Words Written vs. Words Used

I set a writing quota for myself every day: One thousand words. It may sound like a lot, but really, it’s a very modest goal, about three and a half double-spaced pages. Some weeks I don’t even come close, and other weeks I greatly exceed it. I consider >10,000 words a “good” week, and <5,000 a bad one. It balances out, more or less.Your average novel is somewhere between 80,000 and 120,000 words. Fantasy novels tend to be longer, but theoretically, at that rate, you could still write two 150,00 word books a year, with time left for editing.

Theoretically.

The reality, though, is quite different. First of all, I tend to write more than I use. The Painted Man was around 180,000 words when I first started shopping it around. It took some heavy editing for me to trim it down to it’s sleek final 154,000. Some of the stuff I cut was for pacing and tone, and while much of it is, in my opinion, as good as the rest, the book as a whole is better without it. When my site redesign is done and I have my deleted scene blog, I will discuss some of these in detail and put the text up for people to see and judge for themselves. I also excised thousands of redundant and/or unnecessary sentences and words throughout, tightening up the prose into the clipped, active style that I have settled upon.

But even more than overwriting of prose, I have to take into account the fact that about 70% of what I write is notes.

I am a meticulous planner. I maintain two separate versions of every book or story I write as independent MSWord files. One is the prose version, and the other is the stepsheet or story skeleton. In the stepsheet version, every scene is broken down by section into bulleted lists detailing what the action is, the pertinent worldbuilding information, and copious notes on what the characters are feeling and their motivations. It’s a lot like political talking point lists, but less evil.

More often than not, there is FAR more information in the stepsheet than I need for the scene. I may write several paragraphs on the politics of a situation, or the complex cultural rules guiding the characters’ actions, and then sum it all up in one carefully crafted line of dialogue, or not use it at all, saving the information in my vast archive against future need.

I will usually plot out an entire book thusly before I start writing the prose. Sometimes prose just comes to me in a rush and I go back and reverse engineer the stepsheet, but that is much less common. There are always vague sections in the stepsheet, of course, but all the major story points and motivations are covered.

The problem is, once you start writing the prose, things change. Characters develop their own voices and personalities, and are no longer willing to conform with how the stepsheet tells them to behave, and I need to go into the skeleton and break a few bones to get things smooth again. Kind of like a nose job for my story.

It’s a grinding, exhausting, tedious process that takes up more mental RAM than I really have to spare. I know most writers don’t have my level of OCPD and operate much more freely, but I have settled on this method, and it seems to work for me. My goal is to tell an extremely complex story in as simple a manner as possible, and keeping all that straight requires lists, lists, lists.

There are plenty of writers that just make the story up as they go along, all in prose, and never look back, or even too far forward. They have skilled copyeditors who worry about all those little complexities and straighten them out after the fact, fixing logic flaws in fictional cultures or systems of magic or whatever. That’s fine, I guess, but I could never trust another person with that level of responsibility in MY fictional world, and MY characters. They are far too precious to me.

What does this say in the end? That I can theoretically write about one book a year.

Theoretically.

Posted on October 5, 2008 at 12:33 pm by PeatB
Filed under Craft, Musings, Writing
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