This thread on Reddit (Is it better to churn out 3000 bad words a day, or 1000 good words a day) got me thinking about the speed of writing a first draft.

What seems indisputable is that you must maintain forward momentum. Endless tinkering, editing and rewriting in the middle of the first draft leads to certain stagnancy and, most likely, an abandoned manuscript. But chucking down whatever comes into your head for thousands of words at a time can be equally problematic.

I’d like to sing the praises of slowness, if you’ll permit me. By slowness, I mean around 500 words a day, or even less.

Slowness is sustainable

Even on tough days, when you are tired, harassed, pressed for time, you should be able to find a few hundred words. The same is not true for a few thousand. Slowness lets you meet your targets 7 days a week without exhausting yourself.

Slowness gives you time to think, to be immersed in the book

If you did 3000 words a day, you’d have most of a first draft written in a month. To me, that doesn’t seem long enough to have a novel gestating in your mind. You’ve got to live with a novel-in-progress for a long time, let it steep inside your head, to get to the deeper places that give sustenance to good writing.

This touches again on the idea of a ‘good’ 1000 words vs a ‘bad’ 3000 words. For me, a ‘good’ piece of first draft writing for me is not perfect – editing is inevitable. What it means is it is, roughly, the right idea in the right place in the book; in need of polishing, but fundamentally well placed, the beginnings of something really good. ‘Bad’ first draft writing either needs to be cut or almost entirely rewritten. It’s a bit better than not having written anything at all, but not by much.

You don’t necessarily get to a good idea by writing the first thing that comes to mind and moving straight on. Often, you need to think of dozens of different possibilities for each sentence that you write before coming up with something that is beginning to be good. If you always write without thinking, at a furious speed, you may just be skimming along the surface of your thoughts, never achieving depth.

Slowness means that you approach problems…well, slowly

You that fluttery feeling of terror when you’re coming up to a scene, a thousand words ahead, that you don’t know how to write? Going slow gives you time to figure out what to do. Often, a scene that I have no idea how to write on Monday goes miraculously smoothly on Friday. Because I’ve been thinking about it all week, because I haven’t smashed into it at 3000 words a day, I’ve had time to solve the problems before I get there.

Slowness is not that slow

500 words a day doesn’t sound like much. But that’s 3500 words a week. That’s 14000 words a month. That’s two mid sized novels a year. Not bad for just 500 words a day, eh?

P.S. Quite by accident (or by subliminal association) I pinched the title of a book for this blog! In Praise of Slowness. May well be worth checking out for ideas about slowing down…

I should be focused on the more important things – it was a great event, interesting discussions, lovely to meet the other writers, very good to talk to those who came and bought the book etc. But two days after the fact, there are two things I can’t get over…

One – The gift bag you get for appearing was both awesome and crazy.

Contents:

1x Nice bottle of Cava. Thank you very much, don’t mind if I do…

1x Bar of posh chocolate. So far so good.

1x Very handsome folio edition of Zuleika Dobson. I never say no to a pretty book.

1x Very Short Introduction to Terrorism. What?

12x Chakra tea bags. Huh…

1x Bar of fancy soap…what are you trying to say about the average writer’s hygiene? (To be fair, you’re probably right to be suspicious.)

Two

I need to practise signing books more, I don’t have a sexy signature yet. Off to my room now to do it like Shakespeare in Love…

Just sayin’.

Well, look what the postman brought yesterday…

Mind you, as I was out in the Peak, he left it in the recycling bin for me to collect. Let’s hope that’s not an omen…

The principles are simple. Writing time is between breakfast and lunch, and is usually two or three hours a day. Ten until one is the usual slot, with modifications for late or early starts. In those hours, I must write no less than five hundred words, and no more than one thousand.

Both the time and the amount are quite crucial. If I haven’t written by eleven, I start to get very nervous. I will need to eat in an hour or so, for I cannot write on an empty stomach, and I do not trust that I will have the discipline to sit down to write both before and after lunch. I only have courage enough to write in one continuous session per day. So if I do not write by eleven, I will not write until after lunch, and the great chasm of the wasted morning looms in my mind for the rest of the day and makes it very difficult to be productive. On the other hand, I don’t like to start to early. If the day’s writing is done by ten, the rest of the day is a bit too big and intimidating, the wait before I can write again too long to be comfortable. (The obvious answer, do more writing, seems impossible.)

