Better Writing Through Triangle Chokes · 6:06am Oct 14th, 2014
“Redraft everything,” they say, “Write it and then rewrite it in case you did anything wrong,” they say, “Write it and then rewrite it without using ‘said’ or any words that mean ‘said’,” they say, “Write it and then rewrite it without using J or Y or any labial plosives,” they say, “Re-re-re-re-re-dedicate your life to Christ, and also take the adverbs out,” they say, “First drafts are always crap,” they say, “Write it again! Write it write it again and again again again again, write it until the rocks melt and the seas burn and the Leviathan rises to take creation betwixt its maw once again,” they say, “Write it and then rewrite it without using the verb ‘to be’ under any circumstances” they say, and they say a many similar things of a very similar nature until it all runs together in a neverending stream of writing advice tumblrs and Creative Writing 101 seminars.
What a load of wank. Yes, yes, I’m sure that Annie Proulx and Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy and this week’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner (whose works you take lovingly from your bookshelf far more often than those of some genre hack like a Dick or a Bradbury or a Christie) all write their novels, ruthlessly examine each and every word of each and every sentence to make sure it belongs there, purge anything they deem less than utterly necessary, sit on it for a month to make sure they’re reading it with fresh eyes, reexamine every sentence from the ground up, send it to their agent’s editor, make corrections, send it to the agent’s editor again, make further corrections, sit on it for another month, then burn their entire manuscript and collected notes before repeating the process six-to-eight times until they are sure that each letter is borne of the deepest springs of Literature themselves and not sullied by mere human hands.
I have heard these stories of the craft, seen them in the New York Times Review of Books, listened to them on Radio Four podcasts, skimmed them over a thousand blogs. I have seen authors of well-received works declaim that not a single word of their first draft remained in the final draft of their work. I am sure that this is a creative process that works for them, and I wish them joy.
Of course, it’s all utter rubbish. Robert Heinlein, Harlan Ellison, Dean Wesley Smith, they all explain in detail how wrongheaded the myth of ‘writing must be slow and neverending and edited in perpetuity’ is, but really, the myth holds no more water than Ladder Theory* or the idea that the Bush Administration blew up the WTC**. Even a cursory glance at the bibliographies of good writers shows it to be false: Phillip K Dick spent most of his writing career slamming out a novel a week in a shed while taking too many amphetamines and not enough antipsychotics, and his literature is beyond reproach. Charles Dickens slammed out words at a phenomenal rate to hit deadlines for the magazines that published his novels. Harlan Ellison would take a sentence-long story, sit down in a bookshop with a manual typewriter, hammer out a short story in a single sitting, and then win a billion science-fiction awards for it.
Even in our literary microcosm of My Little Pony fanfiction, we can see similar things. Darf kicked out 6000 words of lush, perfect pornography per week at a bare minimum, and that motherfucker didn’t redraft shit. Kkat’s Fallout: Equestria—whatever you think of its place in the fandom, only a fool would deny that it is a damn fine post-apocalyptic novel, and has a cast and level of plot complexity that makes Lord of the Rings fold its arms and nod respectfully—had a 8-10k update every week, and its equally twisted spin-off Project Horizons was written at about twice that rate. Raging Semi wrote the greatest love novella I have ever read (in all fiction) in about the time it takes to get out of bed on a December sunday, and then wrote the second-greatest love novella I have ever read a short while after.
Anyway, this post is not made for arguing such points. If any of you feel that the pinnacle of good writing can only be reached through slow, meditative, word-churning, you are welcome to write your own damn blog post on the subject and link to it in the comments here. I am not here to talk about the what, I am here to talk about the how.
Specifically, how do we improve? If we follow the first three of Heinlein’s rules—Keep writing, finish what you write, never rewrite except to editorial order—then how do we get good stories? After all, there’s a grain of truth in the myth: when we start writing, our first stories tend to suck. If we’re not actively seeking out the flaws in these stories and fixing them, how will we ever grow?
Fortunately for you guys, I have an analogy from the world of Mixed Martial Arts.
Most combat sports—judo, boxing, muay thai, BJJ, sambo, greco-roman or amateur wrestling, any karate that doesn’t suck—have four basic stages of training: techniques, drilling, sparring, competition.
Technique
Technique is the most basic level. Techniques can range from simple things—slipping a jab, ‘bridging’ your hips to buck off an opponent sat on top of you—to complex things like dual-throw combinations in judo, head kicks in muay thai, bizarre spider-guard attacks in jiu-jitsu.
There’s no real skill in learning a technique. There’s the speed that you can pick a technique up, and the number of techniques you can remember, but the actual skill is all in the application.
Writing is the same way. There are techniques, you know them, you’ve heard them a thousand times, you compulsively seek out tumblrs to learn dozens more every week. Show, don’t tell. Basic grammar. Advanced grammar. Relatable characters. Avoid Mary Sues. Remove unnecessary words. Keep the plot moving. Save your notes and drabbles. Make characters work for their goals.
You’ve heard of these techniques before, and many that I haven’t mentioned, and many that I’ve never heard myself. They’re not the whole story, though, if they were good writing would be a simple matter of ‘read all of these writing techniques and create a masterpiece.’
It’s the same with mixed-martial arts. You cannot learn to fight just by watching and going through the motions of all these shiny techniques. Martial artists learned this in a brutally empirical fashion in the UFCs of the early nineties, when masters at arts that focused purely on learning techniques (wing-chun kung fu, aikido, penjak silat, bad karate) got thoroughly trounced by mid-level kickboxers and wrestlers who spent their time learning to apply a far simpler set of techniques.
