Writing Faster

August 11, 2011 11:36 AM

A writer in Slate examines the scientific literature for clues that will help him to write faster.
posted by chrchr (69 comments total)

It's called amphetamine.
posted by gagglezoomer at 11:43 AM on August 11, 2011 [5 favorites]

It's called practice.
posted by Ardiril at 11:44 AM on August 11, 2011

Others are "Mozartians"—cough, cough—who have been known to "delay drafting for lengthy periods of time in order to allow for extensive reflection and planning."

COLLEGE: YEAR ONE:
"Oh god. Oh god. This paper is due tomorrow. I need to never do this again. I need to hunker down. Oh god. There's no way anyone can get through college writing every paper the night before. This isn't going to work forever."

COLLEGE: YEAR FOUR I GRADUATED, EVENTUALLY, HAVING SPENT THE LAST THREE AS AN ENGLISH MAJOR:
"Son a bitch -- it worked!"

This may, of course, reflect more on the college than it does on my ability.
posted by griphus at 11:45 AM on August 11, 2011 [18 favorites]

IBM Model M keyboard. Better'n cocaine, as there will be fewer typos.
posted by Slap*Happy at 11:45 AM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

Is there a named law stating that any comment lauding one's own ability to write must and will contain a typo or grammatical error?
posted by griphus at 11:49 AM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

t's clld skppng ll th vwls.
posted by googly at 11:51 AM on August 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

A perfect lesson in spewing 1100 words when a deadline looms and you have no better ideas for a column.
posted by Ardiril at 11:52 AM on August 11, 2011 [6 favorites]

It's not Speed.

It's panic AND speed.
posted by The Whelk at 11:53 AM on August 11, 2011 [4 favorites]

Is there a named law stating that any comment lauding one's own ability to write must and will contain a typo or grammatical error?

There's Murphry's law.
posted by longsleeves at 11:58 AM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

Neither Speed nor Crank movie franchises seem to have involved much practice.
posted by Sys Rq at 12:02 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

As Robert Asprin said, "I am not a slow writer. I am not a fast writer. I am a half-fast writer."
posted by darksasami at 12:03 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

IBM Model M keyboard

Until the roommate who can't sleep because you are typing on it uses it to beat you to death.
posted by localroger at 12:04 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

(Could a mod delete the #p2 from the URL?)
posted by dhartung at 12:10 PM on August 11, 2011

ts*,dr

*slow
posted by Fizz at 12:10 PM on August 11, 2011

It's all about the subconscious; that has to have been busy with the words. Because if it has been, then it becomes a matter of sitting down and type down what's in your head.

Or, as Norman Mailer wrote in The Spooky Art:

[…] in the early years of writing, you do force it, and what happens, of course, is equal to blowback. From its point of view the unconscious has done its job. It’s damned if it’s going to give you any more right now. If you insist, flatness of affect will be your reward—nothingness, the dread antagonist. It’s there. One of the most painful elements in the act of writing is to live so much of the day with little but that. It is why many talented men and women do a good book or two, then stop. To deal on a daily basis with nothingness is vitiating. [139]

In other words: think first. Don't expect miracles if you don't.
posted by ijsbrand at 12:12 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

Step one: Unplug from the Internet.

Step two: Write in the quiet for four hours.

Step three: Profit!
posted by jscalzi at 12:13 PM on August 11, 2011 [12 favorites]

The longer I've been at it, the slower I find myself writing. Does this save me come re-writing, editing etc? Maybe but I still do a shitload of that. The end product just ends up better than it used to be.
posted by philip-random at 12:14 PM on August 11, 2011

I used to break things up this way; say you've got a 1000-word essay. Your intro and conclusion, that's roughly 100 words each, leaving 800. Come up with 4-6 points supporting your thesis and spend one paragraph each on them; that's 150-200 words per point/paragraph. Plug a few quotes in and before you know it you're back to drinking!

