Writing Output—Is Size Important?

Zoë Sharp

I came to the conclusion years ago that I need to write faster. Actually, I should qualify that by saying, ‘faster without degenerating into rubbish’ because I’m sure I could rattle out thousands of words a day, if I wasn’t bothered about which words…

All I need are more words...

The quality of what I do is always uppermost in my mind, however. It’s the thing I worry about most (probably) as I write. I’ve heard all the advice that says you can fix a page but you can’t fix a blank page, but find this hard. Once I’ve written a scene, I find it incredibly difficult to pick that scene apart and slightly alter the slant of it. Far easier to point it in the right direction to start with. (In this case, the word ‘easier’ is used in its loosest sense—in the same way that it’s far easier to prevent the glaciers melting in the first place than it is to reverse global warming. You get the idea.)

The result of this is that I tend to manage around a thousand words on a good day when I’m in the midst of a book. I have writer friends who can apparently produce ten times that amount. And yes, amazingly, they are still my friends!

Some of them use dictation software to achieve this. I’ve tried this method, but my somewhat mongrel accent seems to utterly confuse it, plus the delay between words spoken and some form of them appearing on the screen is disconcerting. I find myself quickly distracted.

When I learned to touch-type they still had manual typewriters in college classrooms. This is back in the days when the word ‘carbon’ was followed by the word ‘copy’ rather than ‘footprint’ and Cut and Paste involved a printed page and a pair of scissors.

The result of this is that I’m a fast typist who doesn’t need to look at my hands while I do so. Indeed, there have been times when I’ve been typing at my keyboard while turned away having a conversation with someone else at the same time.

Also, when I’m working on a book I perhaps think in written words not spoken ones. I like to pick up a word, see how it feels, try it on for size, then maybe backspace and nudge the sentence in a slightly different direction instead. I self-edit as I go, so thundering through sentences on the grounds of knocking them into shape later goes right against the grain.

Plus, did I mention that I get distracted?

Ooh, look! Red squirrels!

I’ve tried reading writer self-help books that promise to get you up to 5000 words an hour by starting in five-minute timed stints of writing without doing anything else—no editing, researching, social media browsing, etc—and then working up. I shall persevere with this, as even 500 words an hour would be a big improvement.

I find it does help if I have a clear idea of where I’m going and what happens next in the story. I need the structure worked out in detail beforehand, and I also find I work better from pencil notes about the scene ahead. Even just the back-and-forth of the dialogue, which I can flesh out with narrative as I put the words on screen.

But sitting down and just winging it, with no clear idea of where the scene needs to go in order to move the story forwards, that doesn’t seem to get me anywhere on a regular basis. That doesn’t mean to say, of course, that there aren’t the odd occasions when inspiration strikes, leading to unexpected twists in the story. Sometimes, these even make it into the final draft.

Back when I was a motoring photojournalist, I remember watching motorsport and being told an old maxim about racing drivers. “You can tidy up speed, but you can’t speed up tidiness.”

You can tidy up speed...

If you are writer, which camp do you fall into? The ‘get it down as fast as possible and tidy it up later’ or the ‘self-edit and polish as you go’ method? What is a good word-count day for you? And to what do you attribute your output?

This week’s Word of the Week is enchiridion, which is a handbook or manual containing all the words on a particular subject. It comes from the Greek en-meaning within, and kheir hand.

Events

I have been invited to take part in Noir @ The Bar London ‘Chilled To The Marrow’, which takes place on Monday, October 22 from 7:00–10:30 p.m. (doors open at 6:00 p.m.) at The Urban Bar, 176 Whitechapel Road, E1 1BJ. The line-up is Susi Holliday, William Shaw, Mark Hill, Derek Farrell, Jay Stringer, JA Marley, Alex Caan, Barbara Nadel, Zoë Sharp, Liz (Elizabeth) Mundy, Caroline (Caz) Frear, Felicia Yap, and a Wildcard chosen on the night. It’s hosted by Nikki East.