Drilling
Drilling comes after you learn the technique. You practice the technique against a resisting opponent in a situation that allows you to isolate that technique. A common situation in Brazillian Jiujitsu (a pure-grappling sport) is guard passing/guard retention: To stop the attacker from climbing on top of the defender and striking/applying locks at will, the defender wraps their legs around the attacker. The attacker has to ‘pass’ the guard, and the defender has to ‘retain’ it. There are basic techniques to pass guard, and guard itself is a technique which can be improved in various ways.
A guard passing drill looks like this:
Both fighters are in position to practice a small set of moves. If either wins the game or draw the game, they stop and restart. Drills can differ: Sometimes the defender is using one, specific defense to help drill attacks against that defense, sometimes joint locks and chokes are permitted so that the attacker must defend themself at the same time, sometimes strikes are allowed to practice for a MMA context. The level of resistance also varies, high intensity when both partners are well-acquainted with the skillset, lower intensity when the partners are still getting a feel for the moves.
Writers have similar exercises. Drabbles. Character-focused dialogue. Experimental chapters. ‘Change-the-ending-and-go-from-there’ stories to see where a story could have ended up. Short stories with different viewpoints.
Exercises that stretch the skills you love, and nurture the ones you’re unfamiliar with. I (shamefully) don’t use many drills, but I have a few, usually revolving around plotting, world-building, and what-if games. Chuck Palahniuk suggested one where you remove every ‘thought’ verb from a piece of writing, to improve ‘showing’ skills.
Drills like this are very useful, and they can create a lot of improvement in a small stretch of time. Used well, they can improve your skills by leaps and bounds. Used poorly, they will simply bore you and send you running for the next stage.
Sparring
In martial arts, this is the fun part. You’re up against one of your training partners under the rules of whatever sport you’re playing, and both of you are trying to win. Boxers want to punch and avoid getting punched back. Judo players want to grab their opponent, lift them bodily, and hit them with the planet. Jiujiteiros want to establish a superior position before forcing their opponent to tap out via a choke or joint lock. Wrestlers want to wear tights and teabag each other.
Sparring is almost always done at full-resistance, and it’s where the bulk of the learning occurs. Guard drills will teach you to pass guard, and mount drills will teach you to win after you pass, but sparring teaches you to link these drills together, to work against an opponent using all their guile against you, to recover from the unpredictable, to read your opponent, and to fight even with a 200lb dude in sweaty canvas pyjamas sitting on your head.
There is no ‘redrafting’. You do not stop during sparring to make sure you’re getting a move right, you don’t go back for do-overs, that’s what techniques and drilling are all about. There are no do-overs, only the next round. You may recognise the mistake you just made, but you do not fix it in that bout, by then you have already been teabagged. You keep them in mind for the next bout, juggling them along with the two-dozen other mistakes to avoid and techniques to try that are flying about in your adrenaline-addled mind. You can’t learn everything at once.
Seriously, you can’t learn everything at once.
(Plateaus are a thing here—too much sparring and not enough drilling and you’ll end up in the same ruts, clinging to a moveset that’s fraying around the edges as all of your training partners grow used to your best attacks. Same goes for writing—if you stop experimenting under ‘safe’ conditions and stop pushing yourself, you’ll end up writing the same stories over and over again)
For writers, first draft is sparring. There’s no opponent except the elusive story inside your head that you are trying to drag onto the page, fully formed. It’s free-form, you are putting yourself under no particular constraints except those of your characters and genre, and you’re trying to write the best damn story you can.
It’s where you learn to write, and instead of being judged by involuntary teabaggings, you are being judged by your own sense of taste.
I believe you should approach it like sparring: each first draft should stand in its own right. If your first draft is full of mistakes, do not go back and try to eternally stir that pot of mistakes until it’s something resembling a good story. At best, you will marginally improve your story at the cost of slowing everything the fuck down. At worst, you’ll simply be stirring up a pot of crap, it’ll still be crap, and you’ll worry that your next draft will be unfixable crap too.
Also, do not linger and agonize over words, hoping to get around the ‘oh shit I’m not allowed to fix my mistakes’ problem by never making any mistakes. In sparring, such dithering will get you punched, thrown, or sat on. Work as quickly as you can. Move past your mistakes. If you find yourself making the same mistakes over and over, focus on them in drills.
I say this now because I’m hitting the ‘several hundred thousand words written’ stages of my writing life, and I can now step back and view stories with some detachment. My two best-rated short stories, A Persimmon Spring and Morning Glow, were both first drafts, both written in less than a day, and both only touched up for minor spelling and grammar issues. A Persimmon Spring is probably the favorite thing of mine I’ve ever written.
Conversely, my least favorite stories are ones I spread out over a long period of time, agonized over, and touched up incessantly. They feel patchy and strange, like a restored painting that’s been given too much detail in some parts and almost none in others. My very least favorite stories are the ones that never even became stories, ones with three or four half-completed redrafts that tired and disappointed me.
Why’d they disappoint me? I was trying to learn everything at once and apply it all at once, and you can’t learn everything at once.
