Better words, s/lower wordcount?

It seems the better I get the harder it gets. Or something like that.

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You are not alone. I think ( hope) it's something that will get better in time. I'm trying to not worry about how bad my first draft is, and what helps is knowing that my first drafts now are as good as my polished stuff two years ago. That really helps to loosen up those fingers.

If your competency is tripping you up, return to incompetence for the first draft. Get it down first, then go back and agonize until you've gotten it right.

There's a difference between 'I could do that better if I give it a minute' and never doing anything because it's not quite perfect

If I write something I know can be improved I make a note a the end of the para like so XXX needs more (whatever) XXX so I can go back and use the find function to find the XXX, and get them right later. So I can get on with the actual story and not worry about forgetting what I wanted in that scene.

First get it written, then get it right.

Feathers said:

But I just can't rationalize writing something bad when I know I can write it better.

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I beg to differ. It's very easy to rationalize. Why waste all that time on exquisite crafting when you may end up chucking the whole scene once the story has taken final shape?

There. I have given you the rationalization you needed. Get cracking.

Feathers said:

Someone mentioned that the better they get at writing, the better the quality of their writing is, the harder it is for them to actually write. It struck me because that's what's been happening to me. I used to be able to whip out 75,000 word novels in 3 months. My writing sucked but hey. I was writing!

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I disagree with this assessment. One of my favorite authors, Tom Clancy, did a super job with his first novel, The Hunt For Red October. It was crisp, fast-moving, and a great story. His next books were the same way. The he started listening to people who focused in on the technical content of his books, and Clancy started dragging his novels down in a vain attempt so show how "in" he was on the technical side. People were buying his books for the plot, not for the technical speak stuff, and his sales dropped. The last book he wrote himself took me about four months to read as I would pick it up, read a few pages and get bored, and put it back down.

I think first and foremost, a novel should tell a story in an interesting fashion. If it can't do that, then all the fancy writing skills aren't going to make it any better.

Clancy's problem is that he abandoned his writing skills...

Feathers said:

Nowadays I sit down and struggle through a 1,000 word scene. Reading over the scene, I love it, but gosh; it was sooo hard to write.

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I don't know what your definition of "struggle" might be, but it takes me about four hours to get through a 1,000 word scene. On a good day, it might take a little less time than that. On a bad day, it might take longer.

Plenty of authors write sloppy, fast first drafts. But there are also quite a few who write meticulous, slow first drafts and produce finished prose each day.

The only thing that matters is the product, not how you got there.

To answer your original question, I started slow and still go slow. But there are plenty of people who started fast and slowed down (right off hand, Evan Hunter, Lawrence Block, Dean Koontz).

I don't know what Dean Koontz does, but it takes him in excess of eight hours per writing day. Stephen King seems to move along at about 2,500 words per day (10 pages). Lawrence Block apparently averages about 750-1,250 words per day (3 to 5 pages). Note that we are talking about very prolific people here.

Hemingway put out 250-500 words per day (1-2 pages--though some sources give this as 1,000 words per day, which is belied by Hemingway's own records).

My point is that when you talk about struggling through a 1,000-word polished scene, you are talking about something many writers consider to be a full day's work--or more.

On the other hand, if you want to beat yourself up about speed, Anthony Trollope managed four pages per hour of finished prose.

Hi,
I was having this kind of conversation, on the telephone today, with the lady who reads all of my stuff for me (my beta-reader). I told her, that last night, I had put excerpts of chapters of my stories onto a web page, and once they were there, I thought my writing was crap.
She laughed. She reads a book a day and is an ex teacher, so she knows about reading & writing etc. She told me, after I said my writing was crap, that some people write beautifully, but their actual stories are rubbish and have very thin plots. Whereas, she loves reading my stories because they are fast paced and keep the reader in suspense.

So I guess we can't have the best of both worlds; my own writing's rubbish but my stories are good. Other people can write beautifully but haven't got such great story telling talents.


