In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. There are also elements of do I really have to do this shit. In writing, at least in writing for publication, every published or aspiring to be published author I've ever talked to has said in one form or another that the shit parts of being a writer are the promotional copy. Except the ones who are lucky enough to have people to do it for them.
The good news is, there's a certain pattern to the promotional copy you need to write. If you're trying to sell it to agents and publishers, generally they'll want something that's either one or three pages. If it's one page, they'll want a summary, if it's three pages, an outline. These are all different terms for the same basic thing, what is your story from beginning to middle to end. Including any twists you might have at the ending, because you're trying to sell them on the whole of your story, not induce them to read what's on the next page. Regardless of what the agency or publishing company wants, you're going to have to write a cover/query letter, so you're going to need to distill your work down to one to three sentences. This may or may not have a closed ending, and I'd actually recommend writing several different versions of it if your work is big enough that you can vary it that much. The odds of you having to write over five different query letters are pretty high, if your courage holds out. Finally, you'll also want a couple paragraph synopsis from beginning to middle to end as well, in case your submission requirements permit a longer query letter, or in case you want to vary your one page summary some.
That's your selling to agents copy, but there's also a school of thought that says you might want to self-publish someday, so you might want to write some promotional copy. As the room lets out a collective groan, yeah, I hate promotional copy too. I hate selling myself in text, I can write fiction till my wrists go numb and my hands fall off, but ask me to write promotional copy for my own work and I will do laundry or empty the catbox before I sit down to do it. I will cut raw cold slimy chicken, that's how much I hate it. But it's a good thing to have. Once again, there will be places (Twitter comes to mind immediately) where you'll need to summarize your work in the shortest terms possible, so figure this out first, because it's hard. Not only do you need to summarize, you need to do it in a way that will make people want to click and see what it's all about. Write several variations, then run them by your circle of first readers (you do have one by now, don't you?) to see which ones are accurate, which ones are most interesting. Hopefully the two will be the same, one thing you do not want to do is alienate potential readers by promising them one thing and handing them another. You want to have several kinds of accuracy: tone, factual, focus. Bait and switch very rarely works, so my best general advice to you is don't. You can put up these short blurbs on Twitter, on Nanowrimo, on your social media profiles preceded by "Author of [Your Title Here], [blurb]."
Next you'll tackle the longer blurbs. You'll need a back of the book style blurb, maybe a paragraph of plot that trails off before you reveal the ending and with the goal of inducing the person to want more, and then you'll want another few sentences summarizing the mood and setting. This will go either on the back of the book, in any flyers or postcards you might be passing out. Some publishing companies want you to submit them a back-of-the-book style summary in addition to your summary, they want you to sell them on the book. You might also put it at the closing of guest posts on blogs, "Author is currently writing [blurbspiel]" or hand it out for other authors to put on their blogs following a review "the book is [blurb]". If you're very lucky, you might be able to construct a book trailer using this type of blurb as a script. Fortunately, this is where this type of promotional copy stops, because promotional copy meant to be seen by potential readers rarely gets longer than that, and only in specific circumstances. Still, you should have a back-of-book length blurb, and, again, at least two variations. If you don't know how long to make it or how it works, look on the back of books similar to yours, see how it's structured. Then apply it to your own work.
That's the what, now for the tricky parts, the how and the when. Personally, I hate doing this like poison, so I get it over with as soon as possible. This means after I have the detailed outline of the work, because I'm a planner, and at the latest after I've started the novel and am still in the wild and crazy beginning, when I'm brimming with enthusiasm for the project. This gives me the momentum of new-project glee as well as the structure of having that outline, therefore knowing what the book is going to be. I cannot protest strongly enough against writing a book blurb based on that idea you have. When you outline it in detail, your chances of it becoming a workable idea in the same form as the inspiration drop drastically. Once you have an outline, you have a structure, and your chances are much better that the finished product will resemble your promotional and query copy. And if it doesn't by the time you have a first draft, you can go back and edit that copy while you make your first round of edits. Because you wouldn't send an unedited manuscript to a publishing house or agency, would you?
