Thanks for focusing on something that can trap a writer. I hear others talking about their daily quota and I cringe because I can't match them and I don't want to start hearing the word "should" in my head all day. Each day is different for me, some full of words and others a sea of possibles, impressions, a haze that will clear at some point.
And then what about having time off to gather your forces or just *rest*? We don't all work the same way with the same schedule. I've always told my students and writing clients that general advice from famous writers needs to be matched against what fits for them. Before finding your voice, sometimes you need to find your way of working, the schedule that makes sense for *you.*
I never subjected myself to a daily count. Except the 2 times I did NaNoWriMo, as a personal challenge, to see what I could come up with. It was more than a bit of strain on my personal life :)! There is so much that feeds a writer besides writing: looking at the world, reading books, commenting on stuff friends sent you because they want a cold eye opinion, talking to people, not to mention the side stuff writers do: proofreading, interacting with editors, querying (Ha!), keeping channels open on social media ... All these things that make you say, at a certain point: I ache to write now, which is the best time to get completely obsessed about it and then word counts certainly don't matter.
We're writing all the time when we are out in the world. Otto Rank said that was vital, and then equally vital was retreating from the world to create. It's in his classic Art and Artist.
I don't worry about my daily or weekly or monthly count. What matters is the immediate: have i polished the dialogue in the scene? Is the setting clear enough? Granular issues, in a way, and less burdensome than some "required" word count, which is tyrannical.
Thanks for this great reminder. I'm not a journalist, nor am I writing a book, I write for myself because I've always been called to do so and it turns out quite a few folks read what I write. I am working to be consistent in my writing but when I feel angsty about the requirement to do so I know I need to step away (not saying I'm always successful in doing this though) and regroup. When the reason I'm writing is not coming from deep inside, pulling me forward, I know I am off track. There are no word counts for this.
Stepping away and letting go can be powerful. I'm glad I have dogs who take me out of myself and that I also review books which focuses me on other people's work (even when it's not inspiring).
I agree that quality and relevance are more important than the number of words that someone generates per day or per week. Recently, a friend asked me to write an endorsement of his new book for children, and I spent a lot of time reading his book, writing drafts, revising drafts, and thinking about how I could improve my paragraph. All of the effort to write 127 words was worth it because my friend liked my endorsement and will use it for his picture book. Best wishes! Janet
Thanks! I've done the same when supplying a book blurb. I learned to revise revise revise when I was writing for a handful of newspapers as a book reviewer.
I also have journalism experience. I used to write drama, dance, and opera reviews for my local newspaper, the Kalamazoo Gazette. I had tight word limits, so every word had to be specific and add important information. I took notes during a performance and then wrote a draft, revised it, and e-mailed it to the newspaper. That was a real challenge! Best wishes! Janet
Primarily a poet, I have poet friends who marvel at my production. "You're always writing, Glenn!" I could fill a slim volume of verse every two or three years, sure. But finding a publisher, that's hard, and seeking publication doesn't feed me the way the writing does.
But writing every day? I don't do that. I have done the poem-a-day thing here and there, but I find the quality of lines declines as the days go by. If I stop and do other things, it's like a battery recharges, and the lines are good again. Or, at least, the pleasure, the energy comes back.
I did a long project called "Thousand," a prose poem epic. I wrote 100 words a day for a thousand days. I stuck to that. I only missed a handful of days over the 2 years 9 mos. The result is not commercial. Plot comes and goes; characters pop in, hang around a while, then disappear forever. But the friend who turned it into a book (he has long done small press projects) loved it and compares it to the Mahabharata. https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-1-100-Glenn-Ingersoll/dp/1727326571
As you can guess, I don't pay my bills from my writing. I seek publication to honor my poems. I've written them, I like them, they ought to be out there in the world.
That said, I remember Anthony Trollope. 2000 words a day, and if he finished a book halfway through the words for the day, he simply started a new book. John Steinbeck also had a daily word goal. But those goals were also part of a balanced life as well.
You're spot on. I joke that I write poetry and short prose because I don't have stamina, but even a poem can take years of living to collect its content. Roethke was known to mine his journals for the snippets that later became poems. Quantity over quality seems like a desire to be AI. Not my thing. I make my living elsewhere so my words can distill as needed.