Competition
I’m loathe to talk about this part in much detail because it’s been years since I’ve competed in a combat sport, and I’m the rankest of noobs at actually having people pay me for my words. I’m only adding this part for the sake of completing the analogy, so take everything I say from hereon out with a bigger pinch of salt than usual.
Competition is the bit you see on telly—high-level athletes fighting for a win. Like this:
Three things to note here:
1) You learn a lot from fighting in competition, as pretty much everyone who’s fought in the UFC will tell you.
2) This learning happens between-fights. You do not have time to learn and apply anything particularly useful during the fight. This is knowledge you will use for your next fight.
3) If you enter a competition as a raw noob, you will get your ass kicked. Even amateur MMA competitions require a high baseline of skill and conditioning, and almost nobody possesses that without some kind of training.
For writers, ‘competition’ means getting your story bought, either as commission, as a novel, or sold out of your car-boot. Similarly:
1) You learn new skills getting your story published, from getting around publishers to working with paid editors to dealing with self publishing to creating cover art and so on and so on.
2) After some time, you may learn from fans what they want to pay for and what they want to see. Or you might start chasing statistical phantoms. I lack the experience to say.
3) If you submit your writing to buyers as a raw noob, you will get rejected. Writing is a craft, and it’s one that you can improve over time.
I am now getting to the stage where I read works in my genres and think ‘pshh, I’ve written better than this’. In 2011, I was not at this stage. Reading early Banishment Decree chapters makes me wince. Reading early unedited Banishment Decree tables makes me wince harder and read through my fingers. Reading the few pony works I wrote (and took off FIMfiction shortly afterwards) before that is literally painful, and the less said about the things I wrote before pony, the better.
My writing is now far better than that. This is not because I have an amazing team of editors, or because I redraft a billion times, or because I think for two years before I dare put down a sentence lest it be the wrong one.
My first drafts have improved because I’ve learned techniques, I’ve drilled techniques, and I’ve written first draft after first draft after first draft.
That’s how you learn.
*How to tell that Ladder Theory and assorted PUA rubbish is in fact rubbish: Look on Facebook. Look at the various people in relationships. See how there are very few harems of ‘HB12s’ dating Alpha Papas like it’s the goddamn Leroverse. See how there are ugly people in relationships with ugly people, pretty people in relationships with ugly people, pretty women dating ugly men, ugly women dating pretty men, and even women dating women and men dating men. Then either come back to reality, or just go full MGTOW and leave the rest of us alone already.
**How to tell that the Bush Administration did not blow up the two towers: Well, they blew up, didn’t they?
As I've said before: Stop saying things I utterly agree with. It's dreadfully dull. You have a habit of being more eloquent in your musings than I am, though, I'll grant you that.
At the very least, you've made me feel far, far, far less guilty for my story Late Fees. So, yeah, thanks oodles and bundles for that, that's been gnawing at me for months.
"I'm not allowed to like it! I had fun writing it and I didn't agonize over it and I certainly didn't rewrite it! I'm not allowed to enjoy it!"
And also noting the exact reason I keep some of my most weaksauce early fics up in my archives rather than tearing them down and burning them:
They're there to remind me that I can, have, and will continue to improve. No, fuck you, better authors, you were at my level once. You weren't just born that good - with the exception of GhostOfHeraclitus. I've read his first stories and goddamn he was actually born that good.
Motherfucker.
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See, I'm a sneaky git like that: I've got them all in my own private archives, just not publicly hosted. That way, motherfuckers read and be like 'wow, he started good and got even better!' and I'm behind a wall of bad writing, laughing evily.
Oh Celestia's fat royal ass, Chuck wrote another wall of text.
I mean HI!
Well, word churning has its place. If you ask me, good, no, great writing is, and has to be, a very fine tuned balance between truely inspired yet completely impulsive writing, and careful editing to fine tune what would otherwise be words in the raw.
I really do believe that a story - hell, any kind of artistic creation - is and always will be BEST when it is borne of true inspiration. I don't argue that good stories can be made by, as you called it, 'word churning.' Just that they'd tend to be lesser stories.
Naturally, true inspiration tends to create diamonds... in the rough. They do need to be cut and polished, to what degree depends on the writer and the situation, but they do need attention.
But I think if a story literally had not a single tidbit in it from the original draft, it probably wasn't a product of true inspiration. I'm not saying it'd be bad automatically. Just... probably won't have the same heart as an inspired story would have.
I edit my own stuff repeatedly, but most of my stories remain 99% intact, really what gets changed (outside of errors) is dialogue. And even then, it's only to line up the dialogue with the respective character's voice. It doesn't always come out right in the first pass. I mean, Rarity has to say darling at some point. Gilda has to say dweeb. Dash has to say cool. Etc.
I make minor tweaks to the original draft to improve flow, dialogue, characters, narration, and to exenuate, extenuate... however the fuck you spell that word - certain plot points. Readers are dumb, you have to signpost important shit.
No I don't lol. Fuck tumblr. Writing, like anything I do, is something I just dive into, hoping for the best, and learning as I go. On rare occasions I'll seek outside help or information when I need it for something specific. But to show a prime example of my learning method: I needed to learn LUA code to program a Garry's mod gamemode. I had a miniscule bit of experience in C++. I just opened all the code - some of the dirtiest code every written, mind you - and stared at it for over a month. Pulling out my hair and cutting my wrists, until it finally made sense to me. I emerged as an experienced and flexible coder.
