voice taken out, anything good and interesting removed. All caused by this myth.
And professional agents and editors in New York are no better, sadly. I once got a rewrite request on a major book. I agreed with about 9/10′s of the suggestions so spent the next day rewriting the book, fixing the problems, and was about to send the manuscript back when Kris stopped me. The conversation went something like this:
“Don’t send it, sit on it a few weeks,” Kris said, looking firm and intense, as only Kris can look.
“Why not?” I asked, not remembering at that moment that the myth was a major part of New York publishing.
“The editor will think you didn’t work on it and that it is crap,” Kris said.
“But I agreed and fixed everything,” I said, starting to catch a clue, but not yet willing to admit defeat.
Kris just gave me that “stare” and I wilted, knowing she was completely correct.
I held the rewrite for three weeks, sent it back with a letter praising the rewrite comments and a slight side comment about how hard I had worked on them. Story ended happily because Kris remembered the myth and how it functions.
Now, let me do something that just annoys people, especially in the master classes we teach. I’m going to do the math. (Stop laughing, former students.)
This chapter when finished is going to be around 1,750 words. That is about 7 manuscript pages with each page averaging 250 words per page.
So say I wrote only 250 words, one page per day on a new novel. It takes me about 15 minutes, give-or-take (depending on the book and the day and how I’m feeling) to write 250 words of fiction. So if I spent that 15 minutes per day writing on a novel, every day for one year, I would finish a 90,000 word plus novel, about a normal paperback book, in 365 days.
I would be a one-book-per-year writer, pretty standard in science fiction and a few other genres.
Oh, my, if I worked really, really hard and managed to get 30 minutes of writing in per day, I could finish two novels in a year. And at that speed I would be considered fast. God forbid I actually write four pages a day, spend an entire hour per day, and finish four novels a year. At that point I would be praised in the romance genre and called a hack in other genres.
See why I laugh to myself when some writer tells me they have been working really, really hard on a book and it took them a year to write? What did they do for 23 hours and 45 minutes every day?
The problem is they are lost in the myth. Deep into the myth that writing must be work, that it must be hard, that you must “suffer for your art” and write slowly.
Bull-puckey. Writing is fun, easy, and enjoyable. If you want hard work, go dig a ditch for a water pipe on a golf course in a steady rain on a cold day. That’s work. Sitting at a computer and making stuff up just isn’t work. It’s a dream job.
So, the idea that Writing Slow Equals Writing Better is a complete myth, a nasty sacred cow of publishing that hurts and stops writers who believe it.
The truth is that no two writers work the same and no book is the same as the previous book or the next book. There should be no rule about speed relating to quality at all.
Sadly, this myth is firm in the business, so writers have to learn to work around it, to play the game that teachers, editors, book reviewers, and fans want us to play. On the public front, with every book we write, we must play the game of the myth.
Just don’t do the math about my age. I sold my first novel when I was 38 and have published over 90 novels. At one book per year, I must be at least 128 years old. After my hard page of writing every day, I sometimes feel that way.
Yeah, right. But I stand by that story.
——————-
Notice below that I have added onto this series of chapters a donate button where you can donate if you feel these chapters of this upcoming book helped you in some way and you want to keep me writing them. And if you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this article along to others who might get some help from it. Every week I will be adding a new chapter on the myths and sacred cows of publishing. Stay tuned. Upcoming are chapters on rewriting, agents, bestsellers, and so much more. This business has a lot of myths. An entire book full.
Thanks, Dean
———————
I love this essay. I walked away from writing (long story that I talk about on my blog). Now I have walked back. I teach 5th graders in the day and come home and write at night.
My goal was to finish a novel in a year. I set a word count of 70,000 words (YA Book). I figured a year was more than enough time. I also set myself a goal of 1000 words a day (no matter what). I didn’t know if I was going to be able to hit that but I gave myself a year and I should have only needed 70 days. I had wiggle room. I started in March.
I hit my 1000 words a day and finished in 70 days with 82,000 words. I spent about 30 days doing rewrites. I am now sending the book out to readers I trust and will wait for their responses before I decide what to do next.
