In Which Limitations Are Things That Happen Elsewhere

(This was originally posted after Yuletide 2011, on my LiveJournal. Still, it applies.)

For those of you who don't know me, kick back and relax for a second and I will tell you (for possibly the umpteenth time but this time I'll bookmark it on my links) how Kitty came to be a Speed-Writing Freak.

I've been telling stories since I could, well, string coherent words into cogent sentences. I know I've been writing since Labyrinth came out, because that was when I saved my pennies and bought this beautiful thing that had 'dream journal' printed on the cover, along with a beautiful picture. It was silver and slate blue and lavender and bits of pink, and it had cream colored paper with darker tan lines and little floral accents and I loved it to bits. And I thought it was the most elegant thing ever, so I had to put in an elegant story. So I wrote self-insert badly disguised Labyrinth type fanfiction. Also fanciful stories about my life as though it were a grand adventure.

I was really young, shut up.


The second thing I remember writing, although I know I wrote stuff in between because I have vague memories of stretching out on beds with notebooks and colored pens, I just don't remember what any of them were. But the second thing I remember writing was a huge X-Men fanfic with my best friend of my childhood, D. We wrote this on my stationary that my aunt printed up for me on the store printer, on looseleaf, on any paper we could find. We kept it in binders (hers was leather covered and more awesome than mine) and we called it The Manuscript. And we quoted lines from it at each other all the time, and it was about Wolverine/Jubilee and Rogue/Gambit initially, only my pairings jumped around because I was so much more fickle than her. And we'd stretch out wherever and write for a while, and then read to each other or swap fic. Those are some of the best memories of my childhood, hanging out and writing fic and cracking each other up over it and plotting and everything.

After that there was a lot of fanfic. A LOT. Some of it hand-written, some of it on the computer because I've always had a computer in the house. In High School there was a terrible, terrible but incredibly fun thing called the Mage Wars where I ended up compiling a bunch of people's Mercedes Lackey fanfic into an ongoing RP/collective story, the technology wasn't quite there yet, or we didn't have a good handle on how to use it, one thing or another. And I posted it on the web, this was my first major HTML undertaking. The really frightening thing is, there are probably still people on both LJ and DW who remember the MageWars, I've been running into them over the past year and a bit. Thinking back on it now, it was probably really terrible. Literate, we had all our words and punctuation marks in the right place, but very crude. But it was fun, and it was writing, and we did learn and get better. And I had fun. Also at least one of us got cease and desist letters from Mercedes Lackey's lawyers, aren't we proud.

My senior year of High School we all had to do our senior projects, and pick teachers to be our advisors. I picked one of the English teachers I'd really gotten along with and chose outlining and writing the first 3-5 chapters of a novel for mine. It was nice and sedate, I didn't have to go anywhere, and I could write all the things. And actually, looking back on it, that piece wasn't that bad of a concept. The plotting was terrible and the writing was fairly excruciating in the fine details, but it was literate. Grammar and punctuation were decent, it wasn't nearly as strong as it could be but it wasn't bad. For a 17 year old anyway. You know all the things they say bad about Eragon? Yeah, I did that too. 

So then we skip ahead to college. One thing I did write was a novel-sized background for a weekend-long LARP character. I wrote 90,000 words for a character I was going to play for two nights. I think I did it in about a month. Basically what happened was the Storyteller (moderator) for the LARP made the mistake of telling me, okay, sure, you can have extra points for every two pages of background you write. And then I went up to her and went O HAI I WROTE YOU A NOVEL. That rule quickly went away. But around that time I also started looking more seriously into writing for a living. And then I did a stupid, ignorant thing.

One of the advice pages I saw said that writers who really wanted to get better practiced their craft every day. They sat down and they wrote five pages or for two hours or whatever, so I was all, sure, I can write for two hours a day. But how much should I write? Because I can't always block two solid hours off. So I thought about it, I sat down, and I wrote, I think, about 2500 words in half an hour. Which was good! I sat down, the words just sort of flowed out onto the screen, and I thought to myself, okay. So I can write about 2500 words in half an hour, in two hours I should be able to write 10,000 words. So I'll aim for that, per day. And I did. For about seven freaking years. I didn't realize that things will distract you, writers block happens, sometimes you just get frustrated, I didn't realize that some writers are lucky to write a thousand words in a day. I had no concept in my head of what was a lot to write and what was more average. So I tried to write 10,000 words per day for seven. Years. 

Somewhere over those seven years it sank in that maybe most people don't do this. By this time, though, I was writing about 7k per day on average, sometimes 10k, sometimes less. And it wasn't just 7k of crap, I really was getting better. I could see it when I looked back on stuff I'd written a couple years previous. Over Yuletide I got a prompt that turned out to be the same damn thing I'd written almost 9 years ago, and I went back and dug the story up on FF.net, and it wasn't terrible? But it wasn't good, either. I've grown as a writer. And I've gotten really fast. Because for seven or so years I had no idea that I couldn't do this.

These days, or at least these days as of this writing, I try for about 2000 words per day. I can do that in an hour, maybe half an hour, and it frees me up for other pursuits like exercise to stay healthy, cooking which I do enjoy, playing music, earning money at my day job. Sometimes I write more; around Yuletide I've been consistently going above 5k per day, but I've also dropped a lot of other things. In my opinion which, I think, is shared by some of my closest friends, I've gotten healthier about writing. I've learned where my limitations are, learned how to listen to my body and my mind and what it churns out, and I don't think I'm the worse for it. But I also do enjoy being a speed demon when it comes to writing. Somehow, whatever the writing process is in my brain has been changed to the point that I can sit down at a keyboard (because it's much easier on a keyboard, I type at about 100wpm) and let words flow onto the page. Because for seven years, I didn't know I couldn't. I knew there were words in there, I just had to get out of the way.

I don't recommend this to anyone, at all. It wasn't the best time in my life, and it was a stupid thing to try to do. But for those of you who see me posting my word counts and go "O.O how do you DO THAT?" that's how. By, basically, not knowing and then stubbornly refusing to believe that I couldn't. To the exclusion of most else. For seven years. Also, devouring everything printed I could find and just plain writing every day. The usual rules still apply.