In my college writing workshops and even in my MFA, we were never driven to produce, produce, produce. Yes, I have written and published a lot more essays and short stories in the last two years than usual, but that's due to a number of reasons: 1) putting aside a long WIP and energy turning elsewhere 2) being inspired by my father's decline and death 3) realizing that certain subjects like chronic migraines I'd never written about made good material 4) turning way inward because of relative isolation and discovering even more topics that demanded treatment.
A friend said, "You're a factory!" I said, "No, I'm just in the zone. That's not the same thing."
And speaking of how long a poem can take, my second novel took easily more than decade as I changed the setting more than once, the time period, and finally found the voice. I'm glad I did, since The Washington Post compared The German Money to Kafka, Phillip Roth, and John le Carré.
That feels like the problem with so much of America -- work, work, work. Not necessarily for the sake of the work or because one enjoys it but because your sense of self worth and value in the rest of society depends solely on that.
No, thanks. It's definitely something we do not miss now living mostly abroad.
I would love to live abroad in cities I love like Munich or Ghent, but I've been able to unhook from craziness about career (while maintaining it) by leaving New York. I live in Michigan and my friends are very varied but very few are writers and that's good for me because I don't need that. I need variety and calm to create, and have been more productive than usual during the pandemic.
Trollope also was quite fond of padding, especially the Parliament segments in the Pallister books.
I dunno about the time, because I'm starting to look very closely at that era as far as getting some guidance for modern-day work. I think we're drifting back to that era of serialization and all sorts of monetizing options for writing. Will it ever be enough that, say, the modern-day Louisa May Alcott might be able to contribute to the support of her family like the original Alcott did? Hard to say--but a look at Alcott's writing history is a very good thing to do right now, in my opinion. And digging around for histories of other 19th century serial writers....
Oh yeah and no I haven't--going to look them up. Thanks for the recommendation!
I see the trend toward the three volume novels happening over on Kindle Vella. There are readers who are very much into those. They tend to be somewhat anime-oriented, LitRPG, paranormal romance, or something of that ilk. There *is* a market for the looonng works.
Nods. There was a time when tracking the word count was necessary to get me into a productivity habit. I haven't formally tracked my word count for ages, because...I've discovered that the flow of a certain book is dependent upon how that book's characters unfold. Even if I'm writing a sequel or a new series in a previously created world, the drafting pace varies. And, as I've discovered, writing a far-future book is as worldbuilding-intense as an epic fantasy novel.
Great advice. I was flabbergasted when I joined a self-publishing group (mostly younger, newbie authors) and they were killing themselves cranking out thousands of words every single day. I decided then and there that I wouldn't play that game.
The Us is obsessed with product. It is product for profit, money. More is better. Go look in all the trash cans and dumpters of America. Take that special tour. I think there is now a company called The March of The Manure. Some of the dumpsters are so big they can house conferences for pundits only who wish to share their opinions and tedious columns of writing about how to make America grate. They sit on chairs or couches made of the finest Velveeeta cheese and make pronouncements that have all the profundity of a dead walrus.
You cannot wonder with an alarm clock. And American education models itself on the adult assembly line which is all about production. Every day miilions of children go through the lines, modulated by bells. Ive heard if you are a dreamer most dreamr hide and or disappear. TBC STAY TUNE. but to stay tune you may need to slow down. No, your kids do NOT. have to read over one hundred books this summer. And when you see your loved ones friends, and neighbors stumbling it may well be because of all "the things theyve carried". But perhaps i we fell and started our piles again ( no need to take your antipile medicine) we might more clearly SEE the pile and realize how much of it is either superflluous or overkill. Think about it. Also, this emphasis on writing every day is, pure and plain, INSANE. More on this tomorow when I tell you about that North Carolina nutcase Thomas Wolfe who spent a few minutes in my home of Brooklynn, went around chanting " I WROTETEN THOUSAAND WORDS TODAY I WROTE TEN THOUSAND WORDS TODAY ( his editor chanted too every day: I CUT NINE THOUSAND WORD TODAY{ and then Wolfe had the utter egotisn to write a little sob story ONLY THE DEAD KNOW BROOKLYN which many including myself feel highly insulted ( seemy upcoming story BUT ONLY THE LIVING APPRECIATE IT). TBC.