Elodie

Feathers said:

Why do you think it happens?

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Because you've shifted your standard to the point where, given your current writing skill, you can meet it only by writing more slowly.

Dale

I do this a lot. I hope that it gets faster again sometime. I do feel like it's that I'm learning a lot and working on several levels at once now, and that overall I write faster because what I end up with is closer to acceptable.

Feathers said:

I didn't mean that I was writing crap because I didn't want to take the effort; I was writing crap because at that time, I just stunk. But I agree with you on the Tom Clancy thing. It's really a shame.

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But did you stink? Maybe, maybe not. Here's my point: the goal of writing a novel should be to tell a story. It is not to get the reader to feel like they would want to date the characters (that's what the personals are for), it's not to inform and educate the reader as to how a particular piece of equipment works (that's what technical manuals are for), it's not to convey what a room in a house looks like (that's for Better Homes & Gardens to deal with). While character definition and development, technical detail, and setting a scene are all important things, they are never the most important thing... which is the telling of a story.

All of us have told someone else a story before. It probably went like "I finally decided I need a new car, and I went to the dealership today. I finally found a car I liked, but that salesman was such an ass I decided to go look somewhere else. Maybe I'll go back out this weekend." That conveys the story that you needed a car, you didn't buy one that day because of the salesman, you still need a car, and you'll probably look again this weekend. Is the conveyance of that story going to improve if I spend 1,000 words going over why I need a new car? Or another 1,000 describing the inside appearance of the dealership? Maybe 2,000 words of dialog between the salesman and I? Probably not. Have you ever heard someone tell you as story where the teller is always offering too much detail (I have a 21-yr old daughter who does this all the time). She'll start off telling me about something that happened at work, and 20 minutes later she's talking about people and situations that have nothing to do with the incident at work while getting nowhere with her original point, and I've tuned her out.

I think the best authors are the ones who have a good story to tell, and tell it well. Not the ones who want to spend 1,000 words describing what the interior of a room looks like when the interior of the room has nothing to do with moving the story along. I've done beta reads for folks who have said essentially what you've said... that they feel their writing is no good, when in fact it is good. Their problems usually have more to do with consistency and continuity than things like level of detail, but in the rewrites they'll goose up the "depth" and "detail" of their scenes instead of just explaining how their character went from being in the US in one chapter to being in Spain in the next chapter.

Feathers said:

At the risk of sounding like an inner editor freak, I can't. I'm not allowed to not do my best. Make sense? I understand the first drafts are crap thing, and admittedly, I have a hard time going with that. But I just can't rationalize writing something bad when I know I can write it better. Anywho...

-Feathers

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So, every time I heard the advice to write 'crap', I would get this mental image of two 2-D characters bickering.
Character 1: "You're dumb. Don't go after bad guy. Hez eeeeevvvviilll."
Character 2: "Nuh-uh. I can do it."
I would think of bad prose, bad grammar, and also bad story. Crap = crap to me.

And then one day (quite recently) when I got very sick of a scene that I was stuck on, I did a little of what I previously thought of as 'quick writing'. It's a combination of my personal shorthand (I have a whole system. TWP = The whole damn point of this stupid scene, and stick to it, dumb a**. KIM = Keep this in mind, or else they are all going to laugh at you. Those kind of things.), writing the dialogue, and doing a lot of telling. I also add in edit points like IdiotsRUs does, with some type of marker.

While writing I thought, "Heh, this is crap, but I will come back later and spruce it up." And BINGO! I get it. This is writing crap. This is what they are ALWAYS talking about.

Heh. I guess I am a literalist. Just thought I would share my little epiphany.

So, now onto your problem. You should try quick writing.

Sometimes it's that pesky inner editor saying 'sure you can write great, just cut the crap FIRST'. Then you slog and sit and chew your nails til you have scars on your elbows.

