The 10,000 Word Day

Yesterday (Thanksgiving), I wrote 6,242 words without really feeling all that distressed about it. (Unfortunately for Zoe readers, none of them were Zoe words, but the faster I write other things I need to get done, the faster I can get back to Zoe Words. Also… Dark Mercy is with the betas and I’m about to get back to editing that. And hopefully within the next couple of weeks I can get back to The Catalyst.)

Anyway… way back in the before time, I was an adorable little writer who thought she could only write 1,000 words a day. After 1,000 words something magical happened where all the words started sucking. I’m quite sure this is something I invented in my own head so I could lay on my emo fainting couch and act like I’d really super duper struggled. Please note, I really don’t care how many words any other writer writes or doesn’t write. If 1,000 words takes you all day long and it’s hard… so be it. If you can’t write 1k words a day and think that is too much and too fast. Okay. I’m not even writing this post “for” writers to begin with, but for me and for readers who may find the behind-the-scenes process interesting. But… this kind of post is going to attract writers anyway, so I thought I’d throw in those caveats and hope it doesn’t start some shit storm.

But anyway… I was underachieving on word count “for me”. This is just about me.

So long story short, I really wasn’t pushing myself enough. That was okay in the beginning because writing wasn’t my job then. It was just my hobby and something I “hoped” would someday become a career. Now I’m at the point where I want to KEEP it as my career. As such, I treat it like a full time job and produce much more word count because it is my full time job. But I digress.

At some point I started to get adventurous. Occasionally I would have a 2k day, a 3k day, a 4k day, and holy fucking shit batman a 5k day! Then 5k days became more common. This past year I’ve experimented in a lot of ways with my process. Originally my plan was to write every day and have a certain quota for the day. But that process doesn’t work for me. I can have goals that will end up being the “equivalent” of having written X amount of words on any given day, which is my goal. What matters to me is output, not how I schedule it. But basically, when I’m editing, it’s hard for me to write something else on that day. Editing and writing are such vastly different mental processes for me that I technically can, but really HATE doing them both on the same day. Also, when I do higher word counts, I need the decompression allowed by an editing day or even a scheduled day off.

Basically there is more than one way to skin a cat, and I’m interested in figuring out the way that makes me most prolific and most happy.

On a writing day, right now I’m up to 5 or 6 hours of writing (Eventual goal is 8 for writing days.) That’s with very little stopping, like to pee and eat. This isn’t torture to me because I love writing. As in… I love the “act” of writing, not just being able to say I have written. There are two types of writers in the world: those who love writing and those who hate writing but love having written. One is not morally superior than the other; I’m just telling you which one I am. I used to be the other kind, so it’s not an unchangeable attitude.

On an editing day I work a 2-3 hour day. I can handle a lot more writing without burning out than editing. Again, this may be a laziness issue with me. Or, it may be an issue of building up endurance and stamina. It also could be an issue of, the more you do something and the more competent you begin to feel doing it, the more you may come to love it. I like editing probably more than a lot of writers. As I grow more competent at it, and do it more, I may come to love it, in which case I may not experience burn out as quickly while doing it.

Maybe there really was a time where it was a huge struggle for me to write more than 1k a day. I remember when the idea of writing a whole novel was so daunting I didn’t think I’d ever do it. Then when I finally did I didn’t want to think about the prospect of doing it over and over, which is what I would have to do if I wanted to be a career novelist. Then there was a time when I thought writing and publishing 1 novel a year was “fast” and a “treadmill” (In hindsight I wonder how many prolific authors may have stumbled upon my attitude somewhere and privately chuckled.) In the three years since I started publishing, I’ve published 10 books (a mix of novels and novellas) under a few different pen names. And even that included a lot of dicking around and arguing with people on the internet. I can’t even fathom what my output could have been if I’d put the crack pipe down and stopped arguing with people on the internet sooner. (Please note: this is a metaphorical crack pipe only. It would be hard to produce anything coherent with non-metaphorical crack.)

My perspective on all this has shifted hugely. I want to be prolific. Not because I want to produce shit, but because I want to stop wasting my work time and actually work during my work time. And because when you love your work, work becomes play and who doesn’t want to play for 8 hours a day? Bring on the play, bitches!

I was reading an old post on the Zen Habits blog about being prolific and he made the statement:

“Realize that prolific people don’t always have a shortened creative cycle; they often just have more creative cycles going on simultaneously.”

That’s absolutely true for me. Right now I have several books in the idea/planning/percolating stage (many books stay at this stage for a long time by virtue of the fact that I can only write so fast), a few different projects in the rough draft phase, something with beta readers, something else with the copyeditor. Each creative cycle is however long it is, but by having many cycles going at once it makes it seem like “holy crap that’s a lot of writing.”

So now I’m thinking big… 10k days. Now when I say I want to write 10k days, don’t misunderstand. I do not want to write 10k a day every single day or even five days a week for more than a week or two at a time. That would be insanity. I’m sure technically it can be done and probably has been done by the most prolific writers of all time. And maybe in ten years I will be doing it. Then people can hate my guts.

But right now I’m talking about doing it to get the rough draft out of the way faster so it can sit and cool longer without slowing me down, so I can have sufficient time to devote to editing it and having it out with the betas and copyeditor, etc. Basically so I can have more creative cycles going simultaneously.

I have written 10k in a day once before, but it was fanfic, so I’ve never really counted it. I always felt that original fic was of such a different nature that it just couldn’t be done… at least not for me. (Because I know other people have done it.) But really the big difference with fanfic and original fic is fanfic is often created as a result of a total and complete obsession with an already existing world. So you really know what you want to write… you know the world. The better you know the world, the more you can tend to write in a session because all the stuff that needs to percolate has percolated already. I percolate plenty, but while I’m percolating, I’m writing something else. Or editing something.

I don’t think I would have started thinking about trying 10k writing marathons if not for getting so close to it already. I was less than 4,000 words away from it on Thanksgiving. And that was without being stressed and emo about it. If I’d pushed a little, I believe I could have done it. I think the idea of it is more daunting than the actual process of it if I can get out of my own way. So I definitely want to experiment with writing this way going forward.

Here’s a thought experiment… which is better? 1,000 words a day for 365 days or 10,000 words a day for a total of 36.5 days, but spread out?

Neither. They are both the same production at the end of a year. The point is getting the work done, not how it’s sliced up. Something that I’ve found is… when I have lower word count goals on a per day basis then it becomes really important that I write nearly every day. If I don’t, I start slipping behind. Then after awhile I just give up maintaining word count. (I’m still way far away from my 365k word count goal for the year.) When I write 5k a day until I finish a rough draft it’s a whole different feeling. So that’s what I’m experimenting with next, except I want to throw in some 10k days.

I will report back.