Graham Greene used to write exactly five hundred words a day, but I’m not so precise. Sometimes I’ll let myself finish early if I conclude a chapter or a section. The important thing is that there must be something new. Obviously, there will be five hundred new words, but that’s not quite what I mean. Most of those will be sentences or paragraphs that have been thought out beforehand, and require mere finishing. But there must be something that has appeared unplanned out of this writing session, spontaneous and true. Once I’ve got that – it’s usually just a sentence, though is sometimes as much as a paragraph – I know that I’ve done a good day’s work. A single new idea is enough. Keep producing one of those a day, so the theory goes, and the book will get done, sooner or later. Probably later. But it will get done.

I’m quite superstitious about this amount, on both the upper and lower ends of the spectrum. When the writing goes fast, it frightens me. Usually, the word count is there to drag some semblance of productivity out of me, but sometimes it serves to put the brakes on. The advantage of working slowly is that one approaches problems at a less than glacial pace, gives the noble captain plenty of time to find a good away around them. It is also important to go slowly in order to conserve energy. It is a job, and you don’t get weekends off, or holidays of any kind until the book is done.

Of course, you’re still working when you’re not working. The book is always with you, your mind soaked in it like some sort of psychotropic fluid. Often, you’ll return to write in the morning to discover you’ve worked out the thornier problems of your narrative whilst baking bread or doing the washing up. Each days writing is like the uncoiling of some great creative spring – the rest of the day is spent coiling it up again.

Writing is strange business, and writers are strange people. And no time in writing is odder, at no time in writing are you any weirder, than the middle of a first draft.

The beginning is fun. The end offers satisfaction or, at least, relief. In the middle you must hold the thing in your head at all times, an unfinished mess of ideas. Every sentence becomes immensely complex, requiring a dozen different calculations of narrative and character. Everything is begun and nothing is resolved. It is constantly threatening to come to pieces – only your concentrated will and imagination are able to keep it together.

There is little solace away from the book. Talking to people is very difficult. Every day functions like cooking and cleaning become meaningless. Other recreations do not affect you, unless they are extremely physical, like climbing, or sex. The world does not make a great deal of sense, has very little importance, because it is not your world. Your world is in your head. You can only seem to communicate by writing, though music becomes very important, because no matter how much you write, words are not helping. You are going, in a quite controlled and deliberate way, a little insane.

It is strange time, but not an unhappy one. How can you be unhappy when you are ceasing to exist, becoming, for a few months, little more than a machine that eats and sleeps and produces a novel? You are confident that you will finish, because that is the only way you will be free of the thing you have created. You know you are working hard, that your mind is at full capacity, so you can have confidence the book is as good as you can make it.

And some day, in a few months, perhaps, you will finish write the last sentence of the first draft. The book is nowhere near being finished. The real work will be about to begin. But, at least, the strangest and most difficult part will be over. You will be able to let the story go, because it will exists outside your head. You will begin to live again.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Letters of Note is a marvellous corner of the internet. Perhaps especially so for writers, when it regularly throws up gems like this Fitzgerald letter, written in response to an aspiring novelist.

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories “In Our Time” went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In “This Side of Paradise” I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is “nice” is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the “works.” You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

He captures the sense that I have had so many times on reading people’s work (and indeed my own), but have never quite found the words to express. When I find that my own writing is wanting, it is usually because I have not raised the personal stakes enough, that I have not found the courage to pay that high price of admission.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspirational. James M. Cain

This is a dangerous thing to say. Perhaps my hubris will come back to haunt me. But I don’t believe in writer’s block.

Or, if not a full atheist of the condition, I am at least a skeptical agnostic of the God of Blocks. I can only speak for myself, and I am a writer of reasonably straightforward narrative prose. I’m willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to my brothers and sisters in Modernism and the more experimental branches of literary fiction, and to my cousins of poetry and playwriting, of course, for their witchcraft is strange and mysterious to me. Perhaps for other, better, writers it does exist. Perhaps my lack of blockage is proof positive of my status as a hack.

But I think it is mostly used by aspiring writers who don’t actually want to write. It’s a good excuse to throw oneself onto a sofa, flamboyantly crying “I’m blocked, I’m blocked!”. I know all too well that when you are starting out, you’ll do anything to live the life of the writer, and if you can achieve this without actually writing then so much the better. Writing is hard, time consuming, and often boring. It takes years to get any good, years more to write anything worth publishing. The temptation to get out of this hard work by attending spoken word events, writers groups, literary festivals and above all by convincing yourself that you are blocked is very strong.

Now, I cannot deny that there have been times, many times, when I have sat down and been defeated at the keys. There are things which can stop a writer writing, but they are not writer’s block as it is traditionally imagined – the complete failure of creativity, the inability to think of a single thing to write. They fall into three broad categories: fear, exhaustion, and catastrophe.

