Category Archives: Writing

Thoughts on writing, both general thoughts and relevant to anything I might be hacking away at, or thinking of thinking of hacking away at…

Approaching Perihelion [writing]

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I’ve had this looming over me for about three days now, but a confluence of long days at the office, going to see Man of Steel with Eldest Daughter, and general fatherly and work duties have kept me from acting on it.

I’m 300 words from the 50k mark in W.I.P.

Is that significant? Probably not to you, jaded reader, but for me that’s the the start of the downward slope. My original estimate had this novel clocking around 80k, not because I seriously though that’s how long it would be, but because that’s how long the average minimal length novel is. Coming in under that was not acceptable – past it, fine.

I could be wrong, but I expect I’ll get closer to 100k or more, which is great. It also breaks my self imposed timeline for completion, but that’s ok, the important part right now is to finish the novel, not meet some arbitrary deadline that no one expects.

So why do those 300 words feel so daunting?

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Weekend Writing Update (a thank you letter)

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In the last week, I’ve written 3,678 words – a number that isn’t too shabby until you take into account that 3,667 of them have been in the last two days.

It isn’t all doom and gloom. Thanks to a stupid human trick[1], my word count spreadsheet is looking pretty nifty, and now I can at least visually see any trends in my writing chain. But that’s not why I’m back top of things. For that, I want to say thanks to my wife and a friend from work.

Last blog post, I was all kinds of concerned. I was staring at my novel’s elephant in the room – dragons – and lamenting the fact that they were nothing more than a McGuffin, pulled out when convenient but not used nearly enough in the story to warrant them being there. Two people took the time the next day to seek me out, and I they both deserve thanks.

First, Mr. Nameless at work (you know who you are, but since I didn’t say I’d do this, I don’t want to out you as a reader of inane blogs). Your words of wisdom about tropes were, if not spot on, still the words that helped me get out of my funk, get over myself, and just get back to telling the story. Thank you, hoss.

Second, my wife. If anyone will ever deserve a book dedication, it’s this woman who sat down before I left for work and told me what I needed to do to fix the story, gave me case examples for reference material, and knows me so well and completely because she could do all of this without having read a word of what I’ve written so far. Talent? Maybe. Or super power deserving a cape and special boots. Certainly proof of psychic mojo.

So I’m almost back on track. Technically still working against a negative number according to one of the formula in my spreadsheet, but all in all right on schedule for being done with the novel by the end of the summer. Other formula suggest that I am coasting my way towards victory at this point and that the worst of it is over. I scoff and laugh at their foolishness, the silly google spreadsheet formula that they are, but then my wife would have to give me another pep talk, and I’m not sure I want to waste that this soon. I have a limited number of pep talks from her in a year, I’d hate to have used one on formulae.

 

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1. Google spreadsheets let you set a conditional background. In my case, I’ve set the conditions of 0 words as red, between 1 and 500 as yellow, between 500 and 2000 as green, and anything greater than 2000 as blue (that’s “yowzer” blue to you). Stupid automated visual tricks will save me some day.

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Dealing with the McGuffin riding the elephant in the room

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English: Elephant

English: Elephant (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writing progress this week has slowed for the first time in two weeks, and I know why. It’s not just work being taxing on my time, that’s nothing new. The problem is that I found an elephant in the room, and there’s a McGuffin riding it sidesaddle.

It’s the damned dragons.

My current effort of fiction, the Dragon Queen’s Bride, has dragons in some really key scenes. They’re part of how one protagonist is catalyzed from village girl to object of interest. There are some incredible scenes written around the relationship between Ness and her dragon. Scenes that caught my breath when I wrote them, they were so exciting. The conclusion of the novel, which has been written since before I started, is a touching scene between Ness and her dragon.

What’s the problem?

The problem is that the dragons in this novel only appear when its convenient to the plot. For most of the adventures, they’re absent. I can justify it a few times, but by and large, as it exists now, I have no reason for the dragons to be missing from most of the book other than the simple fact that when I close my eyes and watch the story, they aren’t part of it. They aren’t part of the intrigues or betrayals, they aren’t part of the landscape, they just aren’t there.

And that’s a problem. I recognize my options are pretty simple – either I find a way to work them in, or I drop them all together. From a fiction writing perspective, I actually favor the latter – except then I lose my “inciting incident,” I lose my poignant conclusion, and I lose the whole justification for the title of the book. Then it just becomes the Common Evil Sorceress’ Bride, and who wants to read such a droll book?

Something tells me this is what I blocked out of my memory when I dropped this project last year. I don’t want to do that again, but I haven’t seen where the paint I used to get myself in this corner has dried up enough yet that I can move.

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Words per diem – what do the pros average?

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This weekend, I was struck by a simple idea – using the power of twitter to be able to whisper to multiple authors at once, could I get a consensus on what they’re average word count is?

Why?

Because I’m curious. Because like most unpublished writers, I flip-flop on the importance of word count. Is it important? Is it superfluous? On the one hand, I firmly believe tracking it is just a psychological trick to get us to write more and has no real value otherwise. As a realist, I recognize that that power is intoxicating.

Who?

I asked 30 science-fiction and fantasy authors with a presence on twitter. Of those, just over 20 got back to me, and nearly 20 had answers (a few didn’t comment, and one made me do math homework to get answer between 0 and 130k). Who I asked is a matter of public record, and I may include their names at the end of this piece. I’ve decided, though, to make you do the extra work of figuring out who said what to me (also all public knowledge), namely because the intention here was not to pit one author against another, but to instead get an idea of whether there was a normalization to the data.