The United States has always been obssesed with PRODUCTION. How many, and with iit goes : HOW MUCH. The assembly line,- all about money. No matter if when sped up the assembly line might take a finger or a hand. How many cars came down the line; how many have been sold? In the sweatshops of New York City, LA, the factories on the border- work work work produce producee prllllnvff oduce
The model infects the schools , the educational assemvly line where bells separate the subjects. So a high school junior who has just read some raging speech from Heathcllfe hears the bell rises gathers her book bag, and her three minutes to go from English to Math, from the storms of Wuthering Heights smack into quadritic equations. Or the freshmen goes from his ninthgrade biology class about the healthy gentle ways to. treat th shorline and goes to Social Stuies and the entire period watche Band of Brothers about World World war one. NO TIME TO DIGEST ALL THE INFORMATION.
And then there is all lthe pressure,, starting at an absursdly early age to not only read, but read FAST and READ ALOT. Hundreds of libraries have summer reading that awardd prize to kids who read fifty or a hundred. Or how about the miseducated poets who brag about how many haikus they wrote the othe r day. Amount. peed. Production. It cant replace creativity, whimsy, vision, originality.. i cant replace a writer who falls into a zone and works on an eighteen page story for two weeks over 16 hours a day because SHEHE has been swept not AWAY, but swept DOWN IN THEN BELTED OUT TO THE CREATIVE STRATOSPHERE and finish with a story or poem that shimmers and makes the writer shiver. to be continued.
Thanks for focusing on something that can trap a writer. I hear others talking about their daily quota and I cringe because I can't match them and I don't want to start hearing the word "should" in my head all day. Each day is different for me, some full of words and others a sea of possibles, impressions, a haze that will clear at some point.
And then what about having time off to gather your forces or just *rest*? We don't all work the same way with the same schedule. I've always told my students and writing clients that general advice from famous writers needs to be matched against what fits for them. Before finding your voice, sometimes you need to find your way of working, the schedule that makes sense for *you.*
I never subjected myself to a daily count. Except the 2 times I did NaNoWriMo, as a personal challenge, to see what I could come up with. It was more than a bit of strain on my personal life :)! There is so much that feeds a writer besides writing: looking at the world, reading books, commenting on stuff friends sent you because they want a cold eye opinion, talking to people, not to mention the side stuff writers do: proofreading, interacting with editors, querying (Ha!), keeping channels open on social media ... All these things that make you say, at a certain point: I ache to write now, which is the best time to get completely obsessed about it and then word counts certainly don't matter.
We're writing all the time when we are out in the world. Otto Rank said that was vital, and then equally vital was retreating from the world to create. It's in his classic Art and Artist.
I don't worry about my daily or weekly or monthly count. What matters is the immediate: have i polished the dialogue in the scene? Is the setting clear enough? Granular issues, in a way, and less burdensome than some "required" word count, which is tyrannical.
Thanks,, Lev. You say it so well.
Thanks for this great reminder. I'm not a journalist, nor am I writing a book, I write for myself because I've always been called to do so and it turns out quite a few folks read what I write. I am working to be consistent in my writing but when I feel angsty about the requirement to do so I know I need to step away (not saying I'm always successful in doing this though) and regroup. When the reason I'm writing is not coming from deep inside, pulling me forward, I know I am off track. There are no word counts for this.
Stepping away and letting go can be powerful. I'm glad I have dogs who take me out of myself and that I also review books which focuses me on other people's work (even when it's not inspiring).
I agree that quality and relevance are more important than the number of words that someone generates per day or per week. Recently, a friend asked me to write an endorsement of his new book for children, and I spent a lot of time reading his book, writing drafts, revising drafts, and thinking about how I could improve my paragraph. All of the effort to write 127 words was worth it because my friend liked my endorsement and will use it for his picture book. Best wishes! Janet
Thanks! I've done the same when supplying a book blurb. I learned to revise revise revise when I was writing for a handful of newspapers as a book reviewer.
