It’s also not a sustainable ‘solution,’ because it will require you to concentrate specifically on your writing speed at all times. Writing is a mysterious business to even the most experienced and talented author, so simply racing through your work will only result in confused, fragmented writing that doesn’t make anyone very happy. Simply forcing yourself to write faster won’t work. If you’ve reflected on the state of your writing career and decide you need to write faster, there’s no single solution. Writing speed is the result of many different and wholly personal factors-your level of confidence, your natural facility with language, your approach to organizing thoughts, and brain chemistry. If you dream of success in a genre where delivering a book every few months is the norm, you have a lot of incentive to speed up your writing. And in some genres-most notably Romance fiction, but in others as well-readers expect (and demand) a lot of content. If you’re a freelancer, it might affect your income, of course, but you can also consciously seek out projects that perhaps pay better for more in-depth writing with longer turn-arounds. If you finish the stories and articles you work on, your writing speed isn’t the most important aspect of your work. The key question to ask yourself is whether you actually complete projects. If you write slowly and don’t want to increase the pace of your writing (or have found it an impossible task), ask yourself if you have any compelling, practical reason to work at this. Remember: Writing speed isn’t universally important, but your writing speed might matter in the context of the goals you’re pursuing. But if you’re working on a freelance piece with a tight deadline, your writing speed is suddenly crucial. Want to write a novel on spec-that is, without a contract or a deadline for a completed draft? Take as long as you want. Slow writing doesn’t impact the quality of your work much, as a rule. Knowing whether or not your writing speed is an issue in the first place is necessary before you go any further down this rabbit hole. The key is to figure out whether you actually need to change-and what aspect of your behavior and process needs to change-before you start working towards that change. On the other hand, if you’re slow because you goof off constantly and procrastinate, you’re not a slow writer at all. If you don’t make progress because you’re constantly second-guessing yourself, throwing away work and going back to tweak and fiddle with completed sections, you might be suffering more from a lack of confidence than anything else-a paralyzing fear of failure. Everyone’s mind works differently, so if yours requires a bit more time to work through your thoughts, there’s nothing wrong with that-or with you.īut if you’re slow because you obsess unnecessarily about aspects of the writing process it might be healthier to address those issues. Is your slow writing representative of an organic pace of thought? In that case, there may be no real reason to force yourself to speed up. Start with asking yourself these questions: What’s Slowing You Down? But just because some wag on the Internet says it doesn’t make it so. They will tell you that a real freelance writer pounds out 10,000 words a day. They will tell you that you should be writing a chapter every hour. Is your writing pace actually a problem? Self-appointed gurus will be confidently incorrect about this. Take a breath and ask yourself a few questions. If it takes you three weeks just to write a paragraph, don’t automatically assume that you’re a freak who has to completely change how you approach your work. Helen Hooven Santmyer famously took about 50 years to finish her fourth published novel, “…And the Ladies of the Book Club,” while Jack Keuroac wrote On the Road in a feverish three weeks (after several years of lived research, of course). So, if you’re a slow writer, what-if anything-do you need to do about it? Well, first let’s get one thing straight-there is no ‘normal’ writing speed. And if you earn your living through your writing, being slow is probably a real drag on your income. There are some practical concerns with your writing speed-we’re all given just so much time on this Earth, after all, and every moment you spend on this project is a moment you can’t spend on the next one. But many writers worry about how fast they write. As a result, I’m much more prolific, but not necessarily a better writer in terms of quality, the speed of your writing doesn’t matter. It makes me feel a bit like a slacker because I work much more quickly-I finish a short story every month and sometimes finish one within a few days, and I once wrote an entire novel in three months.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |