I’ve seen a few people lately push the idea that the quality of writing is all based on the speed at which you write. Specifically that the longer it takes you to finish a book, the higher quality it is.
This is a silly bit of nonsense that I think came about through the traditional publishing schedule, where it would take a long time for a book to go from the writer’s hands to the bookstore. And it’s a myth that’s spread all throughout literary circles, that if you write fast, then somehow you’re only writing trash.
Of course it’s pretty ridiculous because there are so many variables that go into how long it takes to complete a novel. If someone writes a novel a year and another person writes a novel a month, there are a lot of things to look at. How many days a week are they writing? How many hours per day? How many words per hour? Do they have a schedule or do they just write whenever they feel like it? Are they working from an outline or not?
Use some simple math to break it down. Let’s say you can average about 1,000 words an hour, which isn’t that uncommon. That means if you’re writing a 90,000-word novel, it will take you ninety hours to produce a first draft. If you write to my schedule, which is an hour a day, five days a week, that means it will take you around four or five months to finish a novel.
It’s not Dean Wesley Smith’s pulp-speed fast, but it’s also less than half the time that the myth says it should take to write a novel. And what if I wrote for two hours a day and I wrote seven days a week? Now we’re down to around six weeks.
In fact, if you’re to break down the numbers, to spend a year writing a book means writing less than 250 words a day, seven days a week. To give you an idea of how long it takes to write 250 words, at this point this blog entry is at around 350 words and it took me about ten minutes to write this much.
Writing may be the only profession where being less productive is considered to be a mark of higher quality. Sure, there are times when you can struggle to produce 250 words a day. But if the whole novel is a struggle like that, then maybe you just don’t want to write it.
Now yes, some people may write slower than others. And some people may only be able to write in fifteen-minute increments each day. And that’s fine. But don’t ever disparage people who write fast simply because they write fast.
If it takes you a year to finish a novel, great. If it takes you a month to finish one, that’s great, too. The amount of time it took you to finish that book shouldn’t even be factored into whether or not it’s a quality book.
And it should also be noted that there are quality works of literature that were written in a short amount of time. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? Written in six weeks. Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange Written in three weeks. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Written in six days.
Be comfortable with your writing speed and never ever judge another writer based on theirs.
Great post, Percival! I couldn’t have said this better myself 🙂
Good comments! Last year I took a look at the projects I wanted to write and realized I would be lucky to finish them all before I died. My days are already packed to the brim and so I couldn’t devote any more time than I already was for writing. That left just the one option of becoming a faster writer. I made a concerted effort to increase the speed of my writing and have doubled my output.
Interesting way to look at writing speed. I, for one, want to write faster on everything. I feel like if I write with the speed of my thoughts, content gets down faster. I can always go back later and revise it. I think everyone has their own pace and slow does not mean bad writing.
Preach, brother.