I don’t write fast. Being a pantser rather than a plotter means that I often write myself into corners and must then delete, delete, delete until I find where I went wrong and start over again.Take my latest novel, Backli’s Ford. It started as a novella way back in August 2009. After I finished writing it, I realized that the darned thing was really meant to be a novel. Not only that, but it would be the first in a series. So I started over. By my calculations, that’s over two and a half years for one novel. That’s long, even for me.
In my defense, during that two and a half years, I sold two novels to Carina Press, wrote a sequel to The Shoeless Kid (The Tuexedoed Man), a short story in the Mendenhall Mysteries world, Night Shift (still available for free but not for much longer) and self-published a number of short stories and novels (under my own name and a pen name, Emma Faraday).
Now, I know people who can write 10,000 words a day and not die. That’s not me. I’ll never produce five or six novels a year, and that’s fine. However, I’ve learned that I can produce stories a lot faster than I ever thought I could. How?
Persistence. In other words, applying seat of pants to seat of chair, day in and day out.
This is the way I look at it. I have a full-time job, so my writing time is in the evening and during the weekend. So, say I write 500 words a day, every day. That’s 500 words x 7 days = 3500 words a week. At that rate, I could have a first draft of a 70,000-word novel in 20 weeks, or five months.
And 500 words a day, well that’s nothing really, but let’s leave it at that for weekdays, and double it during the weekend. So that’s 4500 words a week, or one 70,000-word novel in under four months.
That’s three novels a year, with some down time built in, just by being persistent.
It seems simplistic, but it does work. For me, at least. At least partly. I may not produce three novels a year, but I do get a lot of words down (again, for me) in the form of short story, novella and novel.
Now I have a question — do you think less of a writer who produces work quickly? I’ve heard some people say that you can’t possibly produce quality work if you write quickly. Is that generally accepted, or is it bunk?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Marcelle
