Tag: Short story

Why are all writers lazy bums?

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I don’t really think writers are lazy bums. I just want us all to talk about the elephant in the living room: why does writing take so long?

The average person types 50 words per minute.

And that’s slow. I type about 80 or 90. Faster, if I have coffee. Even quicker with headphones blasting, or on deadline. 

Coffee plus headphones plus a deadline? Fuggetaboutit. That keyboard is gonna sing. 

The thing is, all the speed in the world doesn’t really matter.

Here comes the math

Let’s say you write full-time, all day, every day. No day job to worry about, no cramming in writing at 4 in the morning when the kids are asleep or scribbling forty minutes a day on a yellow legal pad (are there other colors? why yes, there are, including PURPLE) as you ride the train from New Jersey to the NYC.

Say you’re not that fast. Fifty words a minute. 

Fifty words per minute =

  • 3,000 words per hour
  • 24,000 words per eight-hour day
  • 120,000 words per week

That’s a ton of words. An incredible amount.

Let’s do a little more math to see how much we should be cranking out, if we’re not surfing the net, Twittering our lives away and checking out Facebook photos all day.

Here come the word counts:

  • 200 words = letter to the editor
  • 500 words = five-minute speech
  • 600 words = news story
  • 800 words = oped
  • 1,000 words = 10-minute speech
  • Up to 3,000 words = profile or magazine piece
  • Up to 8,000 words = short story
  • 3,000 words = 30-minute keynote speech
  • 15,000 words = screenplay
  • 20,000 to 60,000 words = novella
  • 60,000 to 120,000+ words = novel

Of course, people don’t type every second of the workday.

Let’s say half your day is eaten by meetings, research and other things, and you only write four hours a day, or 20 hours a week. Even then, we’re talking about 60,000 words.

That’s most of a novel, four screenplays, 20 keynote speeches or 100 opeds.

In a single week.

Nobody writes that much. NOBODY.

Not even Stephen King, back when he was fueled by industrial amounts of caffeine, nicotine and other substances.

In fact, writers of all sorts are happy to produce between 500 and 2,000 good, usable words a day.

I know novelists who are happy to produce one good novel per year. If you divide 100,000 words by 52 weeks, you get a smidge less than 2,000 words per week and, I kid you not, less than 300 words per day.

I know reporters who crank out two stories a day, five days a week and columnists who do one or two opeds a week.

There are pro speechwriters, brilliant people I’ve known for years, who take two solid weeks to nail down a 30-minute keynote speech (3,000 words).

Before the invention of word processors, writing gods like Hemingway would pound on their Underwoods and count every word, quitting for the day when they hit 1,000–or even 500–that day.

But let’s be generous and say 2,000 words a day is a good day.

Where are the missing words? Why are all sorts of pro writers–reporters, novelists, poets, speechwriters–producing about 20 percent of what the math says?

Suspect No. 1: It’s not really eight hours or even four hours

This looks like the obvious culprit, because it’s the only person sneaking away from the crime scene with a guilty look and blood on the bottom of their shoes.

Reporters have to cover stories, get quotes from sources and meet with editors.

Novelists need to do research, talk to their agent, go on book tours and so forth.

Every writer, reporter and novelist has to do research, travel and attend meetings. Nobody is chained to the desk the entire workday, pounding on the keyboard like a typist. They need to eat of the food sometimes, and drink of the wine, and have a life.

HOWEVER:  A lack of hours isn’t what’s wrong here.

Let’s say even more of the day is toast. Research. Phone calls. E-mail. Lunch with some big important person. Twittering to your buddies.

Fine, let’s go all the way down and say six of your eight hours are toast, and there are only TWO HOURS of actual banging on the keyboard.

3,000 words per hour X 2 hours = 6,000 words a day.

And yet the most writers typically can hit, day after day, is 2,000 words.

Where are the missing words?

Also, I know writers who spend six hours a day in meetings, doing research, returning e-mail and all that — and they still bang on the keyboard at least four to eight hours a day because they’re working crazy hours. A lot of writers work weekends, too. Writing is often a daily habit.