Drills... I drill sometimes. I should probably write a lot more stories, but I have experimented. I wrote a fic in 2nd person once. *shudders*
Competition? What do you mean you have to sell your shit? This is FIMFICTION. It's a giant cesspool of competition without a dollar changing hands! Here, the currency is followers and upvotes. You think this isn't a competition? Shit, dude.
I guess it's a friendly competition, but isn't most actual business friendly? But yeah, I have to say, merely publishing a story here is you competing with all the other authors.
Also,
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/37540750/_ponies/gilda%20this%20up.PNG
See my point? That's inspiration. That's what makes the greats. That's why I write by this (one of a few) rule: don't manufacture a story.
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I actually disagree with that. I've manufactured stories before and had them turn out rather well. Three of the four commissions I wrote had no particular drive to get written until someone paid me to do so, but they all turned out very well indeed. I guess you could say that yeah, if you get a story idea and but you never really get the drive for it then it'll suck, but I think at that stage you run the risk of trying to write a story, fucking it up through sheer bad luck and saying 'oh, because it sucked I must have lacked inspiration.'
I found a link to Raging Semi's stash, but she-he wrote quite a bit. What was your first and second favorite romance novellas?
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Bittersweet, and I Wish I Might. They're both equally good, and I find myself swinging between which one I think is best on a regular basis.
I don't redraft too much. I don't have anything to redraft. I can't get the words out. Free writing doesn't make it easier. Outlines don't make it easier. Neither prompts nor the lack of them make it easier
The longest work of fiction I've ever written was roughly a thousand words of Tom Swift fanfic that I cobbled together over the course of month in order to squeak past my third grade English requirements. Since then, my most fruitful hours of sitting in front of a blank screen have yielded at best five hundred word spurts of purple prose.
Nonfiction is somewhat easier. I can churn out academic papers pretty regularly, but my test scores say that my non-fiction writing is my weakest skill. I can toss around maths and reading comprehension well above the ninetieth percentile, but my persuasive writing is merely slightly above average among university-goers. This is going to bite me in the foot very shortly as I seek funding for graduate-level research. Applying for research fellowships? That's writing. Communicating research results to the world? That's writing. But it isn't just writing -- it's storytelling. I have to really sell it. And that's where I fail.
I feel that if I could manage fiction writing, my nonfiction writing would improve drastically. That would help me just as much in getting where I need to go as fiddling with, say, determinants of path-finding functions. Even if it doesn't, it's still something I want to do for its own sake. Maybe your blog post will help inspire me. I'll dedicate the next hour to writing down story-words. Maybe something will come out of it this time.
Maybe this time...
Is this why I love you?
...
no Yes, yes it is. Continue writing magnificent stories pretty please.
Also
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holy crap
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Try writing 1000 words of barely-readable bullshit with sparse grammar, bad spelling, terrible characters, and no real plot to speak of. That'll get your tubes unblocked.
How would you classify the <750 word write offs from writeoff.me?
Because they seem to occupy a weird intersection between drilling and competition
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I'd say drilling, unless <1k words drabbles are your main area of writing.
I have to disagree with you about first drafts.
I've found that the most useful things for me - the most gainful practice I got - was having people kick my writing back at me with a long list of things I did wrong. Learning how to do something right is really important, because if you never actually learn how to do that, then you're going to keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Writing first drafts is fun, but unless you're forcing yourself to do something new, it isn't really going to change anything. People telling me what was wrong with my writing helped me far more than doing first drafts has, and that has been true all the way since AP English in high school.
If your story is absolute garbage from the standpoint of "this was a bad idea", then yeah, it is unsalvagable. And chewing on the same thing endlessly isn't really helpful. But simply farting out first drafts doesn't really help as much either. The truth is that if you knew how to do it better, you'd already be doing it; that's why having other people help you is so important, because it helps to avert the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
I think you took the wrong conclusion from the first draft stories which ended up close to right. I've done the same thing - my most popular stories were written in very short periods of time. But the thing is that those stories came out really fast because I knew exactly what I was doing and did it. It wasn't because they were first drafts; it was because I already knew what I was trying to do with them. I don't think they're my best pieces (though I do enjoy them) but they were very, very directed. Thing is, that isn't necessarily how you make the best story, but it is the easiest way to create something which is reasonably good. There is something to be said for doing it right the first time.
But you only do it right the first time on rare occasion, and even then, it isn't likely to be completely right.
Definitely agree that competition makes for better writing. If you have someone or some group you want to impress, that can drive you to take some chances. That's where things get good.
Kinda with you on staying forward momentum. My best scenes and character moments happened in a flurry of writing, with minimal editing. Sometimes you just hit that stride.
There are other times - more common, or at least, longer-lasting - where you have to set things up a certain way for the next flurry of writing. Instances where you need a few things established, but the story hasn't given you the place to do so yet. These are pain-staking, unforgiving, brutal-ass slogs focused on cutting down huge swaths of text and trying like hell to make it all read well. You'll have these, and while they should be avoided, sometimes you just don't have that option, and have to make the best of what you have.
Both tend to come out in a way that's immensely satisfying, but it's for different reasons.
I'm a big fan of just moving to the next story. Though I think doing one editing/rewrite pass on a story is a good idea, especially if you are still learning the basics. Then again I don't really do 'drills' so perhaps I just like combining them into my primary story writing. Even then I think that you shouldn't rewrite a entire story, just one or two sections that didn't come out right.
