(Copied from the Book of Faces -Jack)
Some writerly advice about production goals.
In the Tower of Silence post somebody asked me what my record word count was for one day.
16,000.
However, that was brutal and I do not recommend it. That was to wrap of Son of the Black Sword, which I though I had more time to work on, but the deadline got moved up because we had a wonderful opportunity for it to be on the cover of a major wholesale catalog. Which was an opportunity we’d be dumb to pass up, but which meant we needed eARCs by a much earlier date. That ended up being like a 26 hour day.
If you work like that very often you will burn out and get stupid.
A normal week while writing a book my ideal goal is 10k.
Which means averaging 2k per week day, assuming I’m taking weekends off, which I usually do now.
It’s never actually 2k though, because editing is slower than writing. So it’s usually more like 3k, 1k, 4k , 2k, 0 because that’s just how life is sometimes, 2k, etc.
And don’t get worked up about it, because then you just get into your head and screw yourself up. If you didn’t produce yesterday like you wanted it does no good to fixate on that today. Just get back to work.
A fantastic day for me is when I get in the zone and write like 5k.
When you are in that zone, where the words are just flowing, just run with it as long as you can.
Don’t do that thing where you stay up doing the all nighter (unless you’ve got no choice!) and keep writing after your brain is toast, because usually what happens the next day when you are coherent is you end up throwing that away no matter what.
As a rule of thumb I almost never write after midnight or 1 AM, because at the time it’ll make sense and the next day it’s going to look like trash.
My record for a book is 1 month, but that was 60k for the non-fiction gun book, which is a topic I’ve been pondering on for three decades, and I also had a bunch of blog posts that got cannibalized to serve as starting points for different chapters.
Normally books take me between 3 and 6 months. Sometimes life kicks you in the balls and that turns to 9 months or a year. Whatever. Don’t cry about it in public, that just makes you look piteous and pity doesn’t sell books. Just get back to work.
I’m comfy at 2k a day, but I also have to edit far less than when I was inexperienced. Back then I’d write more in a day, but then spend twice as long editing. So find that comfy pace that maximizes your good productivity.
Day jobs suck. If you’ve still got one all the same principles apply, just adjust the times and word counts according to what you do have available. When I started writing I owned my own business and was working crazy stupid hours. Just take the time you do have and make the best of it and keep grinding until its done. Most of us don’t quit the day job until we’ve written a bunch of books and have a sufficiently selling backlist to pay the bills. That’s normal.
If you can only write one day a week, do that. Get the most out of it. If you write a mere 1000 words a week you can write a pretty big novel in 2 years. If you write shorter stuff like YA you can do a novel in a year at that, and 1k a week is nothing. You can hit that at lunch breaks.
Don’t get all worked up over stuff like NaNoWriMo. That’s great that it shows people what they can do, but don’t get upset if you can’t write 50k in a month. I do this full time, have 12 years experience, and I don’t usually hit that. It’s great if you do. But really, for working professionals every month is NaNo.
Production goals will vary depending on what market you write for. Indy guys who are doing the 6 short books a year thing are going to set different production goals than a trad guy like me who knows his release dates a year in advance.
Also don’t beat yourself up over perfection. You are writing the best thing that you can in the time allotted. Writers fall into that eternal turd polishing trap, and spend 8 years working on their first book, sell it, then panic and crash because the market/publisher wants the second book tomorrow and they don’t know how to do that.
On behalf of those boycotting the Zucker-Book, Thanks for sharing Jack.
It brings to mind Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art. Its a great read on being productive and sticking to it. Apparently, it is a popular entrepreneur book even though he has said he was only talking about works of a creative.
On a related note, Kevin J Anderson and Martin L Shoemaker made an e-book entitled “On Being a Dictator” explaining how they dictate books. It was a good read, and as someone with a 30 minutes commute it helped me be more creative (though limits my podcasting times now).
I was going to try that on my commute and tried an app on my phone and it was unworkable. There is too much noise in the car. Same problem with trying to record for a you tube video or podcast and yet people do it all the time.
What do you use for a recording and mic and stuff?
What is a basic set up?
My commute and car is very quiet, so I wouldn’t base it on me. That said, otter.ai seems best I’ve used this far in apps.
Speech notes was terrible for me.
It’s all about putting your butt in the seat and being productive, day after day.
Know yourself.
If a break of a day causes you to fall off the wagon, don’t give yourself breaks.
My goal in general has become to average 1,500 words a day blended between writing, refining, and editing. Like the post said, some of these are more productive on a words per day basis than others. I wrote three novels last year, my annual word count coming in at just over 400,000. That was the first year I tried writing nonfiction as an author at a “full-time” pace. This year, I’ve logged 400,000 words already (averaging about 1,600 a day). When adjusting for vacation and days off, I’m actually at about 2,400 per writing day, which led to me already having written another three books so far this year. I clocked 95,720 words in my best month, with 33,035 for my most productive week and 11,156 for my highest day. The problem I’m probably going to run into now is that by the time I’ve got one of the six books I’ve written so far published, I’ll have at least eight or nine books ready behind that one.
In terms of words written while editing, I’m actually a fairly quick editor, but if I add everything I discard and everything I add over the course of two full edits per book, it takes me almost 200,000 words raw to end up with a novel of about 150,000-160,000 words in the end. All of this is for urban fantasy fiction. When writing non-fiction in my professional life, I can easily crank out about 5,000 words a day, but that’s on topics that I’ve studied and performed for a living over the last twenty-five years, and a lot of it is just groaning about things the new guys and gals don’t even have enough experience to conceptualize. My word logging spreadsheet is massive, but it’s a fun way to nerd out about productivity and kick myself in the ass when I take too many days off in a row.