Or you can tell that inner editor 'dilligaf'? Go ahead, type your heart out, then look close--very little is crap. It may need rearranging, a few synonym replacements, but it's good.

Ever plaster a crack in a wall? You slather on 4x as much as you need to fill the crack, then use the edge of the plaster um, thingy, and get off the excess and voila: it's good. It's done, it's fast. Oh, and you see a few holes from those pictures you moved so you can fix them too.

Now how long would it take mixing JUST the right amount of plaster for that crack, using a toothpick to fill it, then try and smooth it over and see you have another hole elsewhere that you need to attend to?

Easier, more efficient and more professional to do more and trim than to squeeze out just enough right for just the moment.

HeronW: Very very nice analogy!

Feathers - I feel you. I've gone through this, too. I think this is another of those things that varies from writer to writer, but personally... I've more or less leveled out now. Once I was at the point where my writing was competent, I slowed waaaay down - almost to the point of stopping on several occasions, but that was due to finally getting a fantastic agent and then finding out the novel she was representing wasn't going to sell (long story, but basically it didn't fit firmly enough into a genre). I've just finished revisions on another novel that my agent is sending out on submission soon (me, holding my breath)...

But as far as my writing speed, it's found a happy medium. I don't keep track of how many words per day I usually end up writing (mostly because I've been in revision mode for a few months), but I know it's less than when I started, but more than what I was doing before at the painful-crawl stage.

I believe - and this theory is yet untested, but I'm about to try it now - that planning actually will help. I've always muddled along as a pantser, but at this point I'm required to write a synopsis for a novel that I haven't written yet (a sequel to the one my agent is pitching) and I'm going to have to *gasp* plan. Having previously rebelled against every outlining method ever recommended, I now know I've got to do at least a little bit of groundwork... and already, my writing is faster for it.

Here's what I found that has really helped (courtesy of a thread started right here on AW!) - Jim Butcher's Livejournal. The post that's currently at the top describes the method he uses for outlining, and it's far less restrictive than other methods I've seen. I think you'd benefit from reading all of the entries he has... there are only 15 or so, and he's got some great advice.

Good luck - I'm sure you'll find your groove, and don't believe that you have to write rough just to get faster. It's different for every writer, and a lot of them (as David mentioned) skip the crap-writing phase and opt for near-ready first drafts at a slower pace. Go with whatever works for you.

Obviously the advice to just write crap for a first draft works for a lot of people, but it doesn't for me. The more "crap" I write, the more I look back and think that I'm just getting further behind, because now I've got 100 lousy pages to edit instead of 90. Or that maybe I'll edit out everything I wrote today and thus wasted all that effort.

So I'm more comfortable writing carefully, watching something pile up that's sorta like a finished novel I wouldn't be totally ashamed of. But I set a word goal every day, usually around 500-800 words a day at the start of a novel, when it requires more effort to picture unfamiliar settings and characters, and 1,000 words a day from the mid-point on. But those thousand words take several hours, on and off spread out over the day. Never actually timed it.

That works for me, and gives me a novel in three-four months, with another couple weeks later of polishing.

But there's still a balance point at which I have to tell myself: I need to get my words for the day done, so I'll just write crap for a paragraph or two to get through this part, and then edit it at the end of today or tomorrow.

So maybe letting yourself writing crap on a limited basis would help. Not page after page, but just a line or two where you're stuck, or a paragraph or two, and then mark it and go on, and fix it as soon as possible.

Feathers said:

Someone mentioned that the better they get at writing...

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I just want to know how they accomplished this part.

I'm having problems with my current WIP but only because it's a difficult subject. It's just really emotional for me to put myself in my MC's place.

But...I don't think I would have your problem. I know I've gotten better, but in my first draft, I don't think too much about what I'm putting down on paper. I know the plot, and I just type. I just let my fingers fly. My first draft comes out really quickly. Then when I go back to revise, it takes me longer because, well, my first draft is crap.

That's just me.