Saturday, September 18: Mississippi Mud
CALL ME LATER—I’M WRITING
by John M. Floyd
I’ve always been interested in how writers write. I like finding out about their sources of inspiration, their workplaces (thanks, Steve, for your recent columns on that), and their daily routines and schedules. One thing I find particularly fascinating is that so many writers assign themselves “quotas,” in terms of the number of words or pages they feel they should produce in a certain period of time.
That’s never worked well for me—maybe that’s because I’m probably either writing or dreaming up something to write throughout most of my waking hours anyhow—but it sure seems to work for most of my writer friends. Almost all of them feel that if they can’t look down at their printer tray at the end of a writing session and see a certain, pre-determined number of manuscript pages, they’re not doing their jobs.
One friend, an author here in Jackson who has published everything from nonfiction to murder mysteries to children’s books, says that if you can make yourself type only one page every day, at the end of a year you’ll have a 365-page novel. A true statement—but this is also the guy who once told me about another writing approach: stack your finished pages into a cardboard manuscript box every day, and when the box is full, that’s when you’ll know you have a completed book. (Yes, he was grinning when he said it.)
Is there a draft in here?
Some writers say they measure their daily output in the number of unedited, off-the-top-of-your-head pages, others say they base it on the number of polished, corrected pages. (The latter would be especially hard for me, since I usually don’t start editing anything until I reach the end of the story. To me, a first draft is truly a rough draft.)
And a surprising number of writers say that once they’ve met their daily word-count or page-count quota, they stop writing at that point and don’t even think of that project again until the next day. My opinion is, if you’re on a writing streak (“in the zone,” so to speak) and the words are flowing effortlessly, you should keep writing until that “feeling” passes—whether it’s minutes later or hours later. In that blissful state I can sometimes turn out a dozen pages before coming up for air; unfortunately, it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like.
Quota quotes
- Robert B. Parker once answered the quota question as follows: “I do no fewer than five and no more than ten pages, five days a week, unless there’s some event in the family that prohibits that.”
- In Telling Lies for Fun and Profit Lawrence Block says he also usually produces between five and ten pages a day. But he adds that “there’s a point at which it becomes counter-productive for me to continue to work, on a par with running a car’s ignition when the gas tank’s empty. You don’t get anywhere and you just run down the battery.”
- James Scott Bell, a believer in setting daily writing deadlines, once said, “Writing is a discipline as well as a craft. The only way to grow is to put those words down, day in, day out.”
- Janet Evanovich’s book How I Write offers this suggestion: “Plan to write a specific number of words each day. Hemingway wrote around five hundred words a day—approximately two pages. In his short lifetime (Hemingway died at sixty-one) those two pages a day produced nine novels and a bunch of short stories—with plenty of time out for game hunting and fishing.”
- Stephen King is reported to have a daily quota of two thousand words, and doesn’t stop writing until he gets there.
I upped my word-count—up yours!
The truth is, I suppose it doesn’t matter much what others do, as long as your system works for you. But I still enjoy hearing others’ thoughts on the matter. For those of you who are writers, do you set a daily or weekly quota? If so, is it a certain number of words? Pages? Chapters? Scenes? Or is your quota measured in time rather than output? Two or three hours a day, maybe—or four mornings a week? Do you keep going once you reach that quota, or do you shut down the presses and hit the beach? Do you set aside a certain time of day for your writing? When is it?
Maybe I should set some limits on writing these Criminal Brief columns. An hour sounds about right, and maybe 800 words. Let’s see, I’ve been working on this one for what, fifty-nine minutes now? And I’m at 796 words?
See you next week.
As my father used to say, great minds run in the same gutter. This relates to two columns I have been working on, one of which may appear next week.
Very interesting, and I especially liked Bell’s suggestion.
I also remember reading of a conversation between two great writers, Stanley Ellin and Ed McBain. Apparently McBain had heard Ellin talk about the benefits of writing slowly and had taken it to heart. “Now I only write X words a day.”
Ellin replied “I only write X words a WEEK.”
Great column. I am rethinking my writing and this is a great help to make me devote more time to writing and less to other things that don’t really make me as happy anyway.
I am rethinking my writing as well due to recent health news which has made it pretty clear that drastic changes are underway. In the past, I have only really worked on my fiction when inspired. As such, I don’t have a constant stream of product flowing out for consideration.
As I try to come up with new ways of generating the words, I am also going to have to figure out a way to do at least some writing every day to get anywhere at all.
Interesting column.
My problem is that I don’t seem to function well under any kind of strict guidelines, especially those that are self-imposed. If I “required” myself to produce 2000 words, or 5 pages, or whatever, I’m afraid I’d still just write as much as I wanted to write, and that would be that. But I do tend to write a lot, every day.
And I do seem to “think” better in the mornings, even though I don’t restrict my writing to that time of day. Bottom line is, I suppose I don’t have any rules and I sort of like it that way.
My ‘problem’ is that I can write quickly, but edit slowly. Making verbiage readable takes a long time for me.
CB: I wouldn’t want to guess how many perfectionist hours go into CB articles, but James has to be the record holder.
Last week I had dinner with Robert Crais, and as you might guess, a large proportion of the evening was spent discussing writing. We were both in awe of prolific writers. Bob is probably the hardest working writer I know, but he claimed that he’s v-e-r-y s-l-o-w. Well, if RC is slow, then I must be g—l—a—c—i—a—l. Frankly, I do not write rapidly enough to set myself a numerical goal re word count.
Anyway, Bob said that at one point, Dean Koontz was writing ten books a year. (!)
Leigh, you’re right that I’m something of a perfectionist when it comes to the written word, but my rule of thumb is to edit until any more changes would damage rather than enhance what’s written. That’s not a rational rule of thumb—somewhere along the line you know that you’ve nothing left to give, at least at that point. T. S. Eliot once famously remarked that a book is never really finished, it’s abandoned.
Not just books.
Great article.
I love Hemingway when he says he has an unordinary BS detector; that’s what’s needed the most in sitting down to write. I’ve written as much as 8000 words in one day, none of which could have been salvaged, and I’ve written as few as 50-100 words in one day, trying out what Virgil would have suggested; the 50 words, which often took one entire afternoon to write, tended to turn out to be too mashed together to make any real sense or purpose in the story. The hardest part I think all struggling writers can all agree on, is sitting down to write after so many failures.
How much time should you use to plan a story? Do you do storyboarding? Do you do character analysis? Do you draw timelines? Kurosawa Akira often spent months sitting in a room with his usual screenwriters (his BS detectors!) conceptualizing his stories and putting them down into words. He then had other people to help him with scene design, costume, lighting etc.. For writers, we have only ourselves to do all these things. We have so much to be thinking of before arbitrarily determining how much we should write each day. Nothing comes out from winging it day to day. That’s the only time when Writer’s Block comes in. When you have the scenes and dialogues visualized in your mind like a movie reel, there is no reason why you have to stop, aside of exhaustion.
I write extremely slow. My gestation is unseemly long, sometimes taking two or three years. I’ve failed at least hundreds of times, and only now do I have a short story almost completed. It took me 1 year, on and off between work to write 8000 words, and it’s taking me another year to edit it.
George, good points. It’s at least as much about the journey as the destination.