I tend to look at it in an efficiency fashion. Sure, if I rewrite something four times it might get incrementally better. Or I can use that time and effort to write three stories after the first one. Which will be much more useful in improving my skills. So, one story 5% better or four stories with the fourth one being probably 50% better than the first... Seems like an easy choice to me.
Philip K Dick wrote 44 short novels in 32 years. Dickens wrote 15 long novels in 34 years. Ellison never, as far as I know, wrote any novels, yet he has been writing for, I dunno, 50 years, and he says that he writes every day... so he can't be churning out words quickly. Do the math; they're all writing about 100,000 words per year or less.
Heinlein claimed in a letter to John Campbell that he had sold every story he ever wrote. He never practiced writing. He just got up one day without ever having written, wrote a story, and sold it. No one else has ever done that. Either Heinlein was a liar, and you shouldn't take his advice, or he was an inhuman writing freak, and you shouldn't take his advice.
2532195 There's room for a certain amount of hyperbole in an argument of this sort.
I think the point is that they wrote quickly without picking and poking at the individual words, rather than labouring over it for weeks at a time. I can certainly believe that Dick might write a novel in a single week and then spend the next few months wrecking his liver and punting random words at bits of paper until the next novel came along.
Another great blog post, Chuck!
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If you look at his most prolific years, from the early fifties to the very late sixties, he was pushing out three novels a year (give or take) and a whole bunch of short stories too. He looks less prolific if you take the years when the mixture of amphetamines, poverty, and mental health issues essentially stompted him flat. These prolific periods are the times I'm more interested in, because I'm thinking about 'progress writing while writing' rather than 'progress writing overall including all of life.'
From personal experience, I know that the thing that drags my word speed down the most isn't slowness during writing, it's the long periods of doing things that aren't writing.
Worked for Stephanie Meyer.
Also, I believe that (if he wasn't being completely facecious) what Heinlein said had less to do with the quality of writing and more to do with the quality of his sales philosophy: Send out everything you write, rewrite to editorial demand, and keep sending everything out until someone buys it. That doesn't, to me, imply that he was a superhuman author, merely that he was willing to get paid for dreck and that people were willing to buy dreck. I can believe both of these things.
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That's rule number three: rewrite to editorial demand, if you agree with it. Nothing wrong with that; a good editor will take your work along by leaps and bounds, just as a good coach who examines your rolling sessions and drills you on your weak spots will take your jiujitsu on by leaps and bounds.
Thing is, though: every time you correct an issue based on an editor's say-so, you're more likely to do it right the first time when you write your next first draft.
I think 'completely right' is an artefact, something that doesn't really exist in writing. Trying to chase it will quickly lead to diminishing returns. I think most writers agree about the diminishing returns at some point—if you're ever going to show a story to the world, you have to just give up and put it out there at some point—but I prefer to codify that into a system so I won't end up endlessly tinkering, or hiding away stories that are actually sellable.
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Writing a first draft after a ton of planning with a strict outline is still writing a first draft. I have a teeny-tiny attention span and need an outline even for my shortest pieces just so that I don't finish a paragraph, forget what I'm doing, and stare into space for fifteen minutes. In fact, I tend to plan quite a lot purely to avoid coming up with long reams of text that don't go anywhere and will need deleting.
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I agree with these things.
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Yay! That means I can rationalize away writing the comment instead of working on one of the stories I should be working on.
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Yeah. The trouble happens when you sit down to write a scene you outlined in your head, and it doesn't quite come out like you thought it would. Then it's a battle.
Being able to see a scene in your head but not being able to make it work in text is mighty, mighty frustrating.
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I agree, at least if you're growing as a writer.
Oh, this is very true; nothing is perfect, ever, but that wasn't really what I meant. Stories change by varying amounts depending on how far off you were; sometimes your editor has a much better suggestion for a part of the story than you had. This is why people who actually help you with the content of your story are so invaluable; it is like having another person with a new set of ideas who can help put things into your story that you didn't think of which belong there. Some of my works just get cleaned up, but others actually have new ideas which come from other people in them, and those ideas helped make the stories better.
But that starts to go into the territory of "making better stories" rather than merely improving as a writer, though seeing people point stuff out as being wrong and me going back and fixing it does help me learn about what I'm doing and try to make sure I'm writing the right story to start out with.
When I hear about people rewriting their entire story, what I really wonder is if they were telling the wrong story to begin with; the original version of Star Wars was vastly different from the finished product, to the point where I wouldn't really say they were the same thing.
2532195 I sent an email to Tim Powers, who was a close friend of Philip K. Dick (and a two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick award), and asked him whether he did revisions. He said,
We're having this same discussion in the writeoff group now. Some people can write great first drafts. I don't know what gift makes that possible. Maybe they can really envision the story, see each scene in their head, know ahead of time who the characters are. Some people can't. Mozart wrote music as fast as he could move his pen. Beethoven spent months revising. I don't know whether it depends more on the person, or on the type of story. GhostOfHeraclitus did many revisions of "Whom the Princesses Would Destroy", but "Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea" came out almost as-in in an hour or two.
(And I can't find that story about Heinlein now, so I might have gotten it wrong. It might have been him saying he sold every story he'd written for publication. He was trying to bully Campbell into buying a story.)
Martial Artists must make the best writers.
2531815 Or, perhaps inspiration is merely just the drive to do something. If money lights enough of a fire under your ass to write it, I guess it counts.