That's for planners. For panters, as Nanowrimo calls them, I'm afraid there may be nothing for it but to write the copy after you've written the first draft. But do it immediately, straight out of that first flush of holy crap I did it all and, again, for the momentum. The advantage this gives you is that you can see what shape your work takes, and your chances of your copy text matching the final work are about the highest they're going to be. So write the copy down, and then go back into edits flush from the success of having done all that tedious shit already!
Right now, I'm working on a project called Black Ice. It's less of a novel and more of an anthology or, as I heard Mike Stackpole once call it, a braided novel. You may have seen me bitching about it on Twitter in various places. And it's something I'm self-publishing, so unless I have the money to hire someone more interested to write the promotional copy for me (hint: I don't) I have to write all the damn promotional copy myself. I still hate it more than cutting up cold slimy chicken. But in my folder of documents for Black Ice I have a file called "Black Ice Outline and Support Docs," and in that file on each page for however many pages it goes on is my chapter/story outline, an editing checklist of how far into it I've gotten, and my support docs. In this case, it's almost all promotional copy because I haven't tried selling this to an agency or publishing company, since it's not a traditional book model. So I have a one-sentence summary of Black Ice, a few sentence summary, a back of the book blurb, and eventually I'll fill it up with copy for the rest of the more idiosyncratic promotional type things I end up doing. The sequel project to Black Ice, called White Lightning, doesn't even have a full, finished rough draft yet (the bulk of it does, and I have the outline, but not the revised first draft), but it already has a "White Lightning Outline and Support Docs" file that consists of mostly outline right now. Thus do I remind myself that there are shit tasks ahead.
If you are one of the people who enjoys and can easily write promotional or query copy, I bow before you because you are a better person than I am. If you're like the rest of us, well, scutwork comes with every job, and there's not much to do but accept it and slog through the mud till we can get to the really fun stuff. Like editing. Oh joy.
Showing posts with label on writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label on writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
In Which Editing Is Skewered But Refuses To Die
I hate editing.
What a shock, I know, right? After years of being smacked in the face with the rule no one is above revision, not to mention being asked to read over other people's writing and render judgments (which is its own kind of squirrelly) I have come to the conclusion that what I hate most about editing and revising is that it's effort. It's work, and it's hard work, and it's a pain in the ass. Not only is it effort, it's soul-crushing, sometimes repetitive, often ego-shredding effort that leaves you limp and sweaty and not in the fun way, wondering why you ever thought you could do this or bothered to try in the first place. I hate it.
Writing is effort too, but it's a much more accustomed effort for me; I've been writing for at least 25 years so it bloody well should be! It's also a hell of a lot more fun. It's creating, it's storytelling, it's sharing all those cool ideas with the rest of the world. Look, I had this idea and then I did this thing, isn't it cool? Chances are, no matter how terrifying it is to actually put it in front of real eyeballs that aren't yours, you still feel that element of bouncing around going look what I did. Editing is ripping all that apart again, and even if you put it all back together and it's much more better afterwards, you still have to do the ripping. It hurts. A lot.
So, that's the biggest chunk of the effort. It starts with tearing your own work to pieces, which then makes it easy to succumb to the brainweasels, and fighting them is an uphill battle with boulders strapped to your arms. If you don't know what brainweasels are, they're the little jackasses that crawl into your head and make their little weaselly nests and whisper that you suck, that you're not worth it, this isn't worth it when everyone's going to hate it or, worse, ignore you. Brainweasels come in all shapes and sizes, speak all languages, and swarm around any small accomplishment that you manage because they hate success. Of course you'll fight them, and you'll push through it and get your work edited and rewritten, and you might even manage not to cut or change anything that didn't need to be cut or changed before the brainweasels got to you, but it's freaking exhausting work. Like I said, much more effort for a much less cool reward.