Easier said than done, I know, but plowing through a six-page university essay in a couple of hours and getting a B+ was the main talent God saw fit to endow me with.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:15 PM on August 11, 2011 [6 favorites]

Fine, I'll do it:

"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."
-AJ Liebling
posted by villanelles at dawn at 12:18 PM on August 11, 2011 [12 favorites]

"I used to break things up this way" - The tried-and-true soap-opera script.
posted by Ardiril at 12:28 PM on August 11, 2011

Anything you can write, I can write faster
I can write anything faster than you.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:28 PM on August 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

Yes I can.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:28 PM on August 11, 2011 [7 favorites]

No, you can't.
posted by nevercalm at 12:30 PM on August 11, 2011 [6 favorites]

> The tried-and-true soap-opera script.

Yep, it was a formula all right.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:31 PM on August 11, 2011

There's Murphry's law.

You meen Muphry's Law?
posted by Wordwoman at 12:35 PM on August 11, 2011 [7 favorites]

Wait! I am picturing an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"...

(Sorry, df.)
posted by Ardiril at 12:35 PM on August 11, 2011

I wonder if those NaNoWriMo novels I've done count toward the 10,000 hour mark. I mean, it is practice, and it's a way of getting used to long-form plotting and pacing, but it also doesn't seem like actual writing. I mean, it's fun.
posted by MrVisible at 12:38 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

The key, I think (and this is coming from someone who still can't practice what he preaches) is to selectively give a damn. When you're starting something, and every morning when you sit down to write, you do give a damn. It matters if you can put your butt in the chair and start typing. But once you are writing you have to stop giving a damn. Just write for the amount of time or the number of words you've already decided on, and then stop. Don't even read over what you've done. The actual words don't matter so much, at first. Later there will be time for editing and polishing, but the most important thing when you're writing that first draft is to sit down and meet your self imposed deadline every day. Then, when the days and words start piling up, you'll get better at what you're doing and (hopefully) the doing of it will get easier.
posted by Kevin Street at 12:41 PM on August 11, 2011

I average a ratio of three minutes of productive writing for every ten minutes spent staring out the window or rocking back and forth on the floor.

Plus, I try to never write alone.
posted by The Whelk at 12:49 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

What I want is something like WriteMonkey (discussed previously on the Blue) except that completely takes over your computer in such a way that will survive reboot or ctrl+alt+del - anything - until you write XXX number of words. It also needs to clear the clipboard when it starts, or needs to disable pasting, so that you can't cheat by copying a large piece of text before starting the program. A dictionary would be required, so that you can't just start hitting random keys to make 'words', and a grammar check engine would be nice, to make sure you're not just entering words randomly or repeating the same sentences over and over like Jack in The Shining. Finally, it needs to store your credit card numbers, so that if you run over X hours, it will start making random etsy purchases.
posted by zylocomotion at 12:49 PM on August 11, 2011 [10 favorites]

Alllllomost of those things can be accomplished by having someone in the room and a policy of only writing first drafts in long hand.

I will admit I have done the Jack Torrence thing more than once to make it look like I was writing.
posted by The Whelk at 12:51 PM on August 11, 2011

I think Someone in the Room would be a great name for it.
posted by zylocomotion at 12:56 PM on August 11, 2011

I tried writing with a partner once. (I've tried everything at one time or another.) We were doing separate stories, and it was a peer pressure thing where neither one of us could wimp out by stopping before the predetermined finish. That was brutal. Omg, it was like bathing in acid for two hours! Then we'd unwind by playing a game of cards. But with each meeting the writing time would get shorter, until eventually we gave up on the writing altogether and just played cards. I think having a partner can be a good thing for some people, but if you both have the same bad habits the faults can be magnified.
posted by Kevin Street at 1:02 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

My first real job after earning a bachelor's in Creative Writing was as a copywriter for a small marketing firm. I wasn't thrilled about it, but I already knew that I'd never be a famous novelist.

