Last week the New York Times ran an article suggesting
that authors only writing one book a year is slacking. Nowadays indy authors
have a better chance of building an audience if they write multiple books a
year, and big publishing houses view additional output as useful promotion. To
write less might just mean we’re lazy. Lisa Scottoline has received particular
bile on social networks for being described as struggling to write 2,000 words
per day.
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| How do I write so much per year? Bubble baths. |
Twitter whipped out the ballistics-grade snark. Writing is
easy! Anyone can bang out a thousand words in an hour. That’s just a long blog
post. I didn’t work that hard on NaNoWriMo! Get back into the salt mines,
authors!
What rankled me was the number of mediocre writers espousing
this condescension. Many were hacks whose e-books aren’t worth 99-cents and
whose blog posts run over 2,000 words because they don’t know how to edit. Of
course it’s easy to fluff up word count if you don’t care about craft.
It rankled worse with rush-pundits who actually show raw
talent that, with the time and reflection they insist you eschew, could develop
into something great. What they’d learn from experience will be stifled by the
positive feedback loop of rushing adequate chunks of text to market. Traditional
publishing has nearly killed the Max Perkins style that gave us Fitzgerald,
Wolfe and Hemingway. God save us if the next wave of publishing kills taking
your time.
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| Slacker! He'll never go anywhere. |
John Scalzi was particularly level-headed. He advised folks
to calm down and recognize that everyone has his or her own writing speed. And
he was right. Many of us grew up on Stephen King, who seems to write at the
speed of sound. Amanda Hocking and Seanan McGuire do multiple novels per year, and
Jim Butcher has at least one door stopper a year. Meanwhile Jo Walton and
Justin Cronin take about two years to release one book a-piece, and Patrick
Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin can run even longer.
In a better world those authors who were at ease with
promotion and speedy production would use their platforms to help the slower. I
stump for talented authors of all paces routinely and have been lucky to find like-minded folks. But while Scalzi was correct, I still ran hot.
Or imagine some blowhard on Twitter screeching that she's not working hard enough.
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| A great work, but also one of privilege. |
The self-publishing world, and particularly the
Locke-and-Hocking world of cranking out as many e-books as possible, is not
delivering such works. The best of these books I've read were passably entertaining and couldn't strive for more in their production cycles. In a market where a large catalog and frequent releases
are your best shots at a career, it really can’t, and if you want to make a
living, that two-year cycle of a Jo Walton or Justin Cronin seems implausible
barring a very lucky hit. And when Amanda Hocking got that hit? It was having her sizable catalog that helped her become a millionaire.
Since I see something like this self-publishing model dominating the industry in a few years, this is disturbing for the future of
an art form. We can’t stop the price cycling that Amazon, Apple and the Big Six
have steered us toward. We can alter how we interact and help each other. That
novel Harper Lee spent so long on owed a debt to Truman Capote’s assistance. Those
who succeed in the speedy new market can help not just teach and critique, but
to promote talents that have different paces.
The rebuttal is that the market doesn’t want great
literature. It wants twists
and thrills and titillation, and little else. It’s too dumb to recognize exposition and formula, and authors are
fooling themselves for caring about more than dollars. This "market" would become a race to the bottom of both
price and ambition, allowing The Novel to survive a few more years by
imitating reality television’s innovations. If the future of publishing really is who can write the most blood-and-smut the fastest, then I might as well kill myself
now.
Thank you. I am a reader rather than a writer. I don't like formula writing. I don't like sloppy writing. Yes, I read agreeable trash from time to time but that is not all I read. And I want a book that will bear rereading.
ReplyDeleteThe slickdrawMcgraw writing style might fill in an hour butI can't see me putting it on my shelves, or rereading.
Yes, I know, I am a dinosaur.
But I like dinosaurs! There are even some in the novel I have in the pipeline!
DeleteAnd really, there is no better force in this argument than readers supporting superior work in the market place.
Yes and Yes, John. Thank you for your reasonable voice. Suggesting that anyone's writing pace is wrong, too quick OR too slow, is not only unfair but totally bizarre--What was it Maugham said? There are 3 rules for writing, but unfortunately no one knows them?
ReplyDeleteSheesh. The internet, man.
To be fair, here I've suggested that some writers' paces are too quick. How did you react to those claims? Regardless, thank you for the agreement, and for reminding me of the shifty "rules."
DeleteI see you saying that some writers obviously don't know how to edit, books *or* blog posts, but I didn't see you actually tell anyone they were writing too quickly. I must have missed it. I'd react to that the same way I react to anyone telling any writers "They're doing it wrong": Nope. There is no wrong, as long as good writing is produced. I have a quick pace but I don't think I write any better or worse than people who takes years or minutes to produce their stories.
DeleteIt could be inferred from my assessment that the poor quality of novels from novelists who publish many times a year is a holistic rejection of speed-writing. I'm glad I didn't read as too rejectionist. Naturally I've got great admiration for King, whom I mentioned as an example of the quality quick-production writers.
DeleteI do tend to default to, "Did this writer rush?" when a novel is too quick. The most recent sequel I read was dreadful, and when I realized it was one of three novels she'd released that year, I definitely defaulted to a conclusion.
Very well said, John. What difference if I take six months or six years to write my novel, as long as it comes out right in the end. You can't rush the story. That's what it's supposed to be about right?
ReplyDeleteLamentably, what it's supposed to be about varies on several factors. I'm prone to some utopian thinking about writing, but creating superior work is a worthwhile goal.
DeleteYep. Excellent post.