I also have journalism experience. I used to write drama, dance, and opera reviews for my local newspaper, the Kalamazoo Gazette. I had tight word limits, so every word had to be specific and add important information. I took notes during a performance and then wrote a draft, revised it, and e-mailed it to the newspaper. That was a real challenge! Best wishes! Janet
It's good training, isn't it? It taught me a lot about deadlines too.
Primarily a poet, I have poet friends who marvel at my production. "You're always writing, Glenn!" I could fill a slim volume of verse every two or three years, sure. But finding a publisher, that's hard, and seeking publication doesn't feed me the way the writing does.
But writing every day? I don't do that. I have done the poem-a-day thing here and there, but I find the quality of lines declines as the days go by. If I stop and do other things, it's like a battery recharges, and the lines are good again. Or, at least, the pleasure, the energy comes back.
I did a long project called "Thousand," a prose poem epic. I wrote 100 words a day for a thousand days. I stuck to that. I only missed a handful of days over the 2 years 9 mos. The result is not commercial. Plot comes and goes; characters pop in, hang around a while, then disappear forever. But the friend who turned it into a book (he has long done small press projects) loved it and compares it to the Mahabharata. https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-1-100-Glenn-Ingersoll/dp/1727326571
As you can guess, I don't pay my bills from my writing. I seek publication to honor my poems. I've written them, I like them, they ought to be out there in the world.
I write when I want to and need to, whether there's a contract or not. And I love to take time off. It fuels me to rest.
That said, I remember Anthony Trollope. 2000 words a day, and if he finished a book halfway through the words for the day, he simply started a new book. John Steinbeck also had a daily word goal. But those goals were also part of a balanced life as well.
I love Trollope, but not all his books were terrific, and also that was a very different time.
You're spot on. I joke that I write poetry and short prose because I don't have stamina, but even a poem can take years of living to collect its content. Roethke was known to mine his journals for the snippets that later became poems. Quantity over quality seems like a desire to be AI. Not my thing. I make my living elsewhere so my words can distill as needed.
In my college writing workshops and even in my MFA, we were never driven to produce, produce, produce. Yes, I have written and published a lot more essays and short stories in the last two years than usual, but that's due to a number of reasons: 1) putting aside a long WIP and energy turning elsewhere 2) being inspired by my father's decline and death 3) realizing that certain subjects like chronic migraines I'd never written about made good material 4) turning way inward because of relative isolation and discovering even more topics that demanded treatment.
A friend said, "You're a factory!" I said, "No, I'm just in the zone. That's not the same thing."
And speaking of how long a poem can take, my second novel took easily more than decade as I changed the setting more than once, the time period, and finally found the voice. I'm glad I did, since The Washington Post compared The German Money to Kafka, Phillip Roth, and John le Carré.
this comment is like a permanent mitzvah is such things exist ( and why not??)
You succinctly sum up the idiocy and give succor to the afflicted and the suckers assailed by the huorcksters who will keep on shucking away (oy vay).
You, me, and many others write the true fiction. The false fiction has been around since humanity emerged from that "gorge" in West Kenya.
Now I heard it all started- in Brooklyn. it's a hell of a story but Im not don with it
That feels like the problem with so much of America -- work, work, work. Not necessarily for the sake of the work or because one enjoys it but because your sense of self worth and value in the rest of society depends solely on that.
No, thanks. It's definitely something we do not miss now living mostly abroad.
I would love to live abroad in cities I love like Munich or Ghent, but I've been able to unhook from craziness about career (while maintaining it) by leaving New York. I live in Michigan and my friends are very varied but very few are writers and that's good for me because I don't need that. I need variety and calm to create, and have been more productive than usual during the pandemic.
Glad to hear it. And I very much enjoyed reading Dancing on Tisha B'Av many many years ago.
Thanks. As it happens, my next substack will be about that book. Hard to believe that was 27 books ago....
Trollope also was quite fond of padding, especially the Parliament segments in the Pallister books.
I dunno about the time, because I'm starting to look very closely at that era as far as getting some guidance for modern-day work. I think we're drifting back to that era of serialization and all sorts of monetizing options for writing. Will it ever be enough that, say, the modern-day Louisa May Alcott might be able to contribute to the support of her family like the original Alcott did? Hard to say--but a look at Alcott's writing history is a very good thing to do right now, in my opinion. And digging around for histories of other 19th century serial writers....