My brain's not offering anything useful to add at the moment, but I signal-boosted this (both the blogpost and the comments). Really insightful stuff.
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One of the reasons I've kept my drafts of some of my stories is to see if I can figure out what it was that I did and changed; basically, if, after some years of writing, I can go back and look at my stuff, look at what I rewrote, and say "this got changed."
I think the question of how prolific people are and can be is a somewhat interesting one, though; SS&E is seen as being ridiculously prolific, and he really kind of is - comparing him to real world authors, SS&E writes a truly absurd amount of material, millions of words a year.
But... how many words does he write a day? To write a million words in a year, you don't even have to produce 3,000 words per day. And 3,000 words per day doesn't sound like all that much to me; that's eminently doable in 4 hours or so, and when I'm having a good day, I can do it in two. When I'm actually fully focused on writing prose, I kick out somewhere in the realm of 1-2k words/hour if I'm writing a single story, a bit less if I'm writing a bunch of short stories.
The problem I have, primarily, is twofold. One problem is laziness; I don't write every day. I really should, because I enjoy it, but somehow I manage to avoid doing so. The second is distractions; sitting down to write and then doing something else.
On October 7th of last year, I wrote 6,051 words of prose. On October 23rd, I wrote 4,340. On October 30th, I wrote 4,714; on October 31st, I wrote 5,662 (The Wraith of Ponyville, which was entirely written in a single day, is a first draft, so that's what my first drafts look like). On November 18th, I wrote 5,329 words, which was Temptation (which is much shorter than that; I wrote five different endings to that story, of which only two are published. One of the other endings is very nearly as long as Temptation itself is, as it was Applejack mirroring Rarity's scene. I didn't include it because it was repetitive). On April 15th of this year, I wrote 4,893 words. I've had numerous days where I've written north of 3,000 words in just a few hours; the latest was September 14th. I wrote four short stories in five hours on August 16th, three of those were written in three hours.
Can we even compare present-day production rates to those in the past, though? The computer makes writing a new revision much, much, much faster; not only can we type massively faster on a computer than writing by hand, but we can fix our errors far more simply than with a typewriter. And we can then produce a new revision quite quickly; word processors are insanely powerful devices, and those haven't really been widely used for all that long (only 40 years or so now) and modern, really nice ones haven't existed for half that (since the 1990s, really).
Is SS&E really a freak of nature, or is he just on the top end of what we can do with modern tools and technology if we wrote every day?
EDIT: Anyway, I ended up rambling a bit there. You were talking about first drafts. Blah.
Anyway, for me, sometimes a story comes out right the first time, and sometimes it doesn't. Crepes, for instance, had the entire final chapter rewritten, with only a bit at the start surviving from the first draft. Shotgun Wedding has seen over 20,000 words removed from the story - and while that includes material you haven't seen yet, that's still an enormous amount of material. Why? Because I've had to rewrite enormous amounts of stuff to make it funny.
The Best, my unpublished story which has been languishing for ages, has had an entire chapter removed from it - 4,500 words, gone. It wasn't even replaced with anything; it just didn't need to exist.
The Butterfly's Burden is exactly 10,000 words long according to Word. My tracking notes indicate that I have removed or rewritten 5,156 words out of that.
On the other hand, The Collected Poems of Maud Pie, only one poem was heavily revised after being written. The Wraith of Ponyville was a first draft. Abandoned Sanctuary was a first draft. Very little was altered in Better Lairs and Landscaping. The Stars Ascendant is mostly original. We Can't Turn Back Time didn't really get heavily revised either. I'm not sure if The Legend of Falling Rocks, Buffalo Brave was even edited.
On the other hand, Scaring Each Other is going to have more removed from it than ends up in the final story and Daring Do x Rosetta Stone OTP has had the first 4k words rewritten 3 times.
I noted previously that my most successful stories were all written in stupidly short amounts of time - The Collected Poems of Maud Pie, the first chapter of Shotgun Wedding, and The Stars Ascendant were all written in very short periods of time and had little changed in them. Why is this? Well, I think the real reason is that I knew exactly what I was doing with those when I wrote them, and I did it. The ideas weren't really terribly complicated, and I could just execute on them in one go. The first chapter of Shotgun Wedding was written in 45 minutes - I know this because I turned off Skype at the time to remove distractions and just write. I spent more time working on the cover art than I did writing the chapter which got the story featured.
This isn't to say that they're my best works, but they may be my most "pure" works. I think there's something of a line beyond which point your story becomes much more complicated, and thus less "pure", and thus requires more rewriting - everything I've written which is over 10,000 words long has had a considerable amount of material rewritten. Maybe that's the real cause - the longer you go, the less "pure" it can be.
Or maybe it is just because those stories were mostly written in a single sitting, and it is just really hard to write 10,000 words in one go.
Interesting discussion! Using martial arts metaphor was a neat touch, as it both anchors the process of writing (a rather abstract thing) to the utter physicality of fighting another person, and makes us look at the whole thing from a very different direction indeed.
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Bittersweet is my favorite RagingSemi work. It's brilliant. I didn't like I Wish I Might as much; it's a very good story as well, but somehow it didn't quite click with me the same way.
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The max I can do is about 500 words/hour. 2000 words/hour is 33 words/minute. I probably couldn't physically type faster than 45 words/minute for an entire hour if I were copying from a book. My hands would cramp up.
