on writing, "but what IS it?"

[lagilman]

And so on Twitter, a random comment about 'are you working if...?" led to Kris Rusch and I getting feisty* over what constitutes "writing."

Kris said that words-on-page is "the only sign" of writing, and that nothing else count. I disagreed: the inspiration and the thinking and the researching are all part of the writing. Words-on-page is the final and most important part of it, of course: if you don't get the words down, nobody else can see what you've done/share the story.

But to say that words-on-page is the ONLY sign... that bothered me. A lot.

A story isn't words. Words are what convey the story. The stronger and more effective your conveyance, the better people respond. That's the goal. But Kris would agree that a story without research is going to fall flat, no matter how well-structured your words (as her former editor, I am in a prime position to say that Kris does a hell of a lot of research!)

And I know from my own and others' experience that research triggers ideas, and the ideas trigger thoughts, and those thoughts move the story in ways we-the-writer might not have anticipated or planned.

So how can that process be any less "writing a story" than the actual choosing/typing of words?

Idea + Plotting + Research + Word choice + Editing/revising = Writing.

I suspect that this is an argument of semantics, but it really bothers me to see writers discounting everything that comes before as not actually working-at-writing. Because it IS. And they should give themselves credit for the whole damned difficult process.





As an aside, I have decided that the push to post daily wordcounts has the potential to become akin to measuring dicks in the locker room: pointless and potentially damaging. Too much guilt coming off people who "only" wrote 1000 words, or "only" revised one chapter. If you're on schedule, and feel good about what you did - isn't that a good day's work?




*we've been friends for a long time. Hopefully nobody thought it was daggers-drawn....

Comments

[author-guy.livejournal.com]

I often hear people say they wrote X thousands of words today, and then they say they're deleting whole scenes that don't work. I write a few hundred words in the mornings, but I rarely delete anything. We get to the same place.

I can't say that I completely agree with you about the writing, though. I don't know what's coming next until I've written down what happens now. I experiment with words until I find a set that will represent the story logic I follow. I don't know the logic until I've got the words. The story changes depending on the words I use to tell it.

[lagilman]

Except that nowhere do I say that the words-on-page isn't a major part. Just not the ONLY part.

Do you not research your facts, and change the story as you learn new things? Have you never amended a plot to include new information, or to work around discovering something wasn't possible?

All that shapes the story, too. That's all part of the writing. That's my point.

[author-guy.livejournal.com]

I have been known to engage in a spot of research. But that sort of thing is part of the story logic I would be trying to embody with my words.

[claireeddy.livejournal.com]

If it is just the actual words on a page that are the sole measure of a being I am in trouble. There have been times when I have puzzled over copy for weeks to finally have the hook pop into my head at three in the morning. Or in the shower. Ditto the brilliant :) solution to a thorny editorial problem.

In my head I know that I was processing the project on some level a good chunk of that time...and I count every one of those minutes as actual work.

It isn't just quantity but quality. And the Muse, she can be one mercurial @^#$@#!@...

My two cents.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, the shower. I strongly suspect that there is a designated shower muse who does this to us on purpose.

[lagilman]

Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.

[mt-yvr.livejournal.com]

...Story idea.

:P

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, yes. To quote Mrs Cotton from I Capture the Castle, 'I have no use for antiquity in plumbing.'

[kthanna.livejournal.com]

I have to agree. I saw that tweet :D

I have a long way to go before I reach a publishing credit, but I have been writing a long time. My usual course of action has always been Idea YAY Pants it! And as I write these fantastic word counts, my story gets further and further away from my initial idea, and further and further out of my control, until I have no clue what to do with it.

Obviously, that sort of writing doesn't work for me.

So now, I'm working with something very similar to:
Idea + Plotting + Research + Word choice + Editing/revising = Writing.

And I feel better about this story than I have about any one of my other shelved first draft books.

But - as someone once said to me: This is what works for me. What might work for me, might be someone else's bane.

Oh, and friends can usually discuss anything. After all, everyone is entitled to their own methods and opinions, right?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I tend to agree with you, especially the research stage (and the bouncing ideas off people stage, too). Word counts are, for me, a way of keeping myself moving as much as anything.