It only took a few months until I came to hate the job. My bosses used a mishmash of ridiculous marketingese and corporatespeak in every conversation with coworkers and clients. Despite being a small firm with only small and medium-sized clients, they were true believers (this was in 2008, when everyone wanted to be leaders in social media marketing).

On a day that I was feeling particularly rotten, I was given an assignment to write copy for a new client's website. Instead of doing any kind of research on the client and their industry, I decided to just write what I thought was a parody of all marketing and advertising copy. I used every awful buzzword that I, as a student of serious writing, hated. I also tried to throw in as many marketing cliches I could think of ("when you want it done right," "we work smarter," "finally, a company that cares," etc.)

My boss loved it. So did the client.

After that I became the most productive copywriter. I simply treated every assignment as if I was writing a parody. I became even more bitter. Other copywriters would ask me what my secret was, and I'd mumble something about practicing and absorbing other marketing copy. But that was a lie. I was really driven by rage and disdain. Now that I have some distance from that job, I'd also add a good amount of arrogance to that productivity cocktail.

Anyways, I'm not in marketing anymore, and I'm a a lot happier because of it. But that was my secret for writing fast: rage, disdain and arrogance.
posted by mcmile at 1:09 PM on August 11, 2011 [49 favorites]

I would have been sincerely tempted to make up corporate buzzwords and lingo just to see if management would eat it up, assuming that it was new and not wanting to be caught off the bleeding edge:

"We smart harder."
"You'll never fall off the canoe with us."
"Who says you can't get blood from a ham?"
posted by griphus at 1:22 PM on August 11, 2011 [13 favorites]

Oh mcmile, I know some writers for a certain NYC publication with a ...distinct house style that do just that, try to make the most parodic article they can think of.

And then they drink.

( I have sometimes gone with , well what's the lamest idea ever for a cartoon? And then do it and it is always the one that gets sold )
posted by The Whelk at 1:28 PM on August 11, 2011

Shakespeare wrote a lot in a short time and look what happened to him.
posted by Postroad at 1:38 PM on August 11, 2011

He turned into Francis Bacon?
posted by joost de vries at 1:42 PM on August 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

metafilter: rage, disdain and arrogance.
posted by localroger at 1:43 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

Yes, I will admit that knowing I'm getting paid for my deathless prose does a lot to motivate me to actually write it. :D
posted by Lynsey at 1:54 PM on August 11, 2011

Lynsey is an ink-stained wretch, an ink-stained wretch, an ink-stained wretch...
posted by Cranberry at 2:01 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

One night last fall, I was in the grips of an especially bad case of night-before-the-deadline brain freeze. It was a one-page throwaway assignment for a 200 level Writing in Economics course. The prompt was maddeningly general: "Write a realistic memo to some specific group of people about a specific issue, real or made up." After about 4 hours of thrashing around for an idea, I had a revelation: who needs a topic?

I. B. Fictional & Associates
To: All Employees
From: John Doe-Smith, Director of Policy
Date: November 18, 2010
Subject: Guideline for Writing Memos

It has come to our attention that many employees have become frustrated with the number of unnecessary all-hands memos being posted on the staff mailing list. In the interest of raising the quality of communication within our company, the rest of the administration and I have put together a guideline for composing a great memorandum. Here are some general rules of thumb:

• Start with a clear purpose. Don’t write as if your memo were some sort of assignment for a writing class, or you’re likely to come up with a tortured premise that is difficult to sustain for the length of a whole memo.
• Even if you do feel such an obligation, please, do think of some legitimate topic to write on! Don’t make a lazy move like going “meta” and writing a memo on the topic of writing memos. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and no one will give you any credit for it.
• Never include any content just to fill space, such as adding a third bullet point in a list “just to make a solid three.”

