Linda Nagata: the blog at Hahví.net

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For Me, Writing Fast ≠ Writing Well

January 27th, 2011

I’m 20,000+ words into my current project. I see this as a short, easy little novel, and not a big event by any means. In fact, my primary goal is to try to write fast. (For those of you who don’t know, I’m a notoriously slow writer.) So the rules were to produce a thousand words a day and not worry about editing or getting it right, but just let the story pour out.

Since I had a rough outline and several scenes and incidents lined up before I started, the rules sort of worked for awhile. I made the word count, or more, on a surprising number of days. But around 20,000 words I started getting unsteady. I began jumping to different parts of the story, and frowning over the plot. I started writing in separate files, and in long hand.

And it all started feeling like a huge mess.

So today I broke the rules and went back to the beginning and polished and refined my opening chapter and added some back story that I’ve figured out since I started.

I’m a lot happier now.

So for a while, at least, I’ll bid the rules good-bye.

But I’m still trying to write fast.

Posted on: Thursday, January 27th, 2011 at 2:21 am
Categories: Writing.

2 Responses to “For Me, Writing Fast ≠ Writing Well”

  1. MP Says:
    January 30th, 2011 at 7:06 pm

    It’s awesome you pushed yourself to do something you weren’t used to, like writing fast. And it helps to allow yourself bits of what you’re more comfortable WITHIN that challenge.

    I’m definetly a fast writer. I pump it out, get it out of my system, let it sit and then go over it countless times. Usually I write a book and then rewrite the whole thing from scratch until I get it to where it feels ‘right’. These rewrites are great though, because I know the basic plot, characters, and twists, and what I can take away or embellish. It sucks I have to write it three times to know this, but hey! It works!

    Awesome, awesome post. 🙂

  2. Linda Says:
    January 30th, 2011 at 11:23 pm

    Thank you! One reason I’ve never had the urge to teach how-to-write classes is that I still feel like I have no idea how to write. Every new work feels like a new challenge!