Not wanting to break momentum or waste my summer which I have off. I jumped right into the 2nd book. I probably won’t do this in the future but who knows. I am now 60,000 words into the 2nd book. At this rate I will be done with 3 books (roughly 250,000 words) in a year. If they are crap it isn’t because of the speed. It is because I need to get better after my long stay away.
I couldn’t tell when I edited which pages were magic and flowed right onto the page. Which pages were written when I had that nasty migraine. For me it was the goal. Write everyday, no excuses. Now I just need to get better.
Great post, Dean!
Ever since the Master Class, I’ve loved “doing the math.” It helps me feel better about my productivity on days when I only get a thousand words written! I can just say to myself, “Well, that’s still four books a year!”
And as a former TV news guy, I can attest that speed of writing and quality of output are not correlated. I mean, who wants to sit around all day writing a single blasted page, anyway?
The ones that make me scratch my head are the ones where someone says they’ve been re-writing the same book… for ten, fifteen, or twenty years.
Wow. I think I’d go insane if all I could ever work on — for that protracted period — was the same book. I’d get so sick of it I’d want to take the hardcopy and burn it, then erase every electronic copy, just so that I wouldn’t have to look at it again.
Part of what makes the work fun — or at least worthwhile, for me — is getting to slap the DONE label on a project, then push it out of the way and move on to something new.
Like actor Geoffrey Lewis said, the best one is the next one.
Thanks for the feedback Dean.
When I say I spent 30 days on the rewrite that was a little deceptive because part of that was waiting for a few readers to give it back with grammar and what the heck did you mean by that changes.
Then I wen through and tightened it up. Made sure that references at the end of the book matched the beginning. I didn’t do a whole lot of rewriting. more editing. Making it read smoothly and look professional.
The whole process has been delightful. I know that each book I finish will make me that much better. I love that I have ideas floating around for the next couple of projects. At the worse, I will have done something I love. You can’t go to far wrong with that.
Wow. Thank you!
I feel so much better now. I’ve always felt a little weird that it usually only take me about 15-30 minutes to write the 500 words a day that is my goal on one of my current projects. Actually, I guess what I felt was guilt. I didn’t think anyone else was doing it that way. And I thought doing it that quickly must mean serious rewrites later. Part of that is the training I’ve given myself doing NaNoWriMo four times, every year of college–and even that was a little weird/guilty, because it just wasn’t that hard for me to write 50k words in a month, while so many other people were failing.
But now, from your post and the comments… like I said, I feel so much better. I’m not the only one who writes this fast! And others can be successful writing this fast! I’m going to go write… and feel good about it.
Best post yet. I sold my first major short story after an idea popped into my head that made me run to the typewriter. Four hours later I had a short story, and after reading trhough it, I couldn’t find a word I wanted to change. It sold to Sports Afield for a thousand bucks.
I wrote my first novel in exactly twenty-one days because an agent I queried mistakenly assumed it was already written. Well, it should have been written before the query process started, but at the time I didn’t know any better.
Instead of fessing up and telling her I hadn’t actually started the novel yet, I just asked for enough time to write one more draft. Well, that really wasn’t a lie, I did need to write one more draft. . .the first draft. She said fine, a slong as I could have it to her by the hfirst of the next month because she knew an editor who was looking for a novel to fill a hole in a line, and mine sounded just right.
I do not recommend trying to write a first novel in three weeks, but I did, and the novel sold to that editor.
I also know that Shakespeare was said to have written some of his longest plays in two weeks, and with a quill, yet. Sister Carrie was also written in two weeks, and I, the Jury was written in nine days.
Still, I sort of hate to see this myth die. How the heck am I going to get away with procrastinating for months on end once the truth comes out?
Great post as always, Dean. You really cut to the heart of the matter here, I think. Not just with the speed issue. I think that a lot of the time we forget that all writers and all projects are different.
I bought into the speed myth, and a whole lot of others, before the June Kris and Dean show. It’s a fairly simple thing for me to write 1500 to 3000 words a day (I’m not married and don’t have kids). Ususally when I do this I’m just having a blast and enjoying the process. But I thought that my writing must be crap because it just seemed too easy.