I hope these rules will give you a sense of how the memo format is meant to be used at our company.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

John Doe-Smith
Director of Policy
I. B. Fictional and Associates

I got a check plus.
posted by abcde at 2:49 PM on August 11, 2011 [18 favorites]

I read this article yesterday whilst putting off writing my dissertation.
posted by Put the kettle on at 3:12 PM on August 11, 2011

I wrote a 240 page thesis/dissertation in 6 days. Chapter 18 involved using an exacto knife and postit notes to violate the integrity of the page. This was in 1993. fun times. I did 30 minute naps every 4 to 6 hours. I still like what I wrote but I never got the PhD.
posted by yesster at 3:24 PM on August 11, 2011

I never got the PhD.

Why not?
posted by shivohum at 3:49 PM on August 11, 2011

German. Failed 4 times.
posted by yesster at 4:11 PM on August 11, 2011

I got a check plus.

Reminds me of Foods 12, an easy credit course where they theoretically taught us (all guys) how to do things like bake bread from scratch. I would generally get high, show up and fuck around. Then one day, the teacher (Mrs Williams as I recall) threw a quiz at us. I had no clue, and I was stoned. The second or third question was something along the lines of, "When is a garnish required?". Fuck it, I decided and answered it as if the question was "When is a varnish required?". It was a detailed answer that made a point of differentiating between varnishes and stains (I had been paying attention in Woodwork). This set the tone for the rest of the quiz. I intentionally got all the questions wrong, but I answered them with verve and precise detail.

Mrs Williams pulled me aside later and said it made her laugh, so she passed me and then politely requested that I stop fucking around so much in her class.
posted by philip-random at 4:24 PM on August 11, 2011 [7 favorites]

philip-random: Nice. In my case, it wasn't an "I hate this class, so here's some bullshit" move. I don't like to give people a hard time, and the risk isn't worth it. The assignment was more about learning to use the memo format and structure, without much concern for tone or content. Plus, I had good rapport with the professor—John Stifler at UMass, by the way, the best prof I've ever had—so I knew I could get away with it. He handed it back with a "very clever" and a tolerant smile.
posted by abcde at 5:00 PM on August 11, 2011

Buckley was on Ritalin for his alleged narcolepsy. I look at my bank balance and lo! my fingers fly! Writing college papers bears no relation for writing for a living.
posted by Ideefixe at 5:15 PM on August 11, 2011

I've made my living, most of my life, as a writer. The last time I ran the numbers, there were between a million and a million half words out there within spitting distance of my byline.

The older I get, the more words I pour onto the page (the page! For the past fifteen years, my output has been entirely constrained between HTML tags) the less I know how it works. I can write slowly and painfully, I can (frabjous day) be a bystander while the perfect piece appears on the screen as fast as the robot can move the fingers.

I wrote a novel, but I had to do a thing - namely, getting to a place where there was no place to go except the work. A shack in the deep countryside of a foreign nation, with no phone or internet. Eight weeks spread over four years, and a 90k word book emerged. So, this I do know: distractions are deadly. (Between the furrowed-brow laptop bashing, there was a lot of whisky-till-dawn partying with friendly natives possessed of impeccable music collections. If I could make my living this way, you'd be looking at an empty stage.)

But the daily stuff? Make room for it, because if it isn't the most important thing in your world while you're doing it, it doesn't deserve you. Have a story to tell. If you don't know what you want to say when you dive in, you'll sink. (Unless you think by writing, when you won't.)

Remember the reader: you're taking five minutes of their life and in return they deserve a beautiful trip to a worthwhile reward.

More than that, though: no idea. How the words form, where they come from, how they're judged by the critic in the loop, is beyond me. Why they come quick or come slow, ditto. And I hate not knowing things, especially when they've kept me in beer.
posted by Devonian at 5:28 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

It's funny, how much writing there is about how to write, how to get ideas, how to write fast, how to write well, and so and so and so and so on, because writing is one of those noble pursuits to which everyone aspires in the golden age of the internet, where the word is finally more than just a cloud of details coalescing around day-glo visual imagery washing over us on cathode ray tubes. The old barriers come crashing down, the blogs rise over the ruins, and we've all got a story that just desperately needs to be told…except, well, something came up, and you got distracted, or you're going to start any day now. It's going to be a great book one day, though, right?

