Ready, Set, Write III

But You Can’t Write That Fast

Being afflicted with esprit d’escalier I now wish I’d called this “Inconceivable.”  Never mind.  In these blog posts, written day by day, I don’t have the luxury you have when writing a novel – that of going back.  And that’s something to which we’ll return in this post.

So, you’re looking at these posts and going “what do you mean write fast?  How fast can one write?”

I once knew a writer who thought that a book every five years was the normal and fair speed and that writing faster than that led to inferior product.  This writer, much as it will surprise you, did not have a career.

Most writers working in this field consider a book a year normal and two book a year fast.

Surely, you say, surely, if we write faster than that, then the product will suck.

Well, publishers – and agents – seem to think so.  It’s been a source of exasperation to me over the length of my career, to have people look at a book and go “maybe if you’d taken a little more time.”

Worse, as it becomes known that I’m a fast writer, I will get reviews that say “She should have taken more pains over these short stories, and then they would be better.”  That was for my first collection.  The stories collected in that one took on average three to four months to write.  One of the took a year.  I don’t know how many more pains they’d want me to take, (truly.)

It always puzzles the living daylight out of me that people think they can tell how long it took me to write a book from how much they like it (or not) or how cohesive it feels or not.  And that they inevitable prescribe MORE time to make it better.

I’m here to tell you that some of us are “putter inners.”  If we rush a book to the finish, with no time to stop and think about the implications of various things, the book is tight and to the point.  But the minute we slow down and start thinking “Well, maybe I need to put in an incident that shows how she really doesn’t like beets…”  Even though the beets are a minor plot point.  Or “well, we never see him hugging his dog.”  Or…  Then on revision, we throw all these things in, we end up with pointers in the book that give the reader the impression that the plot was going to be about something it was never meant to be about.  “I started reading this book about a beet loving dog, but it was too weird to finish.”  While if you’d rushed the book, it would have been obvious it was about a couple who happens to hate beets and love dogs going to the stars.

How fast is fast when you’re rushing?

Well, my fastest-written book – Plain Jane – was written in three days.  Mostly because it was work for hire (yes, I know, other people write media tie ins, as work for hire, I write the biography of Tudor queens.  Deal) and not under my name.  I desperately needed the money, but my mind wasn’t in that space.  So I put it off and put it off and put it off until I HAD to do it, and then did it in three days.

I THINK I edited it twice, but by that time I was in a sort of daze, so I can’t promise.

Would I recommend people doing that?  Well, no.  It was three days of minimal breaks for bathroom and eating, and I think I slept a cumulative four hours.  By the end of it, I felt as though I was eighty and I couldn’t think.  I had to ask Dan to take me away to Denver for two nights.  We went to a hotel where I sat and embroidered, because TV shows were too hard to follow.

However, as an extreme example of my deciding on a plot (in this case a structure, which I made a Cinderella pattern) and running at it, the book did extremely well.  This despite a cover SO bad that it’s second only to the hard cover cover of Draw One In The Dark in the annals of sucky covers.  It still pays me royalties.  So…

Other books that worked well and were written fast, but not as fast, included Draw One In The Dark (two weeks) and Dipped Stripped And Dead (about two weeks.)

In fact, for my money, two weeks are my best writing speed.  It takes about ten days to lie down the tracks on the book at 10k words per day, but count in a couple of days when the cats or the kids keep me from working… two weeks.  Then I send it out to betas, usually get it back in a week or two, and will then spend three to four days in rewrite, unless it’s involved, when it takes two weeks.

THAT is ideal.  And now I hear you thinking “But Sarah… why don’t you write twelve books a year, then?”

Well, I write more than anyone knows about, let’s put it that way – there are pen names you’ll never get out of me, not even by breaking me at the wheel – but no, I’ve never written 12 – or even 8 – books in a year.   So, why not?

Because I allow myself long silences in between.  I lose track of that discipline and habit of sitting at my desk and working.  Because I’ll be in the middle of a book and will get an editorial letter, and then it all goes by the wayside because I have to shift gears into the PREVIOUS book again.  Because I too, to an extent, interiorized the myths of “slow is better” and I keep braking and going “What if I’m doing something horribly wrong.”

But the sad part about that is that, no, I can’t be.  There have always been writers – though Rex Stout is the only one I can think of right now – who wrote really fast.  As in, they locked themselves in a shed for five days and emerged with a book.  And most of the pulp writers wrote six, seven novels a year.

Right now you’re saying “Yeah, but look at the pulp novels.”

No.  Think about the general quality of writing in the field in those days.  How fast or how slow you wrote had nothing to do with anything.  It’s like my collection of my earliest stories.  You can think they’re the way they are (and I confess some of them are rather two-dimensional) because I didn’t take enough time over them.  In fact, they’re the way they are because I was learning my craft.

I think there are a lot more authors writing much faster today than they admit to, because of publisher prejudice against fast writing.  For instance, almost every author I know who writes only one book a year has a deep, unhealthy relationship with computer games.

At one time, when I was looking for a new agent, the A-lister I interviewed told me that if I wanted to be “big league” I should write only a book every two years. That this wasn’t because he thought my entire time should be occupied with that precious book was betrayed by the fact he advised me to get a college-teaching position.  (Which WOULD slow me down to a book every two years.  The papers.  The bureaucracy.  The boredom.)

But that model is passing from the world.  There is no reason for a writer not to write as much as he wishes to.  In fact, if he is still also working traditional and is afraid of being snubbed, he can (and should) use secret pen names.

So…  What holds you back?

In the spirit of confession, and knowing I’m not as fast as I could be, I’m going to give myself my own prescription for speeding up:

1 – Stop being afraid to.  Believe – truly believe – how fast you write has nothing to do with how good you are.  Sure, some people are faster than others, but how do you know what your fast-limit is if you don’t test it?

2 – Stop stopping in the middle of a short story or a book.  Once you lose it, it’s much harder to get back to it.

3 – Don’t go over a book more than twice for rewrite.  Three times if you REALLY think something is seriously wrong.  After that you’re adding static and losing the signal.

4 – Let yourself go.  It doesn’t have to be good, it has to be finished.  If you allow your internal critic to talk, it will be neither.

5 – Let the words look after the words.  Words are the easiest revision and it’s why G-d gave us copyeditors (instead of as a sick joke, as every author has suspected on occasion.)

Now, ready, set, write.