Category: On Writing

I decided I needed to do a reality check on whether my 50% drop in writing productivity since my son was born was really related to that event, or whether it’s just been a convenient excuse.  It’s true that finding time to write isn’t as easy as it used to be, and it’s true that life is just plain harder than it was before, but if I’m waiting for life to get easier, I have a feeling I’m going to be waiting a long time.  I needed to challenge my excuses and see how well they held up under more objective scrutiny.

So I set myself a new goal:  write 1000 words a day for a 100 days for a total of 100,000 words.  I decided I would try my best to hit 1000 words every day, but if I occasionally missed, I could do 2000 the next day to catch up.  The words could be novel or short story words, but they had to be fiction, and they had to be new. 

Well, the jury’s still out on whether I’ll meet the challenge, but I did 13 days for 13,000 words and only had to do a 2000 word day once.  During that time, not only did I work the full-time day job and do all the normal family and household/yard stuff, I also did all the following in that 13-day span:

• Spent a day helping give my daughter a pony party (with a real pony!) for her fifth birthday
• Went to the zoo with my family, eating up a Sunday
• Took an afternoon off and went on a coastal hike with my sister, who was visiting from NY
• Visited with my father for an afternoon and evening Saturday, who was visiting from Hawaii
• Spent an afternoon and evening out at the coast guest-speaking at a writer’s workshop

So all in all, a busy time, not crazy-out-of-my-mind busy, but an ordinary level of busy for how my life is now.  What did I learn?  I learned that through it all, I could write at the pace I’d like to be at — a pace that will help keep me in track with my goals.  There were quite a few days where I was writing late in my office, dead tired, but I was able to write.  I produced pages.  I learned that I could write and still have a social life, still have time for books, still have time for movies.  I also learned that through it all, I still wasted gobs of time. 

That last lesson was the most painful. 

So yes, life is harder, no denying that.  But the time is there.  It just has to be used more effectively, which is what I’m focusing on now. 

A few other things:

• Speaking of that writer’s workshop, I had a great time out there on the Oregon coast.  I have lots of experience talking to groups because of my day job, but I was much more self-conscious talking about writing, but the writers seemed to get something out of it.  Mainly, it was about how to switch agents from a newer writer’s point of view (and from one who hadn’t even sold a novel at the time), but the the conversation ranged all over the place.  Great fun.  And I learned a few things that made it worth the trip all by itself. 
• John Scalzi has some great thoughts on why YA science fiction/fantasy sells better than adult science fiction/fantasy — and also why writers in YA are paid more than their adult-writing counterparts.  Here and Here.  Great stuff. 
• Now I know why I’m not happy all the time.  I should be a church-going conservative.  Hmm  . . . Nah . . .
• Along those lines, a private Einstein letter confirms he really was an atheist, and that he only spoke of God as a metaphor for the laws of nature.  I wish he would have been more clear when he was alive on this matter, as Richard Dawkins has done, but it’s nice to know.  
• Check out The First Book.  Two new writers up there since the last time I posted, both with great stories about their journeys to being published authors.  How long will I keep doing this?  Who knows, but I’m going to try to keep it up until I’ve done at least 100 of them — which should be about the time my own first book comes out.

Finally, a picture that explains why no matter how many places I visit in this great country of ours, I just can’t get myself to live anywhere else.  This is Cascade Head, where I recently hiked with my sister:

I wrote a post not long ago about my recent realization that the number of words I wrote on a daily basis over the past six years amounted to a little over 500, or about two pages.  And while I meant this to be heartening, in the sense that you really can accomplish quite a lot even in tiny bits so long as you’re consistent, I realized it may have left people with the impression that I personally have been consistent in my writing habits.

In fact, the truth is far from it. 