Me? I'm an astonishingly fast writer, given to regular bouts of ten thousand word days amidst the lesser days in which I only put a few hundred words on the page, but I've got a deep-rooted psychological issue that fuels that fire. In my hapless youth, I was bullied, abused by the school system, misunderstood, mismanaged, and otherwise mistaken for a smart kid because I could talk a blue streak and make sense in the midst of the constant cascade of stories. Walter Mitty was my patron saint, the thematic predecessor in my endless escapes from the pathos and drudgery of an elementary school of booming "pods," educational fads, and crass, bullying teenyboppers fighting for primacy in the lion's den of Hammond Elementary, just north of Scaggsville.

"Joe, are you paying attention?" asked my teacher, and I was, but not to her unbelievable aimless monologue about subject-verb-object.

I was midway through a fantasy I'd been constructing, where my real parents finally showed up, crashing through the ceiling of Pod C in a glorious silver saucer right as I was listening to Mrs. Gaither prattle on about Johnny Tremain until I was considering drinking the entire baby's food jar full of mercury I'd extracted from my dentist with a little flicker of the old golden tongue. I sat there, eyes glazed, desperate for escape from the soul mangling mundane details that fell out of her mouth with all the lightness and delicacy of someone vomiting up slugs of type, and without warning, the ceiling came crashing in and the sharp edge of the Jupiter 2 sliced through the wires holding the humming light fixtures, which came down in a chain of spectacular explosions of sparks and powdered phosphor and—

"—JOE!"

"Yes?"

"What did I just say?"

"You said that I would not manage to get very far in life if I'm not able to diagram a simple sentence," I said, dimming the little accusatory spark in her eye, and yet, here I am, decades later, and I can't diagram a sentence to save my beagle from ravening terrorists who might have proposed that sort of thing as a test of my mettle, except—

"—You think you're pretty smart, don't you," she said, with a sneer, and continued on.

These days, I regard boredom as a corruption of the lazy mind, but I ran on that junk juice back when, and the big secret as to why I can write very, very quickly is that all I'm really doing is typing. I write in my head, almost all the time, stringing sentences together like putting beads on a wire, just filing all the bits in the cavernous storerooms in my brain I have available by virtue of the fact that I never made it as far as Algebra II.

When I grew up, I ran away from home, chasing my fairy godmothers, stripping for money, and exploring the lumpen world of the Reagan years in broken down cars, spindly French mopeds, and my first Vespa, and that old skill of keeping a mental tape recorder running for the moments when the teacher would call for you to play back her tired lines stayed active, feeding an archive of wild adventures that all happened while I was absolutely convinced that I had a terrible, poverty-stricken, empty life. The head writing kept on, feeding all the fantasies, and that sort of practice is the thing that lets people become overnight writing prodigies, even though it's taken them decades to get there.

In my last career before my big breakdown, I ran the microfilm scanning department of a large corporate rollup that did what they referred to as "backfile conversion services," a monstrous appellation that always induced nausea in me. I was the world champion operator of a Sunrise Imaging microfilm scanner and ran the department, and much of my job involved watching images flick by on the screen, one after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another after another until my vision would go all pink and swimmy, but I was clever enough to write little scripts to automate even more of it, and I'd set all my machines running, open a little window narrowed down to a slot like a letterbox, and dump the data from my running narratives in a clattering torrent of keystrokes on the old Model M I carried with me as a hedge against the mushy misery of rubber dome keyboards.