Well, was there? Did everyone say the same thing?

First, the graph, sans names (because this wasn’t about comparing individuals, and because that graph was hard to read). The blue line represents the minimum words averaged in a day, the red the max. Most authors reported back the same figure for both, while some told me they had a bare minimum, and what they tended to average (hence the gaps).

Words Per Diem

 

And the same graph sorted against min/max input (slightly easier to read)

Per Diem Words (sorted)

Surprisingly, no and yes. While about half of them fell in the solidly ~2000 words a day, many had variances. Some write less at the start of a project, or on days where they work their other bill paying jobs. At some point, just over half average 2000 words a day, but not for the entire cycle of the project.

What really surprised me was some of the lower numbers came from authors I’d consider prolific (more than a book published per calendar year). As one author told me, “I probably average only 1200 words a day [...] but I work hard on making them right…”

And that’s the take away for me

High word counts are great, but low word counts aren’t bad if they’re the right words. I knew going into this that the question of word counts is highly subjective and doesn’t really reflect anything about the work that’s produced. Still, it was interesting to see the consistency among so many writers on what a solid word count for a day looked like when they’re working on a project.

Who was kind enough to humor me with at least a response?

These are in alphabetical order of their twitter handle, because it was the quickest way to sort them ;) This isn’t the complete list of who I asked, just the list of the folks that responded.

  • @author_sullivan – Michael J. Sullivan, author of the fantasy series the Riyria Revelations (released) and Riyria Chronicles (coming soon), as well as the upcoming Science Fiction book Hollow World
  • @bbeaulieu – Brad Beaulieu, author of the fantasy series The Lays of Anuskaya
  • @brentweeks – Brent Weeks, fantasy author of the Night Angel series and Lightbringer books
  • @BryanThomasS – Bryan Thomas Schmidt, science fiction author of the Saga of Davi Rhii
  • @catrambo – Cat Rambo, author of EVERYTHING, usually in short story length
  • @chuckwendig – Chuck Wendig, author of the (fantasy? science fiction? horror? something urban?) Blue Blazes, along with a bunch of other sassy writings
  • @gailcarriger – Gail Carriger, our fantasy guide to steampunk vampire mashings in the Parasol Protectorate books
  • @garygibsonsf – Gary Gibson, science fiction author of the Shoal trilogy, currently working on the Final Days books
  • @gryphoness – Erin Hoffman, author of the fantasy trilogy of the Chaos Knight
  • @happynerdjohn – John Marco, fantasy author, his most recent book The Forever Knight was reviewed somewhere local
  • @jamietr – Jamie Todd Rubin – possibly one of the most approachable, talkative science fiction writers I know (possibly)
  • @jay_lake – Jay Lake – I’d hate to think I need to give Mr. Lake an introduction, but just in case, let me know
  • @LordGrimdark – Joe Abercrombie, the King of Grimdark some might say, fantasy author of the The First Law trilogy, Best Served Cold, Heroes, and Red Country
  • @Mark__Lawrence – Mark Lawrence, he that mangled my mind by answering with a math problem, author of the fantasy books The Prince of Thorns and King of Thorns, and the upcoming Emperor of Thorns
  • @MykeCole – Myke Cole, modern fantasy author of the Control Point series
  • @nealasher – Neal Asher, science fiction author probably best known for his Polity books, who took the time to shoot back a number from Crete
  • @patrick_swenson – Patrick Swenson, editor at Fairwood Press and author of a Tor book slated for next year (2014)
  • @SamSykesSwears – Sam Sykes, fantasy author of the Tome of the Undergates trilogy from Pyr
  • @SteveUmstead – Steve Umstead, science fiction author of the Gabriel trilogy
  • @tobiasbuckell – Tobias Buckell, author of mostly science fiction novels, he’s always been kind, even when I ask for inane things for him to autograph

Thanks to everyone that participated in this mini poll, I appreciate you taking the time!

 

[UPDATE 2013-06-05] Corrected a few mistakes an attribution – sorry if this causes the post to reappear in your feeds :)

The Halfway to Nowhere Mark [writing]

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Yesterday, I hit the 50% mark on my current Epically Fantasy project. There can be no celebrating, no rejoicing, because it is, of course, all a lie. I’ve no idea if I’ve written 50% or not, and it eats at me.

What I’ve actually done is written 40k (41k as of this morning) of a projected 80k novel. Is it really going to be 80k? I have no idea, because despite all my efforts I can’t seem to get a cohesive outline out of my brain. I see the story, I know the flow, the ebbs and peaks and such, but I’ve yet to successfully pin down enough to be able to say “yes, these are the definitive sequence of events that shall be this story!” And without that, I find it hard to estimate how long each section will be, so the whole is really out of the question.

So why did I chose 80k as my arbitrary number? Because its doable. While on the low end of fantasy book lengths (which average closer to 100-120k), it’s still considered a reasonable length. That’s about 300 pages, a page length I’ve really learned to appreciate in recent years. As I look at what I’ve written so far, and what’s still left to write, I think I might exceed that mark, but I should at least make it. In other words, the number doesn’t really represent anything at this point except for an ideal. It would be nice if it did, and with a better organized brain I could probably make it, but the reality is that that 50% marker is just a self motivating joke.

And yet.

And yet it sure is nice to see that progress indicator start to turn from red and orange to yellow and green, to see that percent done inch closer to 100.

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