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Oh god I thought I was the only one. Like, I've come very close to 1k words/hour, at some points. Once or twice I might have even breached it, but I find that even concentrating, dedicated, no distractions, full of drive, 700 words is pretty much my upper limit, and 500 words is a good hour.
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Fallout: Equestria is like marmite: lay it on as thick as possible, hang those who talk of less.
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You are a mensch, as always. Wondered why I hadn't seen your signal boost already, then found out that I wasn't following you! Fixed that particular problem, needless to say.
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Watch this video of Genki Sudo at a mid-level BJJ comp and tell me your dick doesn't get hard:
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I swing between the two. Bittersweet for when I'm feeling low and need happiness, I Wish I Might when I'm feeling leaden and need motivation.
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I have... mixed feelings about this attitude.
On the one hand, I do get it. "Your friend can go out drinking the night before an exam, start revising on the bus to uni, and still get a first. You are not your friend." This is good advice. Same with a lot of martial arts stuff, come to think of it: Lyoto Machida can make shotokan karate work in the octagon. You are not Lyoto Machida. Just because lots of high-level grapplers at Abu Dahbi Combat Club are doing weird shit with X-guards and spider guards and twister side control doesn't mean that throwing a bunch of X-guard into your game will make you an awesome grappler: instead of being a grappler with a mediocre top game and a mediocre guard, you'll be a grappler with a mediocre top game and another mediocre guard.
In other words: Yes, there are prodigies who can take shortcuts. You are not one such prodigy.
...On the other hand, practice makes permanent.
If you constantly churn out substandard first drafts with the expectation that you'll clean them up later, you'll keep churning out substandard first drafts. I think this becomes a set pattern: A writer sets a low bar with her drafts, fixes them up considerably afterwards, and then finds that A) she becomes very good at fixing up drafts because she's getting lots of practice, B) she has no impetus to improve the first drafts because 'oh, it's all going to be crap anyway' and as a result C) the difference between the first drafts and edited drafts grows over time, and she sees rewrites as indispensible.
For this writer, it's true that rewriting massively improves her work, and that she likely couldn't get sold without it. What if she'd taken another route, though? What if alt-writer in the alt-universe had worked instead on improving the quality of first drafts, improving sentence structure and planning skills, tried to make each first draft better than the last first draft? The rewriter's work would arguably be more polished, but after each writer had given their story to a decent editor anyway? I think they'd end up with the same results, but the rewriter would take much more time.
Of course that's all conjecture. I need an experiment. Time to dig the old research methods textbooks out...
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See, that's nowhere near my physical limit on typing speed; physically I type at about 90 words per minute when I'm just typing out random text for some reason or other; it actually is fairly close to my copying speed, which is kind of weird, but I guess I get a lot more practice just writing stuff down randomly to reply to people than I do copying text, so maybe it makes sense. Prose is slower to construct because I have to alter my usual writing style a bit, whereas if I'm typing something like this it just kind of runs out of my brain onto the Internet. I strongly suspect that is why I overuse semicolons when I think about how other people think, because I think using semicolons.
This is why my posts are frequently so long and rambly; I just type and type and type and because typing has such a low cost to me, I can just barf out 500 words in five minutes and be okay with that. If I know what I want to say, I can type ridiculously fast.
Really, I'm not sure how or when my typing speed got so high; back when I was in late elementary school, my father offered me a dollar per word per minute I could type, and I managed to train myself up to 40 words per minute using Mavis Bacon. I did more typing practice in school using those silly little keyboard computer things where you copied from a book or the keyboard panel or whatever, but I've been able to touch type for the vast, vast majority of my life - more than 20 years now.
I started using computers more frequently in sixth grade, and by the beginning of high school I was using them very regularly to play games and to write stuff for school; I was somewhat infamous in school for writing reports which were vastly longer than what anyone else wrote. At one point, I wrote a 12 page long review of a book in French for French class and the teacher-in-training cried a little.
Just a little, though.
I once wrote a 40 page long thing about the history of dragons as a symbol in mythology. My original intent was to write not only about the history of dragons as a symbol, but also about how that symbol was used in the modern era and what that meant for it, but, alas, I realized that the thing was already really long even by my standards and stopped. So this isn't exactly new.
And that's ignoring what I used to do back in the day, writing out analysis and reviews of decks or D&D rules or whatever. I've written hundreds of thousands of words worth of analysis of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons.
I feel kind of sad that I've long since lost most of my high school material because I never thought to save it off my old hard drives, and now those computers are long gone.
But at least I still have my very long, line-item reviews of many D&D books.
Maybe that's where it came from. My many years of arguing with people on the Internet, talking about random things, and otherwise living on the computer finally have paid off!
As a side note, I have a blank keyboard. I didn't buy it blank; it had letters on it originally, Alas, after many years of suffering at my hands, the letter keys are all blank. There are little marks on many of the keys which look sort of like melted plastic. I'm sure they're really just scratch marks from my claws, though; I don't type that fast.
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For my own part, I joke to people that I type 100 words per minute and write 600 words per hour.
I can burst past that speed sometimes for short sprints, but over the course of a day or a week, that seems to be a hard cap for me. I do a lot of micro-revising as I'm getting words onto a page, and often have to stop and replay dialogue a few times in my head before I commit it, and nudge things in the direction that my mental outline tells me it needs to go.