Yet 2,000 words per day seems like a kind of universal wall for writers of all stripes. Why?

Suspect No. 2: We type slower than narcoleptic turtles

This suspect doesn’t even get handcuffed and taken down to the station for a chat.

I used 50 words a minute because it’s the average typing speed of the general population.

Serious and professional writers are typically a lot faster, unless they’re hunting and pecking on an Underwood because that’s what they’ve always done since they first got published in 1926. There aren’t that many authors in that category.

If you dictate your stuff with Naturally Speaking or whatever, it’s more like 100 words a minute.

But let’s be generous again and pretend we all type really, really slow.

25 words a minute = 1,500 words an hour.

Even if we say Suspect No. 1 (Miss Most Hours of the Day Get Wasted) and Suspect No. 2 (Mr. Types Slowly) shacked up in a cheap motel and conspired to murder the creativity of all writers, it doesn’t get us down to 2,000 words a day.

Four hours at the keyboard at 30 words per minute is still 6,000 words a day. Two hours is 3,000 words, which is closer, but not plausible. Professional writers aren’t much slower than average typists–they’re a lot faster.

We need a better theory of the crime.

Suspect No. 3: Writing requires deep, deep thinking

Ah, this one is good. It’s lurking in the shadows.

It’s evil. Hard to refute.

How can you say that writing is shallow and easy?

How can you deny the art required, the creativity?

This isn’t an assembly line. It’s not a factory where we churn out widgets. Writers create something original, whether it’s a 500-word story for the newspaper or a 100,000-word novel.

Except I know better. Because I’ve been watching.

Going off my own experience wouldn’t be proof of squat. Maybe I’m an anomaly. Maybe I type 80+ words per minute (true) and separate writing from editing (also true).

But I know writers of all sorts. Reporters, speechwriters, novelists, you name it, and just about everybody who writes for money bangs on the keyboard at least four hours a day, and they’re all faster than 50 words a minute. That’s 3,000 words per hour.

Even going with four hours a day of actual writing, we should be at 12,000 words a day. Except we’re not.

Suspect No. 4: We’re creating while destroying

This is our killer. I’ve seen him at work.

I’ve helped other writers catch the evil scumbag, convict him and send him upstate so he can’t do any more damage.

We are typing away on the keyboard, and we’re not doing it at 10 words per minute. We are writing fast. It’s just that we destroy those words just as fast.

Why do we writers destroy more than we create?

Not because the words aren’t pretty. Sentence by sentence, they’re fine.

It’s because the structure is wrong.

I’ve looked at bad drafts that hit the roundfile. The sentences were pretty. It was the structure that failed.

We spend so much time trying to fix these things because we nobody teaches us structure.

Oh, they taught me the inverted pyramid in journalism school, which is the best possible blueprint for a story if you want to give away the ending right away and put people in a coma the longer they read.

Creative writing professors teach us characterization and the three types of conflict in creative writing.

Rhetoric professors give us logical fallacies and different types of arguments in speech and debate.

Journalism profs teach us hard and soft headlines and the different types of ledes.

Yet that’s not really structure. It’s tiny bits and pieces.

Building a house one room at a time, without blueprints

They way most of us write is like trying to build a house one room at a time. Winging it, without any blueprints.

Pour the foundation for the front door and foyer.

Frame it. Wire it for electricity. Drywall it. Paint it.

Now dig the foundation for the kitchen and build that.

Where should the living room go? OK, we did that, but forgot to put in stairs to the second floor, so we’ve got to tear it all down and start over.

That’s how I used to write. It’s how most writers I know do it.

You start at the beginning and work your way through it, trying to fix any problems with structure along the way.

My old friend and mentor, Robin, was guilty of this. He’d spend a week on an oped, which is only 800 words. He was a brilliant man, one of the smartest I’ve ever known, and a good example of why mixing research, writing and editing into a single process slowed everything down to a snail’s pace. He’d create and destroy thousands and thousands of words before he had 800 on a final draft.