ReplyDeleteIt is far easier to write 2k words a day than to write an EXCELLENT 100 words a day. The market that demands writing at that pace is a market I will avoid. I have had agents and editors tell me to take my time with my stories, get to know the characters--there is no rush. Those are the professionals I want to work with.
Slow and steady wins the race. I cannot release my writing before it is ready. Peace...
Your prose is a perfect example of work that ought not to be rushed. You create distinct fiction, sentence-by-sentence and piece-by-piece. I'm not surprised agents have told you to take your time, as the craft shows.
DeleteI know the quick and easy method is pushed especially hard in genre and serial work. The publishers want the book left on a cliffhanger so people will want to read the next installment, but readers are then frustrated to be left dangling from a ledge for 12 months. I read a lot of genre fiction and a little smut, but I still want an engaging story and dynamic characters, and I'd rather wait 18 months for a book I'll reread than have one in 9 months that did nothing for plot or character development and that I forget about five minutes after reading.
ReplyDeleteI'm still working on my own craft and it's going to take me a lot longer to get to where I need to be, but if I don't put in the time to make something worthwhile, what's the point of doing this at all?
I'm trying to remember the last cliffhangers that actually got me. On Kirkman's Walking Dead comic, they actually got more annoying over time. Maybe Fellowship of the Ring? I can't imagine a series repeatedly dropping me off on cliffhangers and keeping me hooked. But then, in most of what I read the novels end in subdued ways they just promise more - like The Warded Man, or The Passage, or Dark Tower. How do you feel about all those rushed books with jaggy ends?
DeleteExcellent piece! As someone who is being asked by nearly everyone I know, "When will the book be finished?!", it's nice to read something about taking one's time. I was always taught to measure twice, cut once. In the writing of my novel, it has become more measure a hundred times and only then contemplate which saw to cut with.
ReplyDeleteGranted, my updating via social media things like "I'm finishing the book soon!" and posting excerpts may not help the hurry up attitude, but I feel the need to balance my desire to write my way at my pace with my fear of people losing interest in the material that's out there already.
Anyhow, as a slow writer, I appreciate a voice telling me that I'm doing nothing wrong by finding my own way.
I think relatives and neighbors questioning when that novel/book/movie/videogame/app/album will be finished is itself something that'll never go away. I'm glad you're taking your time, though, Aaron. However, I don't view posting updates and views into your process as necessarily cajoling other creators to hasten. I know when I blog about writing, run word counts on the site and tweet about developments, I'm just trying to be transparent and show people how one process functions (or doesn't).
DeleteWhether a blog post or a novel, self-published or big 6, to me it's all about the highest quality content each writer and editor are capable of producing. I don't care if it takes 5 months or 5 years. Good post as always, thanks John.
ReplyDeleteI certainly took the time on this essay. Almost delayed it another week, but based on the comments and retweet-count, I didn't have to! Good to know the sense is working out.
DeleteI guess I'm a lazy writer then! My novel or I should say novella (after many edits) originally took me a year to write and has taken the last three years on and off editing, but I hope the finished product is worth the read.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post John, and I think one writes at the speed they write, whether it be fast or slow its quality often depends on the effort put in the editing to make it as polished as possible.
I wouldn't call you lazy, naturally, especially on the exploring-boundaries end. I'm all for writers pushing themselves. We write 100 words a day, find it easy, then try 250, 500, 1,000, or whatever goal makes us sweat. Like in exercise, the lifting gets easier over time. Can you remember what you used to be assigned in school? I could write those essays in half an hour these days (though Google helps on the citations).
DeleteHear, hear!
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that of all the word-count advisors I've read (recommending anywhere from 500 to 2,000 words per day), precisely ONE of them mentioned editing time as a task equivalent to writing new words. Carolyn See says to write 1,000 words per day or 2 hours of editing, whichever it is you need to do on a given project. It figures she's a professional author who gave that recommendation in a book published in the traditional manner.
And yes, Stephen King does write quickly, but he didn't get as fast as he is now until he sold "Carrie" and was able to turn to writing full-time. Writing 2,000 new words per day (or the equivalent editing time) isn't so bad if it's also your primary means of work, other mitigating circumstances notwithstanding.
As King's said many times, to write is human, to edit is divine. I take editing very seriously. Ted Hoagland actually used to joke that editing was the cure for writer's block. Can't produce new stuff? Fix the old stuff? I like the notion of a minimum number of hours of editing per day, to keep one honest, rather than skipping along a set number of words. I'm pretty drastic in content-curation on my edit-only days.
DeleteI'm learning this lesson the hard way. The very act of making word count a focus is threat to quality. I mean nobody ever throws this nonsense at poetry!
ReplyDeleteBravo. It took me more than forty years as a professional writer to be ready to write my first novel. One of my four novels took 7 years to write, another, 7 months. How many words should a novel be? As many as it takes, no more? How long should it take to write a novel? As long as it takes to do it well, no less. I have had days when I have drafted upwards of 5,000 words (not many, mind you) but only a fraction of those survived the many rounds of editing needed to make them right.
ReplyDeleteThe story tells itself as it should, or at least that ought to be the case. It's nice to have a target for word count, but IMHO, that's all it should be is a target -- not the holy grail. Somedays, if things are going well, or the section you're is speedy, then you might get more. Other days, you might clap yourself on the back for getting half your goal, but if the words you output are good, then you accomplished the real goal anyway, I think.
ReplyDeleteI'm in the camp of whoever says another author is doing it wrong is wrong. Write fast, write slow, write whatever. Just write. Now, as for editing, I also agree with you. Take you time and don't rush that step. Rushing the writing is one thing, but not taking enough time to polish is quite another. That's what leads to the bad name of indi-publishing.
ReplyDelete