The Furious 350...

Less background, more stuff about writing, specifically my personal writing habits...

Every book/blog on writing mentions something about "how much","when", and "how often", and the oft-loathed recommendation that one must write every damned day, day in, day out, forever, on and on, rain or shine, hell or high water 'til your fingers are nothing but hardened callouses... write even if its drivel, poorly thought out, self-indulgent nonsense poured into a moleskin writing notebook. Just write you fools, write anything, write, write, write!!! It doesn't matter what you're writing about!

Stop...

Like everything, there's a happy medium, a workable pragmatism. To just write for the sake of writing, while a noble notion, isn't necessarily good advice in my opinion. I suppose if your goal is to keep a personal journal, or a personal blog (like this one!) yes, by all means, write whatever's on your mind. But if your goal is to one day become a published fiction writer, then my take is that putting words to paper should require a bit of pre-planning and thought.

I am an outliner, and while many view the outline as a painful shackle unnecessarily burdening the writer, I can't live without one. "I just let the characters take me wherever they want to go!" is an oft repeated retort among the anti-outlining crowd. And that may be fine, if that's what you're going for.... but this stream of conscious fiction writing, for me, is more painful than 'following the script'. I started out writing this way, but what ended up happening was a plot-holed mess that meandered needlessly, driving up word count unnecessarily, and creating a Sisyphean revision task I had no stomach for . So, I work from an outline for novel writing. It's painful at the git-go, yes, it's not fun, but it allows me to power through my "Furious 350"....

Most of my writing is done in my head, during the drive to/from work, spacing out in the shower, what some people call 'daydreaming.' Working within the context of a pre-outlined chapter, I know typically what constitutes 350 words worth of a scene. It's a manageable word count (BTW, "It's" in this sentence is word 350 of this post) and easily doable sitting down for an hour to an hour and a half each evening. I know what I need to accomplish so then it's a matter of just "gettin' the words out.". Of course that's the idea, some days are easier then others, others are downright tedious and excruciating.

I myself write everyday. Not because it's good for me, like drinking thirty glasses of water a day, but because really 350 words isn't that much to be honest. Professional writers typically crank out 1000 to 2000 words a day, but that's their day job. That sort of throughput nets them a novel in three months or so. Typical novels are around 80K to 120K, lower usually if it's the writer's debut novel. (First time novels above 130K words are very rare.) By my math, if I write 350 words a day, every day, I'm clocking in at 10K words a month, which will get me up to a novel length manuscript in 8 to 10 months....

Sounds too soulless? too mechanical? Perhaps. It's discipline. It's exercise. It's like going to the gym everyday. (BTW, I can't do the gym... I've tried, man, have I tried...). But when it comes to writing, I don't believe in the 'muse' or the need for daily inspiration/affirmation. It's simpler than that. I write my 350 when I've had a crappy day at work, I write my 350 when I'm 30K ft above Iowa, when it's Christmas, when I'm not feeling well, etc...

So despite my mocking of the "write everyday" Nazis, I do write everyday. Why? I wouldn't get anything done otherwise. A creature of guilt, to squander the opportunity after having landed an agent seems somewhat unforgivable. I doubt if I'd be trying to write a novel a year otherwise. The more novels on submission to editors, that many less novels I have to write to get published.