Doing research, writing and editing all at once is no way to run a railroad. It’s building a house without blueprints, blindly hoping the beginning will magically connect with the middle and an end you haven’t figure out yet.

I’ve had houses designed and built. If a contractor tried to build a house the way we writers work, it wouldn’t take six months to finish it. It’d take six years, or forever.

So this is our killer, our time-suck, our nemesis.

Question is, how do you DO structure — and how do we, as writers, learn to draw good blueprints, so we stop spending 80 percent of our time at the keyboard destroying what we created?

The Saga of Sir Bushytail the Brave

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armored-squirrel-with-shield

This picture was the writing prompt from an earlier post, something I saw on the Book of Face with a caption which went something like this:

You swerve to avoid a squirrel. Later, in your hour of greatest need, the same squirrel returns to repay its life debt.

It stuck with me. There are squirrels all around me, at home and at work. They do chirp at you, and some will come up and eat from your hand.

So here’s my quick and silly story based on that photo. (Sidenote: I swear it’s a photoshop job, but whoever did it put some real time into making it perfect.)

 

THE SAGA OF SIR BUSHYTAIL THE BRAVE

Hathaway took pride in being a good guest, so he nodded at the massive elk antlers mounted on the wall and smiled at a fat raccoon pelt arranged like a tiny rug next to the fireplace. What he couldn’t help staring at was a squirrel, expertly preserved, wearing a suit of armor.

This wasn’t a novelty, a stuffed animal wearing shiny plastic bits that didn’t really fit right, the kind of thing you buy at a tourist trap. This was a real squirrel wearing metal armor someone had clearly taken the time to mold to the animal’s exact dimensions.

Touching it would be rude, of course. So he sat down at a once-grand dining room table, now scratched and hazy, as his host poured a pot of tea. Her gray hair was stuffed under a hat and gardening gloves poked out of her pockets. A sturdy, capable woman, with a scar on her cheek to go along with the wrinkles she’d earned.

Maybe getting her to talk about the squirrel would make it easier to get to the delicate issue he’d come here to uncover.

“I have to ask,” he said, glancing at the oddity. “Where did you buy it?”

“Oh, that’s a silly story nobody ever believes.”

“Test me.”

“You already suspect that I’m crazy.” She stirred her tea. “Telling you would only confirm that theory.”

He persisted. After they finished a second cup of tea, she gave in.

“My husband left to work at six in the morning for thirty years, so I’d make him coffee—Dale never cared for tea—and walked out to his truck to kiss him goodbye. When the sun comes up, day critters like that squirrel wake up and start talking to you, while night creatures, like that big one-eyed monster on the floor, head back home to the woods. I took to bringing my slingshot to chase them from staring through the wire of our chicken coop.

“After he’d leave, I’d stay out and watch the sun come up as this family of squirrels came out of a hole in that big alder by the garage. It got to where I’d wonder over to say good morning and they’d chirp and chatter right back. So I read up on what they ate and started leaving nuts, mushrooms and corn on the cob, though you gotta dry it first. Got to the point where the big male would come right up and eat from my hands.”

Hathaway raised an eyebrow. “The one up there?”

“Bushytail was always the friendliest. And boy did he chirp, like we were having a real conversation. I tell you, there’s something in the water here. So one day, One Eye the raccoon must have gotten tired of staring at the chicken wire and decided the squirrels would be an easier meal. It took five hits from my slingshot get him off Bushy, who was torn to hell. I brought him inside, cleaned off the blood and tried to make him comfortable in a shoebox filled with shredded newspaper. To let him die in peace, warm and dry by the fireplace there.

“Except he didn’t die that night, or the next day. I cut up apples for him and kept a few walnuts in the shoebox. On the fifth day, they were gone, and he was out of the box, limping around. We couldn’t keep him in here—squirrels aren’t potty trained—but I didn’t want to put him outside. Instead of fur, half his back was scar tissue, and he could barely crawl around.