[llwheeler.livejournal.com]

On a day when "all" I've done is 150 words, a page of story notes, a lot of thinking, and sent out one submission... Thanks. I needed to hear this.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I'm much more on your side of things in this one. :)

[ubiquitous-a.livejournal.com]

I'm in agreement, though I come at it from a different perspective. I write for a living, but rather than fiction, I do technical business proposal writing.

The final product, which in my case is a document going to a prospective customer, is only one step out of what is a lengthy process. Before that, I'm researching, talking to subject matter experts for their input, looking at the "problem" to determine in my head what I believe is a good solution. How I want to present certain ideas as an overview is critical, since I can't possibly sit down and write the actual words until I know how I'm going to outline the proposal.

To my mind, fiction works in somewhat the same way. I can't sit down and write the words until I had a good picture in my head of the character, the scene, the story, etc. So yeah, I agree that word counts definitely aren't the end-all, be-all of whether you accomplished something as a writer.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

[(Anonymous)]

Daggers down? I'm smarter than to go toe-to-toe with you, girl. :-)

It's not a question of semantics. It's a question of method. And two pros who have already established their methods aren't going to change each other's minds.

What I see, since I teach so many writers, especially writers whose careers have stalled, is that these writers use things like research and "thinking" as ways to avoid actual writing. So in a public forum, like Twitter, I'm always going to say that research isn't writing.

However, research is necessary to writing, and you must make time to research as well. But if you're not getting words on the page, you're not writing. It's not comparing dicks. I don't care if you only get 100 new words that day. Then you're writing.

For too many writers, though, research is an excuse. But I didn't want to say that on Twitter because people would think I was saying that to Laura Anne, who works her butt off and always has.

Sometimes, Twitter has real limitations. Laura Anne & I just hit one. If we'd been on a panel, we would have a spirited discussion, then laugh, because we essentially agree.

Re: Kristine Kathryn Rusch

[lagilman]

Yeah, 140 characters, even if you "con't" is a problem. But it also forces you to think through your words (thereby proving my point! heh)

For myself, I can't separate out what I believe about writing vs what I say about writing. Especially when I think that it may lead to people underestimating what they've accomplished in a day.



However, please don't combine my aside about posting word counts with my main essay. My concern is not people counting, but people COMPARING count.

[katatomic.livejournal.com]

I agree wholeheartedly. I spend a lot of time doing things that I consider writing that don't result in wordcount. And I hate the dick-measuring aspect of posting wordcount.

The other tricky bit of "writing" is the functions that aren't writing itself but which get it in shape (editing, copyedits, proofing), or get it published (submissions, contracts, queries). I think they all count as part of the job of "writing" and we have to give them some respect.

[(Anonymous)]

A push to post daily word counts gives me hives.

One of the biggest complaints of software developers is management who measures programmer productivity by number of lines of code written, with anecdotes like the one in which a programming team was handed a major project, and a "senior" manager coming through later in the day saw a programmer typing at a terminal and commented he was the only one "working". The rest were studying the specs, looking up references, or simply staring at nothing.

Programmers know what the manager didn't: before you start to code, you have to properly understand what you are trying to build, and you need to spend a lot of time on the design stage, making sure the specs are coherent and you understand what the program is supposed to do, how it's supposed to do it, and how the pieces will fit together.

If you don't do that, the project is a guaranteed fail, with endless time burned doing it over instead of doing it right.

Similar thoughts apply to writing, with the added complication that every writer is different, and has a different approach that works for them.

An old friend is SF writer David Sherman (the Starfist military SF series.) When we first met, decades ago, he was a painter, later turning to sculpture in bronze, before turning his hand to writing. He commented on his sculpture that the fun part was the creative process, planning a piece in his mind, determining the base, figuring out how the armature would be shaped, deciding how the clay would be layered on the armature to form the piece that would become the mold... Actually making the sculpture was just rote work.

I strongly suspect he applies a similar approach to writing, and has the story pretty well mapped out in his head before he starts committing words to paper.

But that's David's approach. Other writers may "think on paper", and sitting down at the keyboard and turning out words may be the way they turn on the tap and shape the story as they go. For some folks, posting daily word counts may be a useful incentive. For others, it will be an albatross around their necks, interfering with the real process of writing.

What counts isn't the number of words you write per day - it's the number that become part of the finished, salable story. If time spent thinking about the story before putting words on the page produces a better ratio of total words written to words used in the finished product, by all means, think.

______
Dennis