The funny thing is after the June workshop, I took a look at the stories I’d stressed over and the ones I’d written for fun and couldn’t really tell a difference in the writing quality. Also, lately, I’ve finally gotten a first reader and they can’t tell which story took two days and which took a month.
So, long story short, I wanted to say great post and thanks for helping me with that particular stumbling block.
Great post. I’ve written happy, sad, angry, after a fight with my husband, dead tired, frustrated. There are days the words flow from brain to fingers quickly, and days I feel I’m fighting for each one of them.
But strangely enough, it all works in a weird kind of way. I think getting in the habit of writing every day helps kill the speed myth – the more you write it feels like the faster you get as well. Or maybe that’s just me.
I completely agree with this one. I tend to write significantly better when I’m writing faster, in part because I can keep a lot more of the book in my head at that pace.
I write slower on a words per minute basis than your 250 words/15 minutes, more like 250-500/1 hour. I also seem to have a maximum brain-processing factor that kicks in so that if I go over 4,000 words in single day it just kills my ability to think for a couple of days afterward. 1,000-2,000 a day seems to be the optimum for me at the moment, though I’ve gotten steadily faster over the past few years, so that a book has dropped from being a 1 year project 5 years ago to 4-6 months now. I’d like to get it down to 2-3 with a month break between for recharge time.
You’re looking damned good if you’re 128 years old! LOL
I used to be a late-night writer, but recently I’ve turned into a morning writer, or a write-when-I-get-up writer, whatever time of day that happens to be. I get up, I get dressed, I walk into my office (which is next door to my bedroom), I take my thyroid medication, I start up my computer, I read what I wrote the previous day, and then I immediately begin to write. An hour-and-a-half later (sometimes two), I’m done. And then I go downstairs and fix myself breakfast.
The last time I mentioned here my daily quota, I said I’d gone from 500/day to 1250-1350/day to 1500/day. I’m now writing 1600-1750/day… and I’m still completing my quota in an hour-and-a-half to two-hours every morning. I take off one day per week.
I knew about the myth you address here, because I’ve read about how long it took Stevenson to write THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE, for example, and I know that this is not all that unusual.
Dean,
Sans fanfare, great post. Along with ‘speed’ of writing I always here the ‘what do I do if i get blocked’, ‘oh, I’m stalled–I’ve got writer’s block’. Drives me crazy. My philosophy is: For writers there is no such thing as writer’s block, only writers not writing.” Perhaps the myth (my opinion) of writer’s block would be a good topic to address.
All the best,
Robert
I’ve been digging ditches under the rain for a while.
It’s pretty fun, actually.
LOL, Zaddy.
Excellent!
We have discussed this “speed” thing in our small writers group here in St. Charles, Mo. and we agree with your conclusion.
Some of my best work has poured out of me with no control of the pen. I think we sense in our minds when we are about to burst with knowledge and creativity. I can never find my computer or pen and paper fast enough.
When I labor over my thought and words, I second guess my confidence, which is not me. Go with your gut, then sweep up!
I agree with all of your points, but one thing confuses me – I have never heard that writing slow equals a better writer. In fact, I have repeatedly and regularly heard the opposite, that one SHOULDN’T write slowly because the creative process shouldn’t require any left-brain stuff. All the “rules” about not editing while you write, not worrying about details and finer points of grammar, etc.
Now, I have heard that AFTER the first draft is written, then writers should take a lot of time to edit and polish, both actual time and elapsed time. But that’s different than what I think you are suggesting is the conventional wisdom.
The reason I agree with your post is because you are saying that every writer is different. I just read what I thought was a good blog post on editing, by an author outlining the things she starts looking for when she edits. As I went down the list, I realized that I do at least half of them while I’m actually writing. I have repeatedly been told that is a big no-no. I’m open-minded enough to try doing it differently and I have done so with mixed results, but the way that works best for me is to be very methodical.
Anyway, good post.