“Putting him outside would be like killing him. So at first I cut holes in a baby sock, like a sweater, to keep him warm. Dale joked about putting chain mail on top of it, to help him when One Eye came back for seconds. So when he left for work, I flattened out a Campbell’s soup can with a hammer until it was the right shape. Took a few tries. Glued felt on the inside for insulation and painted the coat of arms on it. Dale came home and laughed like I’d never seen him in fifty-two years. Then he asked me how it fit.

“Making it fit took the next day. Bushytail—now we called him Sir Bushytail the Brave—got used to it. He curled up by the fireplace wearing it and seemed to feel safe again for the first time. Protected. So we let him out in the back yard and sure enough, he went back to his tree and his family, just like before, just he was a little slower and still limping.

“We started getting surprises on our porch. A fat pine corn, then a pile of acorns. I swear his little ones copied him, because a tiny squirrel followed him one time with a pine corn it could barely carry. And he tended to stay close to us, to climb up our legs and sit on our shoulders.”

She patted her left shoulder with a smile on her face.

“So on a miserable, rainy day, the raccoons finally found a way to get into my chicken coop, and I grab Dale’s old baseball bat to chase them off. The little ones, they scatter. The big boar, One Eye, he stands his ground and claws me in the leg. I slip and fall, and that evil bandit comes right at me, scratching and biting his way up my legs and body to my face, and I’m thinking this is how I’ll meet my maker, sitting in chicken shit while a devil squirrel chews my face off, staring with my cheek.

“And right when I’m making my peace with the Lord, a glint of shiny metal flies over me and lands on the back of One Eye, who screams and yips like he’s been set on fire. Bushytail is clinging to his back and gnawing through the thick part of that raccoon’s ear. It gave me enough time to crawl out of the coop and go inside to get cleaned up. Next morning, Dale snuck out with the twenty-two and waited for that raccoon to rumble up our hill back toward the forest, and I was happy to pull the trigger and turn that monster into a rug. And I swear, even after Bushytail died, the squirrels he sired still remember our friendship.

“But maybe this is just a silly story, something Dale and I made up to entertain the grandkids. Your cup of tea is empty and I need to make another.” She stood up and poured water into a copper pot.

After two more cups of tea, Hathaway managed to learn what he needed without making it obvious. The story about the squirrel seemed more and more like what she’d said: a legend invented to entertain grandchildren and guests.

When they said their goodbyes at the door, he was convinced they’d bought the stuffed squirrel at a novelty shop, and he started to wonder if she was simply a great storyteller and liar.

That’s when Hathaway stepped on a pile of acorns, stacked neatly by the door.

Writing prompt: this epic armored squirrel

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armored-squirrel-with-shield

So a friend on Facebook posted this with a caption along these lines:

You swerve to avoid a squirrel. Later, in your hour of greatest need, the same squirrel returns to repay its life debt.

Yes, I snorted coffee through my nose.

And yet, it stuck with me. The image, the idea, the insane seeds of a short story, maybe 500 words of fun.

The image, the idea, the insane seeds of a short story, maybe 500 words of fun.

I’ll post my short story about this next week. If you want, post a story, however short, in the comments–or use the secrets email, Twitter, whatever–and I’ll include your piece, too.

For more inspiration, the Series of Tubes has been overrun by armored squirrels–both Photoshop jobs, paintings and real-life armor. And yes, the guinea pig armor is real.

armored-squirrel-with-shield-riding-frog

armored-squirrel-2

armored-squirrel-3

guinea-pig-armor

Why critique groups MUST DIE

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Every writer gets the notion — from college, from movies, from the Series of Tubes — that they should be in a critique group.

This notion is seven separate types of wrong.

It’s time for critique groups to go the way of the rotary phone — to make way for something better, faster and stronger.

Peoples of the interwebs: critique groups are obsolete

A critique group is useful for certain things:

(a) university professors who want students to break into groups and leave him alone for the next 45 minutes,

(b) writers who really, really like to read their work aloud,

(c) literary snobs who like to say silly pretentious things about the work of others, and

(d) happy writers who like to socialize with fellow writers and talk smack about the craft while drinking bourbon.