I didn't start editing my own work till I was in my early twenties, when I realized that maybe not everything that came out of my fingertips was pure gold. Yes, I was that arrogant bitch. At least in private. And then when I started editing my work, I was hard on myself. Maybe harder than I needed to be. My pages were covered in red ink, maybe a third of the sentences were left untouched if that many, and there were large swaths of writing involving phrases like "the hell is this?" and "this is clumsy, redo." Sometimes I'd take a wild hair and go on a tangent, scribbling down the margins at an ever increasing angle until it was almost illegible and going down ninety degrees from how it started. And it wasn't good odds that when I went back I'd remember what the hell I was talking about, so that's twice the effort for half the end result. Paragraphs got cut. Scenes got cut. If anyone reading this has suffered through my reviewing and revising their work, be assured, I'm just as hard on myself.
So, that happened, and then I stopped editing again because why bother. And I stopped pushing myself within my writing because why bother. And eventually I just stopped trying. To write, to do much of anything.
The reasons I started up again are complex and require far too much backstory. I did pick it up again, I got better at writing, and my best friend got better at editing which made for an ideal pair. 90% of the time she knows, just from knowing me, what I'm going for and is able to pull out some alternate phrasings. Apart from that and other aspects having to do with knowing each other for 10ish years, we communicate back and forth a lot when we're working on a project. I give her the specs, deadline and word count and rough themes, and then I go write. When I'm done, I toss her the draft, she marks it up in one color and tosses it back to me. I mark it up and fix what she's noted, add in some notes of my own and toss it back at her for review. If the changes work, she strips out our notes and leaves in only the ones that still apply. Plus new ones for whatever I broke trying to fix things. Throughout all this, we IM or email if there's a question on a note or a piece of prose. And it works, not just because we clarify with each other what we mean if things are murky, but because she trusts that I'll listen to her edits and I trust that she's trying to help and make my work better, not tear it down. And that she has the detachment I can't manage.
Editing is a pain in the ass. And there's no getting around it. I've made major edits to this blog entry at least twice already. Nothing comes out a hundred percent the first time; it takes an amazing amount of luck to even get it eighty percent the first time. But there are things you can do to make it easier. Find a first reader, or a couple of them, who you trust not only to read you and get what you're trying to say, but also who you trust to be both fair and gentle enough to tell you the things you don't want to hear in the way you're most likely to hear them. Don't do it all at once, do a couple pages or a few hundred words and take a break, get up, get a glass of water, stretch, reset your brain a bit. Treat yourself kindly while you edit, fix yourself regular healthy meals, small desserts or other kinds of treats to keep your spirits up, stay hydrated, get plenty of sleep. Mind your medications, if you're on them. And while you're editing, try and keep in some kind of contact with the elements of your work that you loved in the first place. Because you're going to get so deep into your work's flaws that you're going to come to hate it, and you'll need to remember why you tried in the first place.
It'll come out better in the end, though. Editing, for all the jokes about pages bleeding ink, isn't about tearing down, it's about building it up more solid and more beautiful than it started. It's just a matter of putting forth the effort to get there.
What a shock, I know, right? After years of being smacked in the face with the rule no one is above revision, not to mention being asked to read over other people's writing and render judgments (which is its own kind of squirrelly) I have come to the conclusion that what I hate most about editing and revising is that it's effort. It's work, and it's hard work, and it's a pain in the ass. Not only is it effort, it's soul-crushing, sometimes repetitive, often ego-shredding effort that leaves you limp and sweaty and not in the fun way, wondering why you ever thought you could do this or bothered to try in the first place. I hate it.
Writing is effort too, but it's a much more accustomed effort for me; I've been writing for at least 25 years so it bloody well should be! It's also a hell of a lot more fun. It's creating, it's storytelling, it's sharing all those cool ideas with the rest of the world. Look, I had this idea and then I did this thing, isn't it cool? Chances are, no matter how terrifying it is to actually put it in front of real eyeballs that aren't yours, you still feel that element of bouncing around going look what I did. Editing is ripping all that apart again, and even if you put it all back together and it's much more better afterwards, you still have to do the ripping. It hurts. A lot.