Yup, Edward, you got it. Every writer is different, just figure out what works and creates selling work for you. That’s the key.
You’ve been lucky to never have heard the “write slow” command. You will get it from everywhere in the business and always from nonwriters such as agents, editors, and teachers. But again, no right way, just your way.
I agree with Torgerson–the fun of this game is being able to say, “Okay, I did my best. Now, I have a much better idea for the next one…”
I can see how this myth might have originated, too, given the snobbishness of many literary scholars and the economic reasons within the publishing industry. Everything has some damn myth looming over it, controlling those without the will to question.
One of the big themes that’s been popping up in my ‘better’ works so far (no results from WotF yet, so I dunno if I’ll even make Finalist…or HM, for that matter) is the American ideal of being completely trusting of all authority and our ‘duty’ to give back to the grand and flawless machine of perfection that is America.
I can be writing about alien societies, but there is a very unconscious political subtext within that speaks my feelings toward the grand myth of American righteousness.
I didn’t really know, consciously, that such a myth existed. Occasionally you hear of an author who has spent years on one book but I won’t be so cruel as to mention a particular author except to say “Boring book, overwritten to death”.
I spent most of my working life writing, not fiction, but writing reports, reviews, papers and the like to mostly tight deadlines; they had to be fast and accurate.
I carried this habit with me when I fet compelled to write fiction. But I made a bad mistake with my first full length novel which ran to about 110,000 words. You see, I believed the myth about fast being bad and having written it in about 3 months, was so sure it couldn’t be any good, I spent another 3 months editing & re-writing (overwriting, really). To compound the error I went and wrote my next in 6 weeks, 80,000 words, again expecting the literature police to leap through the window & wave a penalty notice at me. Write a hundred times – “You must write slowly, You must write slowly….”
Then how delightful to find this post – slow does not equal bad. And guess how I found it – via the Romance Writers of Australia (yes, Australia) website. I get the impression you despise the genre (forgive me if I’m wrong) but having been, and still am, a member of other writers’ groups I have only praise for the encouragement, the support and sheer professionalism of RWA’s members. As a writer of crime fiction with a tiny spice of love & sex I am somewhat scorned, even spurned by other writers’ groups here – they tend to support the writers of “literature,” whatever that is – obscure poetry, indigenous writers (!) and other esoteric fields. Quite frankly, very little is readable. And isn’t that really what it’s all about? Reading? Shakespeare wrote for the masses, as did Dickens, Poe and Mark Twain of course. Yesterday’s pop writers are today’s revered literature.
It’s no fun starving in a garret, art for art’s sake – what a load of bollocks. It should be about not just food on the table, but jam on the bread and butter, and cake too, and caviar if that’s what you want, and pies, magic or plain. So I’ll continue to write fast, now without guilt thanks to you, my friend.
A footnote about agents – agents and publishers are thin on the ground in Australia. Only one legitimate publisher accepts unsolicited manuscripts, and one other has a Friday Pitch, email only. Postage to USA or Great Britain is expensive, around $80 a hit.
Oh, Toni, for heaven’s sake, I am a romance writer. Why would you get the impression I don’t like romance. In fact I flat out tell anyone I know to attend RWA Nationals, even if they don’t write romance, and if they can’t attend, they should get the tapes. I write romance under a number of different names, as well as thrillers under pen names. I hope to start a new sf (paranormal romance) series under yet another name I can post and say it’s me. So I agree completely about how great they are to follow.
Glad you are coming to the conclusion that how you write something, fast or slow, has nothing to do with the quality of the work. My suggestion is write and release, then repeat, as often and as fast as you can.
Glad my comments help some. Cheers, Dean
Dean, my sincere apologies. But you are so prolific, under so many names how’s a girl to know you write romance too!
Crikey mate, fair suck of the sav!
Toni, hope you didn’t think I was mad. (grin) Not at all. I can’t even keep track of all the books and stories I write most of the time, I sure wouldn’t expect anyone else to do so. (grin)
Thanks for the great post Dean.
I totally agree and from what you have calculated, I really can do with writing more than one novel a year and hope to.