Sidenote: Yes, your particular critique group is wonderful, and you couldn’t live without it. No worries. I’m not driving to your house with the Anti-Critique Group Secret Police to disband it or anything. Also, your critique group’s amazing bylaws and secret handshakes mitigate all the typical disadvantages of plain old boring critique groups that are not nearly as awesome. 

Reason No. 1: Critique groups take far too much time

During college, sure, you’ve got time to sit in a group, read chapters aloud and debate what Susie really meant by having the protagonist drink a bottle of ketchup in Chapter 2.

Once you graduate from college, get a job, get married, buy a house and have little pookies, THERE IS NO TIME for this type of nonsense. Do I have three hours to drive to somebody’s house, listen to chapters read aloud, then talk about what I remember of those words and drive home? No. I have ten flipping minutes to write silly blog posts.

People who write for monies, full time, do not gather around a table to read their text aloud while fellow writers and editors listen carefully and ponder the words. It does not happen.

Reason No. 2: Editing as a group is dangerous and slow

Anything written by a committee will stink up the joint, right? Writing is a solitary act.

Editing is, too. You write a thing, then you give it to an editor.

Typically, there are different levels of editing: at a newspaper, you ship your text to the city editor, who gives it the first whack and focuses on the big picture. Later, the draft goes to the copy desk for a different type of editing, more of a polish and proofing.

Also, editing is best done on a keyboard, or with a red pen. Not out loud in a social group, where peer pressure and weird dynamics can screw up a draft in two seconds flat.

Reason No. 3: Critique groups can’t handle most things we write today

Short stories and novels. That’s what critique groups are really built to handle.

And they do a bad job on novels. Why? Because reading a novel in tiny chunks every week will (a) take forever and (b) turn the focus onto pretty words rather than structure and story. You need to see the entire airplane before you can say, with authority, whether it’ll fly or not. Peeking at tiny pieces of it all year doesn’t work.

Traditional critique groups are bullocks when it comes to editing blog posts, speeches, opeds, screenplays, newspaper stories, magazine features, obituaries and haikus. That’s right, haikus. YOU CAN’T HANDLE THEM.

Reason No. 4: Because I say so

That’s it.

I could put some bullets beneath here, if you want to make it official. Here you go:

  • Because
  • I
  • Say
  • So.

Let’s invent something new

Now, there is a place for some kind of thing that’s LIKE a critique group, except better, faster and stronger.

Everybody needs an editor. And the more important a thing is, the more you should hire a professional editor who actually does this stuff for a living. But for a whole bunch of things that we write — including silly blog posts — hiring a pro would be a waste of money and time.

So let’s invent a new Writing Monster that’s better, faster and stronger.

Better

The Writing Monster should be flexible, able to handle the editing of any kind of writing, whether it’s a little blog post, a speech, a short story or a screenplay.

It should also expose people to new ideas and new ways of looking at writing, and inspire us to rip the pages out of stupid pretentious books.

And it should expose us to different types of writers and editors, not just fellow writers who have the same exact skills and writerly prejudices.

Faster

The Writer Monster Thing should use this thing we call the Series of Tubes and travel at the speed of light rather than the Speed of Steve’s Subaru as you carpool to Jane’s house for the critique group and hope that she didn’t make that bean salad again.

Stronger

The Writing Monster should be strong and resilient, living in the cloud and forging connections with writers and editors anywhere, like the Borg’s hive mind collective.

BTW: Resistance is futile.

The Writing Monster will NOT die because Steve moved to Idaho or Jane discovered that she hates Tyler’s novel and, to be honest, his stinking guts.

Also, the Writing Monster will focus more on short, important things like concepts, pitches and structure. Things that take up less than a page. (Kristen the Lamb is onto something with her Concept Critique Group idea.)

The alternative is spending every week for the next year dissecting Steve’s 125,000-word epic about vampire elves with lightsabers riding dinosaurs and Jane’s memoir about growing up on a potato farm in Idaho.