Deadlines, word counts, and imagination

by Christine Kling

Monday is it.

I have to ship this first draft off to my editor on Monday. I would like to have months to revise, but that’s not going to happen. In fact, I won’t reach those lovely words, THE END, until sometime late tonight.

I know I’ll get there now. I know how things play out. Yes, I might still be surprised — as I am almost every day of this business — but for the most part, I know. I’ve seen it already on the movie screen that is in my head. This week, I’ve been averaging about 2,000 to 3,000 words a day and that is a lot for me. This draft is going to come in somewhere just shy of 130,000 words and I imagine it will go a bit longer as I revise. As I said to Mary at the dog park last night, I feel like a toothpaste tube, and I’ve been having to squeeze the stuff out of me every day. I like it — in much the same way I like long night passages in foul weather. It sure feels good when you stop.

A friend of mine, Libby Fischer Hellmann wrote a blog post recently titled “NEW RULE: No more Binge Publishing” that was excerpted on The Passive Voice blog here, and it went on to generate well over 200 comments. Unfortunately, it turned nasty in some instances and a personal attack against Libby. Setting that bit aside, it brings up the interesting fact that some writers can write very fast and produce 7,000 words a day easily, while others like me struggle to produce 1,000 words per day. It seems the writers in these two camps are incapable of understanding one another and love to throw mud.

If you write that fast it must be crap.

You’re so slow because you’re lazy and you don’t work as hard as I do.

But the fact is that many extraordinary classics of literature were written very quickly (defeating the argument that it takes time to write well) and some other writers insist their quality would suffer if they were forced to write even a single book a year. There is no one size fits all.

I really have been trying to up my productivity, and I’ve been fascinated by this great difference in how writers work for about the last 9 months. I’ve been reading books on productivity and practicing different techniques. I’m getting better, but I still cannot imagine a day when I could produce more than 2,000 words a day on a regular basis. I’ve asked myself why. Why do I sit there at the computer for hours and only produce a few sentences? What do I lack — the right words, the proper sentences or the needed ideas?

One of the comments among those 200+ on the Passive Voice blog really resonated with me. A fellow wrote:

“It wasn’t the actual writing that took the extra time, but inventing sufficiently interesting ideas and working out their consequences in the story.”  -Tom Simon

I’ve discovered I have to wind up that old time movie camera in my head and watch the scene play out before I can write it. That’s why I’m not at all stressed about the big finale I have to write today. I KNOW this scene. I’ve seen it play out over and over as I wrote this book knowing that was where I was headed.

The struggle has been in getting here. I don’t think I have a very good imagination. These things don’t come easy to me. In this book, I didn’t know what was going to happen to my characters along the way, and some days it was so very hard to figure out what all these people would do and what the consequences of their actions would be. I wanted the ideas and the action to be unique and interesting — as Tom said “sufficiently interesting ideas” not just to carry the reader forward, but to impel them to continue reading, unable to put the book down.

And that’s such a high bar we set for ourselves. Am I capable of coming up with such ideas? It takes a fair dose of hubris to believe that.

But I do like to try, as difficult as it is. So it’s time to head back out to the Philippines and join Riley and Cole as they (meaning I) figure how to get out of this terrible mess I’ve thrown at them.

Fair winds!

Christine

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