Of course, consistently doing 600 words per hour would mean I could devote three hours per day to writing and keep up a NaNoWriMo pace 24/7. That doesn't happen. There's a lot of recharge time that goes into the batteries that 600 wph drains, and for me at least, the instant I start getting seriously into editing a "finished" draft, it destroys weeks at a stretch.
Maybe I need to do some editing drills. Unfortunately, everyone's time and effort gets put into how to train up your writing skill; I'm not even sure I've ever seen tips on editing your stuff. Where do you even start with that?
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In all fairness, that 90 words per minute is essentially how fast I can talk to people online; if I'm just communicating with someone over Skype or writing a response to them here, I can type at about 90 words per minute.
If I'm actually carefully composing what I'm writing, my speed drops to somewhere between half and a third of that. Not that my typing speed diminishes at all; that isn't how it works. It is more that I take time thinking about what I say - or more accurately, I type something out, and then revise it.
So for instance, my latest blog post - about patterns and memory - took me a bit under an hour to compose. Over the course of writing it I wrote about 3,000 words, but only 1,800 of them actually remained in the post itself when I was done. Though it isn't really a great example of polished writing, it wasn't just barfed out, either.
Of course, that's not counting the response to the Extra Credits video which could be argued to be the "first draft" version of it, or at least the inspiration for it, which also took place in that hour. Hm...
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Incidentally, another term for "ha ha, only serious" is "kidding on the square", which is a term I rather prefer.
I like you, Chuck.
Haven't read any of the comments here, but I enjoyed a lot of what you said. Personally, I think the two biggest elements you need to be a good writer is both technique and substance. All the talking in the world about sentences and structure and flow and word choice won't get you anywhere if you don't have good substance to begin with. Knowing what everything in the kitchen is and how to use it won't help you make a great meal if you're missing all the good foodstuffs. You'll just make a lot of empty noise.
2534785 What's the definition of words per minute? There must be some standard penalty for typos, but I can't find it anywhere.
I can type 90 WPM, but not without making mistakes.
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Specifically, science fiction.
I'm hopefully just misunderstanding you, but I see a big problem with your "don't redo first drafts" rule. What if the story idea I like is in the first draft? What then? Is that idea lost to me forever because I didn't get it right the first time?
I apologize for seeming confrontational, but "don't fix mistakes" makes me panic.
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No, that's a perfectly reasonable point, and in fact it's one I've butted heads with a few times.
If you have one (or many) good ideas buried in a terrible story, finish your terrible story, and then write a new story with the same ideas. Scrapping everything and writing it from the ground up is not the same as picking over a story until it's perfect.
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Doing it all over again's the preferable answer in this case.
I suppose people revise rather than redo because (to me) the later feels like all the previous words went to waste otherwise.
This was a fascinating blog post to read, and very helpful.
I'm struck by this idea because it's been my current strategy. I'm following Neil Gaiman's words: "No one is ever going to see your first draft."
I feel rather trapped in that mindset because it's the only thing I can think of to enable myself to jump over the hurdle of being paralyzed by fear. I find I don't write at all unless I can breach that fear barrier.
Then again, I've managed to publish one short, terrible story since I've taken that advice to heart, leaving over 50k words in my google docs for me to stew over because I'm too scared to edit it as well.
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Two things to note here:
1) Your story isn't as bad as you think it is. Go read a book you like, though not one with sublime prose like Wodehouse or Bradbury. Just pick a book you quite like in a genre you like. Subject the prose to the same level of scrutiny you are subjecting your own fics to. You'll realise 'wait, actually the prose here isn't amazing but it doesn't matter because the story is good.' and you'll chill out a little.
2) Editors, man. Like, they don't have to be the first resort, you can go back through your fic with a list of changes you want to make going in, or with a plot summary to make sure all the key ingredients for your plots and subplots are there. But get one. Get one and let them go through your fic and deal with the nitty bits. You will agonize over your sentences in a way that an editor will not, and this is not always a good thing.
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You have no idea how comforting this advice is. I have been trying to follow Stephen King's advice in "On Writing" where he said to only let someone read what you're writing when it's done. I've been avoiding sharing anything, even with a prereader, until I got to that step.
Seeing an opinion saying I can try the opposite is refreshing.
Thank you.
I'll see if my editor friend will agree to read over what I got.
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That King quote is good advice in some ways. It stops you turning into that guy who spends two years talking about the book he's going to write but never ever does. It stops you from annoying your friends every few days with two pages of scribble not connected to a proper story until they stop reading your stuff.
I would in fact say it's a good idea to finish what you start. Get the first draft done before anyone sees it, but get the first draft done. Even if it seems like a piece of crap halfway through, write that final paragraph and then sling it to your editor.
But if you've already got a finished (or few-page short) stories that you're not touching because the thought of going through them yourself paralyzes you? Screw King, get a damn editor and then ship the thing.
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The last thing I want to be is the "talk about writing a book" guy. That sounds awful, and I can see myself falling into that trap.
Now I'm rethinking what I should do, because the first draft isn't done. "On Writing" mentioned to not be tempted to share something incomplete...
I still think I'll let my friend take a look at my longest story though... a lot of story arcs are done, and I'm not quite sure where to take the story.
I'm only sitting on a few short ones that I should finish up, but those I think I know what to do before sending them to be edited.
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When I don't know where to take my story, the first thing I do is give a writer friend the gist of my story and then ask for advice. Banging your head against a mental wall for weeks on end is overrated. Then just finish the damn draft.