At the moment, I’m spending 4 hours a day, on a good day. Out of a 5 day week, I fall short one or two days.
Thanks for making me feel that just because I sprinted on one day, it’s not all crap. When it’s a slow day, it’s just a slow day.
Hi Dean,
Thank you for this – I’ve been having problems writing anything at all for the past week and was feeling guilty that I hadn’t done anything.
Then last night, I wrote 500 words on a game of Writer’s Tag I am playing at Slush Pile Reader and bam…the guilt was gone; no Vanish or Cilit Bang required!
I’ve posted this to all my writer friends from various websites – hopefully a few will come and read!
K. Morgana (aka Mandy Ward)
I was wondering about this…I was feeling like I must be crazy because I am writing so much a day…like there was something wrong with that, or it was crap. Thanks for your article.
Just as a note, there are years I crank out 1500 – 5000 words a day (yes, working full time). Some years are great. Other years I can barely eke out 100 – 250 in a month that are worth keeping. Somebody could work their butt off writing for a long time and barely finish their book in a year. Not everyone writes fast. Not everyone writes slow because they think it’s better. When I write slow, it’s because I’m pushing and it’s hard, but it’s worth it anyway—not because I don’t write better when it comes fast.
Dean:
I wanted to add these two data points to your comments sections under both SPEED and REWRITING. I think they back up your statement about how these two myths in particular will never die. It should also make any writer grateful to have landed on your site early enough in their careers.
From a Poets and Writers Magazine interview with a group of agents from top New York agencies:
Question: What single piece of advice would you give to new writers?
Answer: When you think your book is done, spend another year on it.
From the FAQ section of the website of an author who was just named to the Booker Prize longlist:
Question: What advice would you give a beginner who wants to get published?
Answer: If you write a novel, rewrite it several times, and then, only when you think it’s great, try to find an agent who’ll sell it to a publisher.
Of course, as you often say, every writer is different, and obviously the intensive, slow, rewriting has worked for some (although who’s to say if those writers were successful because of the rewriting vs. successful in spite of it!).
Either way. Thought this would be interesting for your readers.
And although I’m not a religious person, I gotta say, Dean, you’re doing God’s work here…carry on brother.
“(Yup, that’s right, someone who makes stuff up for a living will lie to you. Go figure.)”
I about fell out of bed laughing! That line by itself is worth the cost of admission, even if the cost were much higher than free.
Funny, when I used to write songs, people would say it’s the ones that come quickly that are the best, and the ones labored over just don’t have the stuff. Also nonsense.
Chris, interestingly enough, I should have learned this lesson as well years before I actually did. Back when I started writing, not only was I doing short stories and rewriting them to death, but writing poetry and mailing and selling some. Actually, for two years I sold a lot of poems. Over fifty. But the poems I really, really worked over and rewrote and rewrote never sold, but the ones I “tossed off” and never rewrote and then just included in a packet of three submissions were the ones that sold. I hated that, and didn’t take the clear lesson it was smacking me with. Until later, that is. Seven years later. Sigh…
One night on a slow night at the bar I was talking to regular and told him I had sold another poem that day to some literary magazine. And as is normal with writers talking with non-writers, he asked me how I came up with my ideas for the poems and I told him I could write a poem about anything. So he pointed at the old cash register sitting on the back counter and said, “Go ahead, write a poem about that.”
So on a bar napkin in about one minute I wrote the following poem.
Buttons
My cash register reminds me
Of a girl I once knew.
She had a button.
And she took my money too.
Sadly, that silly little poem that was one of the only poems of mine that ever had a rhyme in it, sold to a top literary magazine and made me over $100.00, more than I made that night working. I still have the original bar napkin because it made it through the fire melted inside a notebook.
I still shake my head at that one, but gladly I mailed the thing even though I thought it too stupid to be worth the stamp.
And please, no other poems from anyone. That one is enough. (grin)
“A new writer who believes the myth that all good fiction must be written slowly and labor-intensive (called work) suddenly one day finds that they have written a thousand words in 25 minutes. The new writer automatically thinks, ‘Oh, my, that has to be crap. I had better rewrite it.’”