In the midst of the ill-starred relationship that gave me more than ever to write about, I'd curl up on the couch with the TV Cowboy while he sat watching his awful reality programs, comfortably tucked in with his arm around me and my shiny magical new white iBook on my lap, and type. It wasn't the best keyboard, but the location was unbeatable, and sometimes it is just about location, location, location and the relaxed embrace of someone who loves you, so I'd set my fingers flying, with the TV blaring and conversation rising and falling.

He'd smack me in the head sometimes, a little too hard, but playfully in his way, and make me look up.

"What?"

"What are you doing?" he asked, with his brow furrowed.

"Typing."

"I don't know how you do that," he said, and he is someone with a million great stories, and the source of all the best opportunities to drop names that my Presbyterian upbringing completely undermines, and a powerful writer, but he's not fast at his best.

"I write it in my head, then type it out."

"Freak."

"Freak in your lap, bitch."

The eyes rolled and I was back to the keys.

"That's not writing," Truman Capote famously sniffed over Kerouac, "that's typing."

It's true, though. If I am a good writer now, it's because of those frustrating years as a kid, and those endless, endless hours watching microfilm inch through a scanner, and the acrobatic challenges of avoiding asshole words like "impactful" in my bouts as a technical writer, and having had a complicated and confusing life. It's another thing, too—I didn't have time to be a writer, and forced my storytelling into every free minute, and into the yawning void occupied primarily by my internal monologue.

The thing is, if you're meant to write, you don't have to struggle with writer's block and a dearth of ideas and a shortage of motivation to keep at it. If you're meant to do it, it catches like a spark in your heart and burns and burns and you can either articulate it and turn those roiling flames into the fuel for an engine of hyperactive release or burn out from the inside. Well, that's not the only model, I suppose, but there are an awful lot of writers out there planning to do it one day, you know, when things settle down.That's been the demon that's chased me down—the fear I found when it hit me that I'd actually had a pretty interesting life while I was trying far too hard to have a significant, reputable, respectable one. I can write it down or all those moments will just boil away into the aether on the day I die.

Statistically, I'm dead in 33.8 years, so I've got a lot to do.

Fortunately, I've had a lot of practice, and that's the only way to do it.

I've got a couple tips, though:

• Kill your internet while you're writing, unless you're using it to write. The ultimate distraction machine of all time. I went on a manual typewriter bender a few years back and they're one of the single most amazing mental turbochargers—sitting in candlelight in a crappy little cabin in West Virginia banging out a first draft while the coal trains rumble through is as close as I'm going to get to the divine. If you're not out having adventures, you should be writing. I'm sure Mad Men is great, but isn't your own story better?

• Listen to music that makes you feel the way you want the reader to feel when they read your work. I think this works in a kind of taoist "wu wei" mode, where you become what you feel without trying to become this. For example, as I've been writing this, I've been listening to "The Golden Age" by The Asteroids Galaxy Tour, which is a fluffy, goofy pop song I first heard in a beer commercial that's the perfect thing for a rambling fluffy, goofy, and pompous treatise on writing.

• Keep a blog. Yeah, everyone does it, it's tired, it's tedious, blah blah blah, and I know Livejournal is not a much loved thing around mefi, but I started writing in my journal there ten years ago and have written 4200 pages of good, bad, ugly, and holy shit how high was I when I wrote this thing? Enlist your loved ones to nag you when you don't write, particularly your unusually naggy mother and your beloved fag hags, if you got 'em. Write in it every damn day, even if all you're writing is how you can't think of anything to write.

• Read everything out loud. Seriously. That's the slow part, but if you write fast, sometimes your fast writing is crazy brain writing that trips lopsidedly off the tongue, and if it doesn't flow in speech, it won't flow for the reader, either. Besides, it's good practice for the book tour circuit.


Now if only I could figure out how to market what I'm writing.

