New Book, Old Habits
It's been a while since I've written here about actual writing stuff and since I'm nearly halfway through writing my fourth book attempt, it may be time to spout off a bit. I say "attempt" because in my SERIOUS period, I completed a book, then wrote over sixty thousand words of a second (longer than a Gold Medal from the sixties) but the mystery came together much quicker than I anticipated. All that would have been left would have been twenty thousand words of bad guy apprehension and I didn't think that it would be THAT interesting. So I bagged it.
Then there was a long and unplanned delay as we moved to Atlanta and I switched jobs to one that liked to work you over 60 hours a week if possible. Most of us figured that after fifty some the taxes that were deducted from the paycheck made this ludicrous, but still, it was enough to kill my writing time. Bad excuse, but I let it happen.
After a few aborted starts, I got back to it in a big way while commuting to a job in Texas. Unfortunately I ended it at forty six thousand words, the failure being a successful lesson. While I had clear pictures of my protagonist and antagonist, I began writing the thing without a good idea of the circumstances that would put them in opposition. It turns out I had only a weak notion of what the villain wanted and at 46k words, I couldn't fake it any more.
So I've taken everything I've learned in the past and before beginning the current book, I had crafted a series of questions that needed to be answered before pen would meet paper. Even on this I cheated though I was mostly successful.
I began by writing longhand, as normal, but then something goofy happened. When I transcribed the opening scene onto the computer, I kept writing on the computer. Yuch, blech, icky. But I've kept it up and it seems to be working, and I'm taken aback by it.
I prefer to write in longhand because when I write on the computer, the writing just is never as good. My explanation is that since it takes so much longer to write with a pen, by the time I get to the end of a long sentence, my mind has been working on it and it may have changed from its initial conception. This is definitely true of a paragraph: writing it out by hand gives it the opportunity to be digested and revised, a sort of in-line editing process, during the actual movement of the pen across the paper.
Not so with a computer where the first thought is what gets typed. Maybe an answer would be to learn how to type slower but that seems counter-productive. I also think it's foolish to depend on electricity to write, or to have to write where my computer is set up and not in a notebook at the beach or in the woods or lying down in the yard or pulled over in the car.
But so far this one's been done on the computer since the first scene and while I have ambiguous feelings about it, it seems to be working. It may be because I did all the background work before I began the actual book writing. I may just know where I want to go that much better. It could be that this book is written in the first person (my first time) and that it is inherently somewhat quicker to write: the language is limited to that of your character's, the descriptions are limited to things he'd notice, and so on. It also could be the fact that I still can't focus or concentrate as well as I could prior to being afflicted with Chronic Fatigue System.
Or, of course, it could be parts of all of these. I do know that it's not uncommon for me to write two thousand words during the day on the computer and while that chews up page count, I find it disconcerting to not sweat as much over the prose as much as I'm accustomed. On the other hand, I think about the pulpsters and paperback original, paid by the word writers of the thirties through sixties. They'd be laughing at my concerns and say I should be writing three thousand words a day, book after book.
The problem will come next month when we take a two week trip to Wisconsin. I imagine I'll have to write on paper because setting up a computer environment won't be feasible as we bounce from relative to relative, staying who knows where each night. We'll see. Maybe after the trip I'll stay with the pen and ink which I still think is the way I want to write in the future, especially with books NOT written in the first person.
Then there was a long and unplanned delay as we moved to Atlanta and I switched jobs to one that liked to work you over 60 hours a week if possible. Most of us figured that after fifty some the taxes that were deducted from the paycheck made this ludicrous, but still, it was enough to kill my writing time. Bad excuse, but I let it happen.
After a few aborted starts, I got back to it in a big way while commuting to a job in Texas. Unfortunately I ended it at forty six thousand words, the failure being a successful lesson. While I had clear pictures of my protagonist and antagonist, I began writing the thing without a good idea of the circumstances that would put them in opposition. It turns out I had only a weak notion of what the villain wanted and at 46k words, I couldn't fake it any more.
So I've taken everything I've learned in the past and before beginning the current book, I had crafted a series of questions that needed to be answered before pen would meet paper. Even on this I cheated though I was mostly successful.
I began by writing longhand, as normal, but then something goofy happened. When I transcribed the opening scene onto the computer, I kept writing on the computer. Yuch, blech, icky. But I've kept it up and it seems to be working, and I'm taken aback by it.
I prefer to write in longhand because when I write on the computer, the writing just is never as good. My explanation is that since it takes so much longer to write with a pen, by the time I get to the end of a long sentence, my mind has been working on it and it may have changed from its initial conception. This is definitely true of a paragraph: writing it out by hand gives it the opportunity to be digested and revised, a sort of in-line editing process, during the actual movement of the pen across the paper.
Not so with a computer where the first thought is what gets typed. Maybe an answer would be to learn how to type slower but that seems counter-productive. I also think it's foolish to depend on electricity to write, or to have to write where my computer is set up and not in a notebook at the beach or in the woods or lying down in the yard or pulled over in the car.
But so far this one's been done on the computer since the first scene and while I have ambiguous feelings about it, it seems to be working. It may be because I did all the background work before I began the actual book writing. I may just know where I want to go that much better. It could be that this book is written in the first person (my first time) and that it is inherently somewhat quicker to write: the language is limited to that of your character's, the descriptions are limited to things he'd notice, and so on. It also could be the fact that I still can't focus or concentrate as well as I could prior to being afflicted with Chronic Fatigue System.
Or, of course, it could be parts of all of these. I do know that it's not uncommon for me to write two thousand words during the day on the computer and while that chews up page count, I find it disconcerting to not sweat as much over the prose as much as I'm accustomed. On the other hand, I think about the pulpsters and paperback original, paid by the word writers of the thirties through sixties. They'd be laughing at my concerns and say I should be writing three thousand words a day, book after book.
The problem will come next month when we take a two week trip to Wisconsin. I imagine I'll have to write on paper because setting up a computer environment won't be feasible as we bounce from relative to relative, staying who knows where each night. We'll see. Maybe after the trip I'll stay with the pen and ink which I still think is the way I want to write in the future, especially with books NOT written in the first person.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 7:53 AM
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