So, that's the biggest chunk of the effort. It starts with tearing your own work to pieces, which then makes it easy to succumb to the brainweasels, and fighting them is an uphill battle with boulders strapped to your arms. If you don't know what brainweasels are, they're the little jackasses that crawl into your head and make their little weaselly nests and whisper that you suck, that you're not worth it, this isn't worth it when everyone's going to hate it or, worse, ignore you. Brainweasels come in all shapes and sizes, speak all languages, and swarm around any small accomplishment that you manage because they hate success. Of course you'll fight them, and you'll push through it and get your work edited and rewritten, and you might even manage not to cut or change anything that didn't need to be cut or changed before the brainweasels got to you, but it's freaking exhausting work. Like I said, much more effort for a much less cool reward.
I didn't start editing my own work till I was in my early twenties, when I realized that maybe not everything that came out of my fingertips was pure gold. Yes, I was that arrogant bitch. At least in private. And then when I started editing my work, I was hard on myself. Maybe harder than I needed to be. My pages were covered in red ink, maybe a third of the sentences were left untouched if that many, and there were large swaths of writing involving phrases like "the hell is this?" and "this is clumsy, redo." Sometimes I'd take a wild hair and go on a tangent, scribbling down the margins at an ever increasing angle until it was almost illegible and going down ninety degrees from how it started. And it wasn't good odds that when I went back I'd remember what the hell I was talking about, so that's twice the effort for half the end result. Paragraphs got cut. Scenes got cut. If anyone reading this has suffered through my reviewing and revising their work, be assured, I'm just as hard on myself.
So, that happened, and then I stopped editing again because why bother. And I stopped pushing myself within my writing because why bother. And eventually I just stopped trying. To write, to do much of anything.
The reasons I started up again are complex and require far too much backstory. I did pick it up again, I got better at writing, and my best friend got better at editing which made for an ideal pair. 90% of the time she knows, just from knowing me, what I'm going for and is able to pull out some alternate phrasings. Apart from that and other aspects having to do with knowing each other for 10ish years, we communicate back and forth a lot when we're working on a project. I give her the specs, deadline and word count and rough themes, and then I go write. When I'm done, I toss her the draft, she marks it up in one color and tosses it back to me. I mark it up and fix what she's noted, add in some notes of my own and toss it back at her for review. If the changes work, she strips out our notes and leaves in only the ones that still apply. Plus new ones for whatever I broke trying to fix things. Throughout all this, we IM or email if there's a question on a note or a piece of prose. And it works, not just because we clarify with each other what we mean if things are murky, but because she trusts that I'll listen to her edits and I trust that she's trying to help and make my work better, not tear it down. And that she has the detachment I can't manage.
Editing is a pain in the ass. And there's no getting around it. I've made major edits to this blog entry at least twice already. Nothing comes out a hundred percent the first time; it takes an amazing amount of luck to even get it eighty percent the first time. But there are things you can do to make it easier. Find a first reader, or a couple of them, who you trust not only to read you and get what you're trying to say, but also who you trust to be both fair and gentle enough to tell you the things you don't want to hear in the way you're most likely to hear them. Don't do it all at once, do a couple pages or a few hundred words and take a break, get up, get a glass of water, stretch, reset your brain a bit. Treat yourself kindly while you edit, fix yourself regular healthy meals, small desserts or other kinds of treats to keep your spirits up, stay hydrated, get plenty of sleep. Mind your medications, if you're on them. And while you're editing, try and keep in some kind of contact with the elements of your work that you loved in the first place. Because you're going to get so deep into your work's flaws that you're going to come to hate it, and you'll need to remember why you tried in the first place.
It'll come out better in the end, though. Editing, for all the jokes about pages bleeding ink, isn't about tearing down, it's about building it up more solid and more beautiful than it started. It's just a matter of putting forth the effort to get there.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
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.
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.
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