11/10/06: Plugging

[davidlevine]

Word count: 2951 | Since last entry: 829

I keep plugging away. Ten thousand words in a month seems doable for me but I'm giving up an awful lot of sleep to maintain this pace. I wonder how some people can write thousands of words a day, even with a day job. I think that perhaps I am editing too much as I go. On the other hand, this technique seems to work for me.

I talked with my agent today. He's gotten several requests to see the novel so it's going out to two different publishers at once (agents can do this, if they let everyone know it's happening). I hope that this will encourage one or both of the publishers to feel they have to act before the other snaps it up.

I also got a nice email from the slushmaster at Realms of Fantasy saying that he's passing the unicorn story (remember the unicorn story?) up to Shawna. He also said that the days of waiting 6-12 months for a response are long gone. We'll see.

One more tidbit of writing news before I fall over: I talked with Gordon Van Gelder at World Fantasy about when "Titanium Mike" is likely to be published. He'd said a while ago that it might be in the January issue, but then he'd had to retract that, and I asked him what had happened. He explained that my story is 15 pages long, and he'd planned to run it in the January issue, but then he sold one more page of ads, so he ran another story that was 14 pages long instead. (Or perhaps it was the other way around.) It's very informative to see how much influence these random commercial factors have on the makeup of an issue, even when you have a magazine that's owned by its editor, who can theoretically do whatever he wants. So if you're wondering why there were two alien kitten stories in one issue, or why one issue is heavy on the SF and another on the F, the answer might be as simple as that.

Comments

[kvaadk.livejournal.com]

"I wonder how some people can write thousands of words a day, even with a day job."

Since you asked ...
Okay, you didn't ask, you wondered aloud -- or at least wondered in type...
Anyway, assuming you are interested:

I work a full time day job and usually average in the neighborhood of 10,000 words a week. This includes slow days like Tuesday and Sunday, which are filled with real-life events that keep me in the 500-word range, and Saturdays when I routinely stream 2,500 words. I'm trying to push my average up to 14,000 a week -- if only because 2,000/day makes my math easier when estimating project times.

These word counts reflect the fact I edit as I write. My word counts are always words kept at the end of the day -- usually about two-thirds of the words I actually type. Some days I have negative word counts because I've thrown out everything I'd written over the last few days and started over.

My production style is called "cycling" -- but I'm not sure by whom. "Cycling" means if I come up with a neat idea on page 47 and realize it needs to be set up better, I stop mid-sentence and go back to pages 4, 12, and 19 to insert appropriate foreshadowing, then bounce back to page 47 and resume. (Conversely, if I realize on page 47 that a subplot is stupid, I stop mid-sentence and go back to pages 4, 12, and 19 to excise any evidence it ever existed.) By cycling I seldom have to revise the story once it's finished. I suspect cycling is an artifact of how my mind organizes information rather than a skill I developed. (In fact, I remember having "cycling" described at a writing workshop and being shocked to discover everyone didn't write that way.)

Also, I don't stop while writing. If I do not know the name of a place or if I have not named a character or if I am not sure of a fact, I don't slow down to think about it. I type "aaaaa" or "bbbbb" and keep going. Later, when I know who I've written about, I decide if she's Lola or Elspeth or Buck and do a search/replace. (Do NOT hit "replace all" because you may have forgotten and used the same string of letters for two things.)

I've met writers who can't write about characters they haven't named, to which I reply "um." I don't understand -- which again speaks to how my mind works. I usually have a rough idea of a character's name going in, but I'm never sure until I've seen what they do -- and I often rename after the fact. For example, I wrote Wolf Hunters with a major character named "Marten" because she was sly and quick. Toward the end of the novel, I realized the character's defining trait was her fluid ability to improvise creatively within strict parameters -- her real name was "Jazz."

I average four to five hours of sleep a night and routinely take a half-hour nap at lunch time -- usually in my car, parked under a shady tree behind the sandwich shop I frequent.

[davidlevine]

Your writing process sounds a lot like mine, except that every day is a Tuesday. I rarely manage to find more than an hour or an hour and a half for writing per day, even on weekends. But I will go back and drop in foreshadowing or what have you, so that a finished draft is essentially in publishable shape (except for any unrecognized structural problems such as poor pacing or lack of character motivation, which is why I use critique, as described in a previous post).

The 4-5 hours of sleep a night is key. I really need at least 7 hours of sleep to be happy.

As far as naming characters, I think I'm about halfway between you and your friends who can't write about a character with no name. Whenever I need to introduce a new character (or place or species) I will stop -- sometimes for quite a long time -- and think about what their name should be. Which is not to say I don't go back and rename a character as you did with Marten/Jazz, sometimes several times. I've sometimes changed a character name very late in the writing process, and then get confused when people say what they think about that character because I still think of them as having the original name.

[sallytuppence.livejournal.com]

Huh! I never heard a term for it before, but that's how I do it: cycling. I'd always called it recursive writing.

David, I can do 1000 words a day or more on the weekends, but never during the week. Full-time job and two little kids make that difficult (though not impossible if I'm on a roll and my husband has time to pick up the slack).

I'm really interested in agents' submissions practices and how agents decide on how/where to market books. My agent has sent my MS to ten (!) editors, all at the same time, and has given them a deadline. (If the novel gets ten rejections all at once it's going to kill me.) I'm not sure if this is standard practice when submitting to the childrens/YA imprints of mainstream publishers. Genre submissions seem to be really different, yes?

[(Anonymous)]

This is cool! Cycling is exactly how I write, even including the putting in [NAME] if I haven't thought up a character's name or a place name yet.

[sallytuppence.livejournal.com]

Stupid LJ.

That anonymous was me.