I averaged two pages a day, but there were many, many days I didn’t write at all.  These were balanced out by the days that I wrote between 5000-10,000 words.  There were some days I wrote more than what I had written in some months.  This is not something I’m proud of, but it’s partly due to the state of my life and it’s partly due to my personality.  When I really get into the throes of a project, not just with writing but with anything, I tend work on it obsessively until it’s finished.  In other words, my tendency is to be a project-oriented person rather than a process-oriented person.

What’s the difference?  A process-oriented writer usually writes every day, some fixed amount like two pages or five pages or ten.  A project-oriented writer often may not write for days or weeks at a time, but when they do, they may work around the clock until the project is finished.  There’s no right or wrong to either approach, and actually, most writers are probably a mix of the two.  The beginning writer is probably best served by being mostly a process writer, because the beginner hasn’t yet developed the writing skills or stamina to be able to sit down and crunch out 10,000 words.  Building those writing muscles takes time.  This is why you hear so many writers telling you to write every day.  But I do want to say that not all writers do this, that, in fact, a huge percentage don’t, and if you’re one of those people, you shouldn’t beat yourself up all the time that somehow you’re failing to become a Real Writer because you’re not writing on a daily basis.  The real truism, if you want to get better, is that you must write more, however you go about it, and that in most cases the more you write the faster you will get better and the sooner you will achieve success.   (I should also add that whether I write 1000 or 10,000 words a day, my actual writing speed is pretty consistent).

There are dangers in both approaches, however.  The problem for the project writer is that it’s easy for those stretches between projects to get longer and longer without you realizing it.  This is especially the case if you have a challenging life which can prevent you from getting to the keyboard as often as you’d like.   One of the chief dangers for the process writer is burnout.  Writing daily can soon feel like drudgery.

The solution?  Well, as I said before, I don’t think any writer is just one or the other.  Most are a mix of the two.  When I got very serious about the craft six years ago, I made a commitment to write every day, and that commitment was necessary to breakthrough all the inertia that had built up over the years.  But over time, I’ve drifted into becoming more and more of a project writer, which is probably closer to my personality.  My problem lately is that life has become so challenging that it’s easy for a few days between writing sessions to turn into a few weeks.  This is not good.

So my life, right now, dictates that that I veer back into being more of a process writer who occasionally allows himself to be a project writer when I’m in the throes of a particular project and want to finish it.  Translation:  I need to write at least a couple pages every day, but now and then I’ll schedule all-day writing sessions.  In my mind, this gives me the best of both worlds.  I keep my writing muscles sharp by writing on a near-daily basis, but I don’t keep myself chained to it.  I’ve also come to like the fallow periods of not writing, because I’m able to re-charge my writing batteries.  Of course this only works if there’s writing on both sides of that fallow period . . .

So if you find that writing has become drudgery, or that you’re not writing enough, try varying your project/process approach a bit.  I’m doing that now (back to a thousand words a day for me), and I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.   

Ever since I got serious about writing — which dates back to January 2002, I remember it well — I’ve been pretty compulsive about tracking my progress.  I’ve got spreadsheets up the wazoo.  It may seem a bit anal to some folks, but think about it this way:  if you were a factory that made gizmos, wouldn’t you want to have good reliable data on how many gizmos you made a year, your sell-rate on gizmos, and just where in the world your gizmos were going? 

My spreadsheets help me not only maintain a professional focus with my writing, they help me stay honest with how hard I’m working at it.   It’s too easy to pretend you’re a writer if you’re not keeping track of how many words, pages, and manuscripts you’ve produced.  I don’t want to pretend.  I want to be.

Anyway, I was updating one of my spreadsheets when I came upon a number that surprised me.  For the last six years, I’ve written 1,136,341 new words of fiction.  Yay for me — more than a million words of fiction!  That’s a lot of short stories and novels.

But hold on a minute.  If you divide that number by the number of days (365*6=2190), you get . . . 519 words a day.

Which is roughly the equivalent of two manuscript pages a day.

That’s all.  Just two pages a day. 

Food for thought.