Sigh.
posted by sonascope at 6:13 PM on August 11, 2011 [6 favorites]

I bought a desk at a co-working space for $200 a month. It's air conditioned and heated (kind of unlike my house). Right downtown, convenient to coffee and snacks. Lots of internet. There are people if I want them, and if I don't want them I put headphones in. I go there and it is for working. One rule: no metafilter. Shit gets done. Grant proposals, image processing, website updates, whatever. Having a place to go that has a context of "work, bitch" can do miracles.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:02 PM on August 11, 2011 [2 favorites]

That really works until you see a barn full of books priced at a dollar a box. Every single one of those books represented someone kicking and killing and tormenting themselves and endless back and forth and Big Breaks and Huge compromises and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours to make something that if you are very very very very lucky, will end up slightly warped and waterlogged in a barn amid all its identical cousins at a dollar a box.
posted by The Whelk at 7:52 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

The only thing you have to do is hit your deadline. If you don't have a deadline then you're just playing at it and you'd be better off earning money in a proper job or having fun. The only things you have to do before hitting your deadline is get a first draft finished, edit it twice then proof read it for simple errors in English.

Seriously, anything handed in on time is a success, anything handed in late is a failure. Nobody will care about the precise wording of paragraph six on page forty seven, everyone will care if it's not on their desk when you said it would be. The only way to hit your deadline is turn off your internet and not allow yourself out of the room until the first draft is done. Anything else is precious nonsense, electricians do not spend all afternoon staring out of the window looking for 'inspiration', bakers don't get bakers block and house painters don't pretend they're competing with Michaelangelo. You think you're above that? You're not. If you're getting paid for it then you're an artisan like them, not an artist. If you were the next Dylan Thomas someone would have told you by now.

Hit your deadline and you'll pass your exam, keep your job or get more commissions. Miss it and you're toast. If you're not getting paid for it and its not for an exam then it's a hobby and about as important as whether or not you finish your jigsaw.
posted by joannemullen at 8:12 PM on August 11, 2011 [3 favorites]

Writing makes me wish I was still acting that was so stable and sensible
posted by The Whelk at 8:26 PM on August 11, 2011

I am writing -

- Dunk and Egg era GRRM fan-fic. Artos the Implacable! The Laughing Storm! Faceless assassins! Giants become Ogres! Disgraced maesters! Despised pyromancers! Howland Reed! Thenn at the height of its power! Worse than Others at the cusp of winter!

- Pratchett Fan Fic involving everyone, and I mean everyone, I like. Rincewind unable to run away from Vetinari's free beer, Sam and Sarge and Nobby hiring on as special consultants, the Witches Three in town to take Agnes home, the wee free men in town to keep Agnes safe and to try, try in vain, from keeping the clowns in check...

- Robotech fan-fic mirroring the Macross Saga from the perspective of the disposable line-troops, genius warriors with more excess baggage than a Hilton heir. The destroyed who pilot the Destroid!

- Blood and sex drenched short stories for peculiarly particular furry fetishists with money and patience.

One, one, of the above is a lie.

Anyway you look at it, paid per hour, I'll never make a dime, but have a hell of a time.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:32 PM on August 11, 2011

- Pratchett Fan Fic involving everyone, and I mean everyone, I like. Rincewind unable to run away from Vetinari's free beer, Sam and Sarge and Nobby hiring on as special consultants, the Witches Three in town to take Agnes home, the wee free men in town to keep Agnes safe and to try, try in vain, from keeping the clowns in check...


