Bursting to Write
Sometimes, as a writer, I read books or columns of writing advice, much like what you can find in many of the essays here on Storytellers Unplugged. Although I have a degree in Creative Writing, I figure there’s always something new to learn, and at the very least I can see how other published writers handle the job and maybe take something from their experiences.
Most times, I find myself nodding my head, agreeing with what I read. It’s rare to unearth an epiphany this way, but often I think, “It’s great that someone codified in writing something similar to what I do.” Knowing that others work like I do can be comforting.
Then there are times I just have to wince then look away. That happens when someone declares something to be so that I just can’t agree with. Writing is an art. We all come at it from different angles, and there are few absolutes, especially when you’re talking about the process. All anyone ever sees is the end product, and that’s what counts, not how you get there, right?
Here’s the one that gets me the most, and I may be cast out as a heretic for disagreeing with it: Write every day.
Hey, it sounds like great advice, and I’m all for getting into the writing habit. I’ve just never managed it myself.
That may sound suspicious from a guy working on his 11th published novel (Blood Bowl: Rumble in the Jungle, due out this December from the Black Library) in the last three years, but it’s true. While I love writing fiction, especially novels, I still make most of my money as a freelance game designer, both for tabletop and computer games. So, writing fiction isn’t something I do every day.
Sure, I write e-mails, rules, examples of play, blog posts, and more, but fiction uses different muscles than those things. Tackling a novel, even, is a far different experience than pounding out a short story.
Instead of writing fiction every day, I prefer to hit it in strong, sustained bursts. That may come from the fact I write tie-in novels, which are generally under tight deadlines. As Max Collins said on the IAMTW mailing list once, “We are not sprinters. We are not long distance runners. We sprint long distances.”
I don’t think I’ve ever taken more than three months to write a novel. I once wrote a 95,000-word novel in 16 days, including a day off for Thanksgiving. The last day, I clocked out after writing 11,000 words.
And I like it that way. I enjoy being able to devote every bit of creative power I have to a single project. I work on many different things in the course of a year, and it’s easy for me to get them confused if I try to juggle them all at once. I’d rather hyperfocus on each in succession.
Of course, I do this full-time, so I have that luxury — if you can call a career built on serial obsessions luxurious. It’s what works for me. Figure out what works for you, then do that. Rinse. Repeat. Relax.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Thanks, David! In the days before I had kids, I aimed for 5,000 words a day, but I didn’t always hit it. I mostly wrote roleplaying game books in those days, though, which require a different kind of writing. These days, I shoot for 3,000 words a day when I’m on a steady fiction binge, and I can usually hit that. When I’m under a tight deadline, though, I can pump that back up to 5,000 or 7,000 words if need be.
I try to treat writing as a job, and I spend eight or more hours a day at it whenever possible. If you can do that, then a high level of output isn’t unattainable. In fact, if you’re doing it to support yourself or your family, then it becomes necessary.
My heroes are Joyce Carol Oates and Gustave Flaubert. Joyce has a chair at Princeton, travels,
and comes out with an average of three books
a year–first drafts mostly written by hand.
Flaubert, when writing Madame Bovary, often
wrote a troublesome sentence on a blackboard
set upon an easel. He paced around it and redid
it until he thought it was perfect, oftentimes for
weeks.
Chacun au son gout, Each to his own.
Janet
Hell, I can’t write a letter in 16 days. My hero was Nabokov, who wrote his sentences on 3X5 cards, one per card, and kept them in a shoebox. Think about that. You could shuffle, deal, play a quick game of Canasta, and when you slid all the cards back into a pile, you’d have a whole new novel, just like that.
– Sully (Thomas Sullivan)
11,000 in 24 hours-nice! My personal record was 7k in a day.
One of the things about “writing every day” is that it depends on what your definition of “writing” is. A lot of people think “writing” is sitting in front of a computer or notebook. But my best “writing” is done in my head. I can tell when I’ve been doing it because I sit down & the words come as fast as I can type them.
True enough, Jim. I often like to let a story brew around in the back of my head for as long as it can. Then when I sit down it all pours out nice and easy.
Other times, I’m scraping the gunky stuff out of the dark corners, trying to meet a deadline, but I’ll go with whatever works.
Welcome aboard, Matt, and good essay.
I’m currently trying to transition from binge to steady output, to greater or lesser success. The key, of course, is “whatever works best for you”, though I suspect there are those out there who’d regard steady output or treating it like a job as a betrayal of the wild and woolly muse.
I’m somewhat of a binge writer myself, so I know from whence you come. Still, I “work” on writing every day…even if it isn’t putting words on an LCD page…maybe that’s what they mean? Probably not. I know a lot of people say they write a minimum of 2000 words a day, or 1500 words a day, and I know it isn’t true. If it WAS true, from my own Nanowrimo figuring, they’d write around five to six novels a year.
I figure that because I know that if you write 1667 words a day for thirty days, you have written 50,000 words.
Of all the people I know, less than a handful finish more than two novels a year, and even if you put in some time for revision, etc…and toss in a few short stories, they don’t reach that mark…
So what they mean is that they have heard you should write 2000 words a day, and that they wish life really worked that way, and that they write 2000 words as many days as they can…
But rarely that they actually do it.
The process is just that, a method, a path through the woods, a means to an end. You have to have your own, and you have to be comfortable with it to stick with it over time. It can evolve, and if you see a guy on a bike making better time than you are walking, you might at least consider getting a bike…but maybe not.
Good essay.
Your 96,000 in 16 days trumps me
I just ghost-wrote one with Trish in three weeks, but it was only 72k.
D