What has just happened is that the top writing the creative side of the mind had just produced is then killed by the critical side, dumbed down, voice taken out, anything good and interesting removed. All caused by this myth.”
Wow. Just blew my mind.
Hi Dean, Just found you!
I read somewhere that Mickey Spillane wrote his first book in 19 days.
Yup, and he didn’t slow down much through all the rest of books. Welcome aboard.
Hey Dean, only recently found your site, but great great stuff.
I wrote the first draft (edit: there I go again, saying “first draft” – the old ways are hard to shake off) of my 115,000 word book in six weeks. I then spent several years editing and editing and changing and changing again because obviously I wrote that way too fast.
Until I read this post, I considered each edit to be an improvement over the last. But I went back to read what I originally wrote. And do you know what I discovered? I ended up writing four completely different books over the last four years; only with the same characters and the same title.
Thanks for taking up the axe and killing the sacred cow for the benefit of writers everywhere.
Wow, great stuff, Steve. And thanks.
And thanks everyone for the kind comments. I am updating these chapters, so as I go along each chapter will be updated to at least this summer’s knowledge. And then once the book is together I will occasionally do updates on it as well, but more than likely just once every year or so and only on some chapters. And I will post those updates here as well for those of you with the full book by that time.
The final book order might end up slightly different than what I am listing here, but it will be close. This run-through and updating will get it mostly in order.
The agent chapters, even though spread out and now somewhat dates, will be together. And I have a new agent chapter almost done, but will wait for the right time in the flow to insert it.
Glad reading these again is helping. Since in fiction I never go back over my work, this is certainly a new experience for me updating these for the changes over the last two years. (First nonfiction book I have written to be honest.) I’m not rewriting, just updating. But for me, just weird to read old writing. I just never do it with fiction. It feels like someone else wrote it. Weird, just weird. (grin)
Oh, trust me, Christopher, you are getting better. Just by writing regularly and with a pace, you are allowing all the things you don’t know you know about writing to come to the surface and get those words on the page. The key is now don’t rewrite too much, get out of the “critical” thinking that you need to get better. Yes, you do, and you will if you keep learning, but that doesn’t mean the first or second book you finish isn’t good. Don’t kill them with rewrites. Mail them to editors who can buy them and let the kids enjoy them.
Great job!! You are on track perfectly. Keep hitting those goals.
Cheers
Dean
Right on the money, Christopher. If you do something you love, you can’t go far wrong.
And Clare, sure is strange isn’t it how these myths sort of invade into every day for us, making us feel “guilty” if we aren’t doing it the way the myth said it should be done? I still fight this one at times. Everyone does. But no writer is the same, no writer has the same training, no writer has the same background in life. We are all different, all our processes and how we approach story is different. Thus having anyone outside of you say you should writer slower or write faster is just silly.
I just present the math on why writing is such a simple task when looked at in a cold light. Math is always a cold thing.
The key to remember is that unless you have tried something different, you don’t know if it works for you. Most newer writers just ding along inside the myth, fearing to try something different. Try writing in all sorts of different ways, then you will see what works for you, at least for that project.
Glad the post helped.
Cheers,
Dean
James, thanks for the comments. Cool stuff. I bought into this myth early on until reading Bradbury and how he wrote a story a day. Then I started digging behind the myth and the hype to discover how writers really wrote and was shocked at how many of the major writers wrote quickly and one draft for major classics that are studied in colleges. Something the professors will never tell their students, since they often spend more days studying a work than it took the writer to write it.
And don’t worry, all us procrastinators are safe. This myth isn’t going anywhere I’m afraid. I wish it would since it hurts so many newer writers, but alas, it is dug in and deep.
I did exactly the same on my first sold novel. I begged the editor for a little time and then ended up taking 2 1/2 months to write the book, which then ended up selling to another publisher as my first published novel. I was so mad at myself after taking that long to do that book that I sat down and wrote another novel in ten days just to prove to myself I could do it. That’s when I started catching a clue that every book was different.
Thanks again for the comments.
Cheers
Dean