Writing Advice – Craft & Process

Collecting the posts I’ve written about the craft and process of writing

Why Count Words

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It’s been about two weeks since the QWC Rabbit Hole, and you’re still reading blog posts that I drafted during the manic two-and-bit days of writing. This, it should be noted, is quite by design – I knew I was heading down to Melbourne, knew that the Continuum weekend wouldn’t give me enough time to write anything for the week that followed, and I knew that one of these days I wanted to get sufficiently ahead of the blog that I could have some posts in reserve.

One of the more interesting conversations I had during the rabbit hole was with a participant who didn’t quite understand why we counted words. She was writing…well, to be honest, I don’t really know, but I’m guessing it was memoir…and the concept of hitting a set number of words every hour/day, even the concept of writing 30,000 words in a weekend, was utterly alien to her. We ended up discussing it during a tea break, after expressing our mutual distrust of the instant coffee on offer.

“Why do it?” she said. “What’s the point? Surely they need to be good words.”

Me, I’m all about the word-count as a metric. It comes with the territory when you’re writing short stories, and there are limits to how many words you can write before things become, well, difficult to sell. Also, short fiction writers tend to get paid by the word, so you can do all sorts of interesting “can I buy food with this story when it sells” mathematics when you’re tracking the number of words.

Further, I like the way in which word-counts render things far less complicated. A novel of a hundred thousand words is far more daunting than the knowledge that I’ve got to write a chapter of five thousand, even if that chapter ends up being a little over or under. Planning for scenes of a thousand words to two-thousand words gives me something to plan for every day.

But the real reason I like word-count as a metric is even simpler than all that: it forces me to keep moving forward.

I’m a rewrite as a I go kind of writer, which has its advantages and drawbacks, and there’s plenty of times when the desire to finish 2,000 words a day is the only thing that keeps me producing the next paragraph rather than editing. It may be an arbitrary measure, but the 2k goal means I have a benchmark for I’ve done a good day’s work and I’m sufficiently ahead that the manuscript can handle a little revision. The desire to hit 2K keeps me from deleting a thousand-word scene just ’cause I think of something better. It forces me to live with the words for a while, to see whether they’re really as bad as I think.

I’ll admit it’s kind of arbitrary. As a metric, wordcount means nothing, which is why I frequently used other metrics as a back-up. You know, in the old days, when I spent more time writing and panicking about writing than I do now.

I understand people who a baffled by word-count, just as I understand that there are people in the world who enjoy football. I don’t share their preferences and I’m utterly baffled by their affection for the game, but I don’t really hold it against them. Nor, to be honest, do I spend that much time pondering what causes them to go out and watch people they don’t know run up and down a field.

Writing is a weird thing. Idiosyncratic, personal, and utterly without rules. There’s no point where you really look at something and say “right, done.” There’s no measure that will tell you you’ve done a good days work, ’cause a good day’s work is so variable that such a measure would be useless.

This used to drive me crazy. Really, really crazy. I used to beat myself up constantly for not getting enough done.

Word-count was the thing that let me know how to stop. It’s the thing that lets me think, yeah, I’ve done good today.

‘Cause the quality of the words may vary, and it may take me longer than I think to get to the end of a story, but in the end it’ll all work out as long as I keep showing up and piling words on top of each other.

Four Words All Creative Practitioners Should Live By

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RESPECT YOUR GODDAMN AUDIENCE.

Okay, here’s your warning. I’m going to rant my fucking pants off in this one, ’cause I’m mightly passionate and this post has been sparked by something that really pissed me off. If you’d prefer to skip the rage, feel free. Go read something else. I won’t be offended. Just remember those four words, ’cause everything else is just a cautionary tale explaining why they’re important.

Respect your goddamn audience.

There’s plenty of reasons to follow this advice, but here’s the big one: if you don’t, there’s pretty good odds I’m going to hunt you down and carve out your fucking spleen with an ice-cream scoop. Especially if I’m part of that audience, and you’ve contrived things so I don’t have the option of leaving when it becomes obvious that your fucking lack of respect is wasting my goddamn time.

This one irritates me enough that it probably should have been a conversation with the spokesbear entry, if only so I can present the illusion of having an even keel, but the truth is that this is one of those things really pisses me off. I’m firmly of the belief that anyone who takes their audience for granted should be herded into an open field and hunted for sport, preferably by the audience members who were utterly ripped off by the creator’s complacency. There is no leeway there. There is no reasonable part of me when it comes to this. An audience is a privileged, not a right. Treat them as such.