Fear

This is the most problematic, at first. The petrifying fear of the blank page, the blinking cursor. The terror of writing the wrong thing, of writing something unpardonably, embarrassingly bad. In truth, this never entirely goes away, but the seasoned writer develops strategies to deal with it.

Write every day and set up habits, so that you may numb fear with routine. Plan thoroughly and read widely, so that you know where you’re going and why you’re going there. Above all, give yourself permission to write badly. The paralysis of fear weakens when one discovers how much work is done in editing and redrafting, how much of the first draft is revised and discarded.

When you begin, you will write terribly. This does not matter. Later on, you’ll still write terribly. This matters even less. You get better at writing by writing. You advance your project by writing. Write your 20 or 200 or 2000 words for the day. Write them terribly. You will always advance by writing something, no matter how bad it is and no matter how slight your progress. Every day that you don’t write, you grow weaker. That is what you should fear. Be afraid of not writing. Never be afraid of writing.

Exhaustion

To write, one needs time and space, and the mental, physical, and nervous energy to make use of this time and space. If any of these things are lacking, writing can be difficult, or even impossible.

But the problem is not on the page. What needs to be done is to restructure the life so that more resource can be directed towards the writing. Sometimes these changes are minor. Get up an hour earlier. Drink less. Eat better. Get some exercise. Sometimes they are moderate to major. Go part time at work, move to a less expensive city, leave your failing relationship, take a sledgehammer to your wireless router or TV.

Sometimes you can make the changes in a week, sometimes it takes years to get to a position where you have enough resource to write. But if you’re consistently too tired to write, something needs to be done about it. Not enough of your time and energy are free to throw at the writing. Solve your problems off the page, then you can get to solving them on the page.

Catastrophe

Very rarely, the writer may be halted by catastrophe. This is not a catastrophe in the personal, physical, or romantic sense. This falls under exhaustion, for personal difficulties, severe illness or relationship disasters are powerful sappers of time and energy that will put you out of the game for a while. By catastrophe, I mean a catastrophe on the page.

This can’t be a garden variety difficult chapter, or a character who stubbornly refuses to come into view, or a cluster of malformed, hopelessly clumsy sentences that you can’t seem to fix. These can all be written around or edited later on. We’re talking about a serious stylistic, structural, or thematic problem that simply cannot be written through. You’re several tens of thousands of words in, and think that you’ve made a fundamental error in the planning and execution of the book.

You’re allowed to take a few weeks off in this case, so long as you spend it planning and reading, taking action. Maybe you have to chuck your draft out and start again. Maybe a retreat, replanning and rewriting of a few chapters will give you something that intensive redrafting may salvage. But the process is the same. Act, work, and keep at it. Don’t stare at the blank page and wish that you were dead. Do something.

When you’re writing a novel, there’s just so much stuff to get to. Forgetting all ideas of stylistic brilliance, thematic significance, six figure advances and lifetime legacies. Just putting together a novel requires a lot of work, and not all of it will be very inspiring. There will be 70,000 words or more in your book. Surely you can find a few dozen or a few hundred of them today, in temporary, wobbly first draft form?

Surely there is something that can be done?

A few phone snaps from a perfect Autumn day at Gardoms. Great climbing, magic place.

At first the book has no substance. A single idea with no body to it, given existence only through your imagination. Simply holding it in your mind takes a great force of will. It is a fragile thing, and a single stray thought might be enough to dispatch it entirely.

The more you write, the more tangible it begins, yet even on completing the first draft, the second, the third, the fourth, it is still lacking. It begins to take shape, but it is not corporeal yet. It is like some kind of eldritch monster from the fiction of Mieville or Lovecraft, that exists only partly in this world. Its twitching tentacles are visible, but transparent, ineffable. It is struggling to claw its way through. It wants to become real.

The publishing contract brings it someway towards reality, as if it were some kind of lightning spouting steampunk contraption calling to the beast from its own dimension. The first round of the advance comes through, the cover art appears, and these too help give it substance. But it is not there yet. Its form is still in flux, and you still do not quite believe.

It is the final round of edits that truly does it. When the words themselves are on the verge of becoming fixed forever, that is when the book, at last, feels real. A terrifying feeling – if the beast is born misshapen, there is no longer anything to be done about it. But also a wonderful sense of completion, of having built something from nothing but thought and will.

Soon it will live, and go whatever way it will. It does not matter what happens then. All that matters is that it exists, that your mind is freed from the strain of holding it together. That you are free to dream another dream.