Counting words

Ever wondered how many words a professional writer produces in a working day? I’ve heard of one successful novelist who tootles down to his shed after breakfast, writes no more than 1,000 words in the morning, takes a leisurely lunch and then edits those same words in the afternoon. Hardly a punishing schedule, in my opinion. And yet working at that pace, five days a week, is enough to produce two novels, each of 130,000 words, every year. Redrafting many times in order to get it right can halve that output, of course, but if a novelist releases one book a year it is usually deemed to be a productive career.

That’s fine for full-time novelists who are fortunate enough to know that their words will be published when completed, but for amateur authors trying to squeeze writing time into their busy lives it’s another story altogether. Holding down a day job and a family and then trying to produce 1,000 more-or-less publishable words before bedtime is hugely challenging for anyone. My own novel progressed in fits and starts over many years. A typical day’s contribution, when I actually managed to write anything at all, was often around 500 words. Any movement in the right direction felt good, no matter how small. I found that the word count progressed faster during dialogue scenes, and things moved much more slowly during descriptive passages.

Actually, if I average out the total words written in my novel over the 7 year period in which they were produced, it only comes to 75 words a day. Not exactly blistering performance. Kids write more than that each day in their illiterate txt msgs.

There were times when I was able to take the novel on ‘holiday’ with me, and this was when the word count really started to fly. I discovered that I could comfortably manage 2-3,000 words a day, tucked in a Mediterranean villa with no other work to do apart from occasional sunbathing. One week I experimented to see how far I could push the limits of my creative output. The word count nudged upwards: 4,000 a day, 5,000 a day, 6,000 a day. Then I relaxed and dropped back to 3,000 for a couple of days. I had this section of The Sphinx Scrolls plot already mapped out and my characters were sufficiently developed to enable me to progress quickly.

Then, totally ‘in the zone’, I wrote a massive 7,000 words between sunrise and midnight. I know, you’re thinking quality not quantity. This was all first draft stuff, of course, so literary perfection wasn’t essential: getting the story completed was the goal. I knew I could then go back and tidying it all up (which is what I’m doing now). I think it’s more important to finish a very rough first draft than to have a few pages of exquisite English that never become a novel because the writer’s progress was so slow that they couldn’t maintain their motivation.

The level of concentration needed to write 7,000 words in a single day was phenomenal. Other people were staying at the villa too, but I barely noticed them even though I was working on the kitchen table and they were cooking and chatting around me. At the end of the day I felt as if I was punch drunk, my head throbbing from the marathon it had been asked to run. It was like being immersed in a virtual reality, living and breathing the story of the novel and the lives of the characters. My dreams were about the novel. My waking thoughts were about the novel. It was a great experience.

It takes a long time to warm up enough to be able to get the writing juices to flow so easily. You can’t do it from a cold start. You have to know your story, your characters, your style and your goals for the chapter. You also have to sleep well, be in a relaxed environment, and have people to feed you, water you, and even bathe you if necessary. You have to make sure your brain doesn’t need to think about anything except writing.

Getting all of these stars to align is a regrettably rare occurrence for most of us. The editing sweep I’m doing at the moment involves a mixture of reading, writing and rewriting. It’s been two weeks since I started this edit and my progress has averaged just under 3,000 words a day. The stars are not in their magical alignment yet. When they do, I’ll look forward to some amazing progress.

This blog is about 750 words, but that doesn’t count.

From taxi to tuk-tuk

I'm keen to make everything in the novel as believable as possible. I want details to be based on reality, and today I thought about the small issue of what kind of car do taxi drivers use in rural Guatemala. I've been in one myself, but it was ten years ago and I was too fascinated by the Mayan pyramids to notice what kind of car I was travelling in from Flores to Tikal. So I looked it up on the web today and discovered that Flores is now full of delightful-looking tuk-tuks: hybrid vehicles in a more traditional sense of the word, being made from the front half of a motorbike welded to a rolling bench at the rear. Inserting this detail added a little colour to the chapter by making Matt Baker’s journey to the edge of the jungle all the more uncomfortable.

With all the little edits I've been doing this week the word count has crept up to 167,000. Then there's a new scene I need to weave in near the beginning to develop a subplot about Ratty's attempt to sell a priceless carved Mayan stele before realising its true significance and trying, too late, to back out of the dodgy deal. That will add another thousand words or so. Adding to the word count is not my goal, by any means, but I have to admit that it's more satisfying when the document grows than when it shrinks. I sometimes look back at the 50,000 words I cut from the story a few years ago and wonder if I made the right decision. Why can't a novel be like a DVD of a movie, with deleted scenes and bonus features at the end? I'm sure some people would be interested to read the sequences that ended up on whatever is the writer's equivalent of a cutting room floor. A waste paper basket, I suppose.

Matt Baker has a scene in today's chapter where he meets a dying man who has read his book. Matt is a kind of Andy McNab character, a war hero turned writer, and people in the remotest parts of the world all seem to have their opinions on his work, good or bad. Those opinions crop up at the most inconvenient times for him in the story, and it's fun to have someone tell him with their final, rasping breath that his book sucks.

I’m nearly a week into my edits and I’ve worked on about 10% of the book. I need to speed up, because this redraft is meant to be a relatively straightforward matter of re-familiarising myself with the text and the story, cleaning up the book a little here and there as I go. When I’ve got the whole book freshly ‘uploaded’ into the RAM of my brain I can then tackle the more interesting and challenging aspects of the redrafting process, such as exploring each character’s true motives, deciding how much of those motives to reveal to the reader and when, finishing the subplots and ensuring they interweave seamlessly. Plus a million other things that are needed to make this book as good as I know I can make it. It’s Sunday tomorrow – no days off for me. I’ll try to finish a couple of chapters before Monday.