This is not to say that you need to be brilliant all the time. I recently went to an open mic night that was marked with a steady streak of performers whose approach to the audience seemed to be a hearty fuck you, you’re stuck here and you have to listen to me. People were permitted to tell long, rambling stories without time-limit or, in many cases, a point. At least once I considered throwing a beer bottle at the performer on stage, on the theory that I’d either hit them and they’d shut up, or I’d miss and get ejected from the venue. Either way the night would be over and I’d be fucking free.

Instead I just sat there chanting Skip to the Fucking End when it became obvious that the rambling wasn’t actually leading to a point, it was just rambling. The whole demeanor of their performance said they didn’t give a shit about the people they were performing for, and it wasn’t just a case of nerves. If they’d rehearsed, they hadn’t rehearsed enough to be comfortable with their material. If they’d given their material any thought, they hadn’t really given it enough. Listening to them was excruciating, because the venue was cramped enough that there was no way of getting up and walking out until intermission was called.

It wasn’t all bad. There was one guy who’d rehearsed his piece and actually had some idea of how to work a crowd. His performance was great. Polished, entertaining, short. I’d go seem him read or perform again in a heartbeat. It was the performance of someone comfortable in front of a crowd.

But my favourite was actually the least showy performance of the night. It was the most nervous, verging on hesitant, and it consisted of a woman who stepped up to the microphone and told a story she’d obviously written and memorized. Occasionally she stumbled, occasionally she’d pause and struggle to remember what came next. It wasn’t polished in any way, but it was rehearsed and it was shaped and it was personal and it drove towards a poignant point. In short, they’d taken their brief for the evening and thought about the audience and respected them enough to prepare.

It’s about being good. No-one is good all the time. Everyone starts somewhere.

It’s about respecting your audience enough to show them that you’ve put in effort, even if you’re nervous as hell. It’s about showing up prepared and willing to do your best, not a half-arsed facsimile of your best.

You don’t have to be good at what you do, but you have to show your audience that you’ve respected them enough to deliver something you’ve put effort into. You have to appreciate the fact that they’re giving you their time and their eyeballs and their money. You owe your audience, your audience doesn’t owe you.

And if you forget that, then you’re in trouble, ’cause I’ve only got a vague idea where the spleen is located and I’m perfectly willing to keep digging around with that ice-cream scoop until I find it.

Great Writing Advice Learned from Pro-Wrestling, Part Two

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The second thing that can’t be learned about writing by listening to Al Snow rant: People don’t have a physical relationship with pro-wrestling.

This is fricking brilliant, and it’s something every SF writer should memorize immediately.

If you look at most forms of athletic competition there’s usually a correlation between the most popular sports and the sports we play as kids. Every Australian male kicks a football around, for example, and gets forced to play cricket as part of their school curriculum. We’re forced to run, at the very least, at school sports days. Depending on your school, you may be forced to swim.

When we watch people competing at a professional level, we have muscle memory and experience that tells us how hard these things are and allows us to appreciate the achievements of professional athletes. We know just how good they are, because we know our own limits.

Professional wrestling doesn’t have that. How many of us can legitimately claim to have been Irish whipped into the ring ropes, or jumped from the top rope to plant an elbow on a downed opponent. Even the less flashy moves are unknown to us, since most schoolyard fights don’t start with a collar-and-elbow tie-up (it’s interesting to note that in Japan, where Judo is arguably a national sport, pro-wrestling is a lot more realistic and considerably stiffer because people understand the skill required for the various throws in the same way we understand the difficulty of bowling a cricket ball).

So without that physical association, pro-wrestling goes for the emotion. It tells stories from the heart, using familiar emotions to invest people in the characters and make the fans want to see one guy win and one guy lose. I don’t know the physical actions involved, but I understand winning. I understand wanting to get into it with someone I disagree with, or someone who insults me. I understand wanting to be the best, and the desire to get revenge on someone who screwed me or ruined a moment of triumph.

Those emotions give context to the in-ring action, and that context gives it the meaning it lacks because I don’t have the physical relationship.

All of this can be used by spec-fic writers. We frequently display worlds that our readers don’t have any physical relationship with, presenting them with impossible experiences that we need to make comprehensible. And the way we do this is to look for the familiar – little actions, big emotions, a place for the reader to connect – so there’s a sliver of truth amid the fantasy we’re presenting.

I was never good at sports. At all. I dislike watching most sports as a result, ’cause my physical realionship to cricket or football or anything else is largely filled with bad memories and inadequacy.

But story, I totally get story. I get the connection between action and emotion.

And in this respect, Al Snow, professional wrestler, is a source of truly brilliant writing advice.