Remember how Wilde mocked the three-volume novels of that era in The Importance of Being Earnest?
BTW, have you read the Sensation Novels of Elizabeth Braddon? They are not humongously long and they are wonderful.
Oh yeah and no I haven't--going to look them up. Thanks for the recommendation!
I see the trend toward the three volume novels happening over on Kindle Vella. There are readers who are very much into those. They tend to be somewhat anime-oriented, LitRPG, paranormal romance, or something of that ilk. There *is* a market for the looonng works.
Nods. There was a time when tracking the word count was necessary to get me into a productivity habit. I haven't formally tracked my word count for ages, because...I've discovered that the flow of a certain book is dependent upon how that book's characters unfold. Even if I'm writing a sequel or a new series in a previously created world, the drafting pace varies. And, as I've discovered, writing a far-future book is as worldbuilding-intense as an epic fantasy novel.
Great advice. I was flabbergasted when I joined a self-publishing group (mostly younger, newbie authors) and they were killing themselves cranking out thousands of words every single day. I decided then and there that I wouldn't play that game.
The Us is obsessed with product. It is product for profit, money. More is better. Go look in all the trash cans and dumpters of America. Take that special tour. I think there is now a company called The March of The Manure. Some of the dumpsters are so big they can house conferences for pundits only who wish to share their opinions and tedious columns of writing about how to make America grate. They sit on chairs or couches made of the finest Velveeeta cheese and make pronouncements that have all the profundity of a dead walrus.
You cannot wonder with an alarm clock. And American education models itself on the adult assembly line which is all about production. Every day miilions of children go through the lines, modulated by bells. Ive heard if you are a dreamer most dreamr hide and or disappear. TBC STAY TUNE. but to stay tune you may need to slow down. No, your kids do NOT. have to read over one hundred books this summer. And when you see your loved ones friends, and neighbors stumbling it may well be because of all "the things theyve carried". But perhaps i we fell and started our piles again ( no need to take your antipile medicine) we might more clearly SEE the pile and realize how much of it is either superflluous or overkill. Think about it. Also, this emphasis on writing every day is, pure and plain, INSANE. More on this tomorow when I tell you about that North Carolina nutcase Thomas Wolfe who spent a few minutes in my home of Brooklynn, went around chanting " I WROTETEN THOUSAAND WORDS TODAY I WROTE TEN THOUSAND WORDS TODAY ( his editor chanted too every day: I CUT NINE THOUSAND WORD TODAY{ and then Wolfe had the utter egotisn to write a little sob story ONLY THE DEAD KNOW BROOKLYN which many including myself feel highly insulted ( seemy upcoming story BUT ONLY THE LIVING APPRECIATE IT). TBC.
The United States has always been obssesed with PRODUCTION. How many, and with iit goes : HOW MUCH. The assembly line,- all about money. No matter if when sped up the assembly line might take a finger or a hand. How many cars came down the line; how many have been sold? In the sweatshops of New York City, LA, the factories on the border- work work work produce producee prllllnvff oduce
The model infects the schools , the educational assemvly line where bells separate the subjects. So a high school junior who has just read some raging speech from Heathcllfe hears the bell rises gathers her book bag, and her three minutes to go from English to Math, from the storms of Wuthering Heights smack into quadritic equations. Or the freshmen goes from his ninthgrade biology class about the healthy gentle ways to. treat th shorline and goes to Social Stuies and the entire period watche Band of Brothers about World World war one. NO TIME TO DIGEST ALL THE INFORMATION.
And then there is all lthe pressure,, starting at an absursdly early age to not only read, but read FAST and READ ALOT. Hundreds of libraries have summer reading that awardd prize to kids who read fifty or a hundred. Or how about the miseducated poets who brag about how many haikus they wrote the othe r day. Amount. peed. Production. It cant replace creativity, whimsy, vision, originality.. i cant replace a writer who falls into a zone and works on an eighteen page story for two weeks over 16 hours a day because SHEHE has been swept not AWAY, but swept DOWN IN THEN BELTED OUT TO THE CREATIVE STRATOSPHERE and finish with a story or poem that shimmers and makes the writer shiver. to be continued.