I hate you so much right now.
posted by The Whelk at 8:48 PM on August 11, 2011

"I don't like this at all Captain. I mean, Commander. I mean, Sir? Lord! Lord! I knew you was a Lord! It's just that me mouf forgets sometimes when I'm not introducing you formal-like."
"Shut it down, Fred. You're retired, and so am I," said Sam.
"I din't know you could retire bein' a Lord. I thought you were sorta stuck with the job until you're forced to pass it on to the next fellow."
"Shuddup Constable," said Fred.
"It's Sergeant, Sarge."
"It's Captain, Sergeant!"
"You're retired, Sarge. I mean Fred. Mr. Colon?"
"Knobby, shouldn't you be organizing a detail or whatever it is sergeants in the watch do these days?" asked Sam crossly as they passed through the Puzzle Plaza and past the posh and polished window displays of Boffo!, Heated Discussion!, and Poindexter's!, the punctuation more important to legal trademark enforcement than proper pronunciation.
"Commander Carrot assigned me as Sergeant in Charge of Special Projects. He says you lot are his special project, 'cuz the Patrician asked after you two in a Pointed Way," replied Nobby as they made a left past the last of the jigsawyers' stalls.
Sam smiled viciously and laughed outright. Carrot at once thumbed his nose at Venitari and put the best possible team to investigate a bunch of clowns on the case with Vimes. It was how he would have handled it himself.
Fred Colon laughed outright, for a different reason, "Special, we are, and his nibbs the Patrician knows it! Seasoned vets, hard men for hard times! We three! Lookin' out for the city! They should have a name for us!"
"Yeah, yeah! Lethal weapons in the service of civic duty! That's us. Oi! Cap'n, what's that lethal weapon thingummy that one assassin used that one time?"
"The Gonne," grimaced Sam.
"Yeah! Yeah! That's us! The Three Gonners!"
"That's very swashbuckling, Knobby," said Fred, adjusting his belt a bit higher up his paunch, imagining a sheathed sword buckled to it, swash style.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:16 PM on August 11, 2011

Hey Slap*Happy, pm me with your name on Furaffinity and I'll tell you my "secret" identity as a drunken purveyor of weird furry softcore porn. (secret mostly in that I try to make sure that name and this one never ever get linked anywhere Google can see them.)
posted by egypturnash at 9:53 PM on August 11, 2011

One rule: no metafilter

meh no thanks, I'll just stick to being a car-park attendant with great ideas.
posted by the noob at 11:42 PM on August 11, 2011 [1 favorite]

a barn full of books priced at a dollar a box

First editions selling on ebay for less than half, including shipping costs, what I paid for them in the 80s. Vintage collected works barely selling for cover price.
posted by Ardiril at 12:44 AM on August 12, 2011

Yeah, but think about this: thousands of people read what you wrote. For dozens of hours (or even hundreds if you write giant series books) those people were intimately connected to the story you told, and felt all of the emotions you put in there. You made them happy and sad and scared and turned on and ultimately satisfied. That's better than creating valuable collectibles.
posted by Kevin Street at 1:14 AM on August 12, 2011

And that's just furry porn. Imagine if you wrote literary novels!
posted by Kevin Street at 1:16 AM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Try plagiarism
posted by Renoroc at 4:54 AM on August 12, 2011

thousands of people read what you wrote

I'm pretty sure more people will read my Metafilter comments.
posted by The Whelk at 5:45 AM on August 12, 2011

I have a brilliant idea for a Discword fanfic titled Rocks Fall on Carrot and He Dies. Writers, feel free to get in touch.
posted by Wolfdog at 9:30 AM on August 12, 2011

Plus, I try to never write alone.

Good plan. For when you write alone, you write with Hitler!
posted by eritain at 12:54 PM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

"I'm pretty sure more people will read my Metafilter comments."

Maybe (or maybe not, I dunno), but the relationship is different. This is a conversation where everyone gets a portion of attention from the reader. Storytelling is an ancient way of connecting two humans that goes right back to the beginning of the species. The reader seeks you out, and for the time it takes to tell the story the two of you are connected, mind to mind. The reader even helps you out by imagining things you don't describe! There's nothing like it anywhere else.
posted by Kevin Street at 1:42 PM on August 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

I just finished two technical books for O'Reilly. I found that I averaged 500 words per day over each book. I started with a detailed outline for most of the work, then filled it in with bursts of writing. For shorter works, I reckon on 1000 words/day.
posted by mdoar at 2:00 PM on August 12, 2011