Out, damn'd words! out, I say!
I need an icon that has this look: =X or =S or =/. In the meantime, those little non-smiley faces will have to do!
Anyone else sign up for getyourwordsout? I did, and already I'm struggling to keep up with the word count.
The whole thing is based around the notion that only 10% of your writing is actually usable, so if everybody pledges to write 200K+ words in 2009, they should ideally end up with a 20K word masterpiece. Or, short of that, a 20K word readable something.
The problem I have with this, though, is that I normally agonize over every. single. sentence. that I write. (Should I use "said"? Should I have the character say it blandly? Should the dialogue stand on its own and speak for itself? Grrr....! That's it, time for a break.) I edit as I write, really, so the process takes months on end to churn out a chapter. (Anybody who read/is reading the still incomplete Things We Knew Were True will know this all too well.)
I kind of feel like it's wasteful to write and then discard the majority of what you've written. The upshot of this, however, is that I usually end up with only 15% of what I would have written if I didn't simultaneously write and edit, and still only 70% of that is actually usable. (My math is pretty poor these days, but I think that's still roughly 10%.)
So, hopefully this exercise will encourage me to write more, even if a lot of it is crap.
ETA: I still post the crapness, though, all 100% of it. This may be progress in the other direction. =|
Anyone else sign up for getyourwordsout? I did, and already I'm struggling to keep up with the word count.
The whole thing is based around the notion that only 10% of your writing is actually usable, so if everybody pledges to write 200K+ words in 2009, they should ideally end up with a 20K word masterpiece. Or, short of that, a 20K word readable something.
The problem I have with this, though, is that I normally agonize over every. single. sentence. that I write. (Should I use "said"? Should I have the character say it blandly? Should the dialogue stand on its own and speak for itself? Grrr....! That's it, time for a break.) I edit as I write, really, so the process takes months on end to churn out a chapter. (Anybody who read/is reading the still incomplete Things We Knew Were True will know this all too well.)
I kind of feel like it's wasteful to write and then discard the majority of what you've written. The upshot of this, however, is that I usually end up with only 15% of what I would have written if I didn't simultaneously write and edit, and still only 70% of that is actually usable. (My math is pretty poor these days, but I think that's still roughly 10%.)
So, hopefully this exercise will encourage me to write more, even if a lot of it is crap.
ETA: I still post the crapness, though, all 100% of it. This may be progress in the other direction. =|