One thing I’ve found that helps me keep my word count up is using speech to text when I’m driving, lifting weights, hiking, or sometimes even jogging (the motorcycle’s too loud to do it then). I can easily put down 500-1000 words on an idea when I’m doing other stuff and not have to try and remember that all an hour later and sit there for two hours while I tap it all out and debate whether or not I got it all down.
~Hal
What do you generally do when you’ve only got parts of a story but not really a whole thing yet? Sort of when you’ve got characters and a partly functional world, but aren’t quite sure how things work.
Do you just start writing scenes that may or may not mean anything until a story starts showing up or what?
Write out what you have. Is it the final battle with the enemy? Cool! Start there and then figure out what led to it.
I’m not Larry (obviously), but what I try to do is just write what I can write, whatever that is and whenever it comes to me. Of the six novels I’ve completed, two of those I wrote at the same time, going back and forth between the two when a scene for one or the other hit me. I write everything down. For the rough draft of the book I’m editing now, I’ve removed 78,000 words already, and added almost 95,000. Nothing is a total retcon, it’s all just turning the initial collection of words into far better things, which wouldn’t have ever been possible if I didn’t just write the initial scenes down in the first place. Even if you have four or five drafts in the hopper, some of your writing will invariably be editing something else when you realize you crafted a stupid idea or wrote a scene where one of your characters is totally out of character, write that all down too. If you’re super-fragmented in how you write, it might help to organize it in Microsoft One Note (or one of the open source alternatives). Good luck!
Yes, I do this all the time. I don’t recommend it because keeping track of all that stuff is demanding, but that’s how I do it. I don’t know where things are going, I just write the scene and see what happens.
Don’t know what happens next? Go and see what some other character is doing today. Maybe it’ll be part of the bigger picture, maybe they’re just shopping. But maybe they meet someone interesting at the store… It’s had to say.
This is a very wrong way to write books. 6 books in, going through #7 now, I can tell you it’s super duper wrong and you should do what Larry does. ~:D
I think what happened was, between merging three worlds and shifting the time period/setting, I managed to lose the villian. I don’t know what he’s actually doing to be villianous, and had not spent enough time thinking through his motives to understand why he was doing what he was doing, and not yet enough time of the current setting to understand how he could be a bad guy.
(World setting shifted from a high fantasy/technocratic setting to, essentially a a space western setting. Cool, but not exactly a world where money-laundering through art and luxury trade is even necessary.)
I’d been digging around on how sophisticated villiany works in an 1800’s tech level, but what I think I really needed to do first was get to grips with why the villian is a villian. From that, then follows what he does.
Some of the best villains aren’t villains in their own heads. What is he doing that others might see as villainous, but that he thinks is right and necessary? Or, if he’s totally the mustache twirling, ‘I’m the Bad Guy’ sort of villain, why did he choose that route? Just start asking questions about them. Eventually something will click and ideas will start to flow.
Yes, the ones where the antagonist has genuine strong reasons can be both epic and tragic.
This one, he is an absolute sociopath, but I’m thinking it was built in. He and one of the protagonists are both leftover monsters from the losing side in a nasty little war, and I’m thinking the last great order they got was to burn it all down. And each character has reacted to it in essentially opposite ways.
Which does mean I get to play with the “not so different” trope in some fun ways.
Now to figure out exactly how he is trying to “burn it all down” and what form that takes. I’m thinking corruption of the institutions to show everyone is secretly monsters too?
Knowing WHY people are doing what they’re doing is, to me, very important.
I have a character who spends a lot of her time checking her equipment, making sure she has backups of everything, always knows where the exits are, always has a plan for when everything turns to sh1t. There are several reasons in her past why she does all those things, and when you know the history her behavior is perfectly sensible. But to a newcomer, she’s nuts.
It is necessary to understand the Bad Guy’s motivation and probable goals. The reader doesn’t have to be told those things, but -you-, the author, have to know what’s in it for Mr. Bad Guy to be doing the bad things. They don’t have to be -sane- reasons, or good ones, but there needs to be a reason. Art does not resemble life in this way. ~:D
Speaking as a writer who still has a day-job, I can affirm that 2k per day is a good clip, and that sometimes it will be more and less, because editing and rewriting intervenes, or real life makes demands on one’s time.
The advice can be summed up nicely by saying “back to work.”
I third the “if you have a day-job, be realistic.” I seem to average between 500-2000 words/day if my day job is running as usual. Weekends perhaps more, but not always. It all adds up, and your pace is your pace. Some books and stories also move faster than to others, because of style or language or balancing world-building with “All The Neat Things!”
Speaking as a writer, I don’t write like Larry. I do things pretty wrong, according to most people. For instance, I don’t even know how many words I do in a day. I never kept track.
Having said that, this is the best writing advice I’ve seen in some time. “Just get back to work.”
Yes. Write down the words. It can’t be a book unless you write it down. Slow or fast makes no difference. Just because I don’t keep track doesn’t mean I slack off, I still have to write it down.
You get freaked out by word-counts and deadlines? Ignore that stuff and write down the book. Deadlines work for you? Then use them as you write down the book. It is all good.