What Kind of Writer are You-- Fast or Slow?

[AuntShecky]

Pardon me if you find the topic of the writing process "inside baseball," and consider "creativity " as so sacred a phenomenon that any questioning of "how" a work is produced is sacrilegious.

But I'm curious. When you sit down to write something, do the words come out easily or with difficulty? Does everything flow through a Muse directly to the page (or computer screen)? And once the material is put down, is it good enough to leave alone, so that, aside from a quick read-over, editing seems almost superfluous?

Or-- does it seem like a long, hard slog-- occasionally exhilarating, but mostly time-consuming, frustrating, and painful -- in line with the famous quip from sportswriter Red Smith: "Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and just open a vein"?

Thanks to the extremely useful "backspace" and "delete" keys, writing with a PC helps save paper. It also allows yours fooly to write up to twenty versions of the same sentence until I find the one that satisfies me (or decide to give up it and move on to the next sentence.) Consequently, it takes me hours to write just one paragraph, a full page the whole day.

What I'm doing is revising while I write. Does that work for you as well, or do you have a saner approach whereby you get the whole draft down first and then go back and revise? The latter method seems more logical to me, but as much as I try, I can't work that way. (Hope it doesn't mean I'm carrying some deep-seated psychological problem, some yucky-sounding syndrome like "anal-retentive." One thing I do know: I'm not a "perfectionist" -- you should see my apartment!) But that may be part of the reason why it takes so long to work on projects. Most of them usually end up finished. Eventually.

Even so, I never ask myself -- "If it's so damn hard, why do it?" I can't imagine not writing. It's a strange kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior, sort of fun, and sort of not.

So--tell me, LitNutters. Are you fast or slow writers? Or a little of both?

[YesNo]

Metrical verse seems to happen easily once I become aware of a theme that I find interesting. The first draft is done in seconds. There's a sound pattern and I follow it. I find it harder to write prose such as this post although there might be the same amount of words involved. My few attempts at free verse have been failures. I end up writing short or micro fiction. I can't imagine anyone writing something as long as a novel, but people seem to be able to do it.

[miyako73]

Auntie, my experience so far in writing two chapters tells me that a good writing is a difficult one. Maybe it is due to English being my second language, but I don't think flow has a grammar. I feel it. When it doesn't feel right, I edit and edit and edit. Writing a good one page (at least, to me) will take me a lot of hours. If still its not good to my hearing and feeling after several edits, i live it alone. I edit it again later.

[MANICHAEAN]

Dear Aunty
I find I have two habits when it comes to writing. Firstly I'm always observing. This is a bit perverse at times, as instead of getting involved fully in the emotion/feeling of what I'm doing, I always somehow stand outside. Then there is the germination of ideas for a story, whether from; reading, memories, dreams etc. I just let them brew in my head until, almost like child-birth, its time.

The writing straight onto the I-pad is almost immediate, as key words/phrases are already there. Normally one or two drafts and then it's ready.

Warm regards
M.

[cacian]

It depends. But the longest I have written a short story was two days.

[hillwalker]

Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow. . .

But seriously, I'm probably a fast worker. It all comes out in a rush - then I go over it later and smooth the edges or fill in the potholes. Overall I find the stuff I scribble down in a flurry of 'creativity' (?) is better than the material I crowbar out of the keyboard letter by letter.

H

[Volya]

I can write a lot very quickly if I'm inspired, but when I'm not I find it impossible to write even a sentence.

[AuntShecky]

Dear Aunty
I find I have two habits when it comes to writing. Firstly I'm always observing. This is a bit perverse at times, as instead of getting involved fully in the emotion/feeling of what I'm doing, I always somehow stand outside. Then there is the germination of ideas for a story, whether from; reading, memories, dreams etc. I just let them brew in my head until, almost like child-birth, its time.

The writing straight onto the I-pad is almost immediate, as key words/phrases are already there. Normally one or two drafts and then it's ready.

Warm regards
M.

You're absolutely right about "observing." I like to quote Henry Miller's advice to writers: "Keep your eyes and ears open." That's even better than waiting for "inspiration" -- kind of relying on an abstraction settling upon you from above. Fact is, ideas are all around us, just waiting for us to pick 'em up-- how? Just by looking, "observing."

I hear you, M. about letting the idea "brew" in your head. That's been my experience as well, except when it comes time to type it out, that's when the problems (expressed in the original post) arise.

Way back when Truman Capote was still alive, which was back when actual writers -- not just "celebrities" with unexplained talents and one-hit wonders-- were guests on talk shows, I heard him confess that it sometimes took him all day to write one good sentence. That's about the only thing I have in common with good old little Truman.

Incidentally, now that it's that "time of year again," if you get a chance read Capote's "A Christmas Memory," I mean the story, not the made-for-TV version of it. The piece is so perfect, maybe there's something good about being a "slow" writer.

Not referring to anyone else's work, I don't really trust anything that I can "dash" off in just a couple of minutes. I'm haunted by Papa Hemingway's warning: "Easy writing makes hard
reading."

[WolfLarsen]

For me writing is sort of like vomiting or sex or urinating or even defecating. But imagine that you're frantically vomiting or having sex where you're breaking the bed and the neighbors are complaining because of all the thumping & thumping & thumping or you're urinating all over the world or your defecating a giant skyscraper into the skyline of New York City or Chicago. That's what the first draft is like to me. It all comes quickly and frantically in the first draft!

For me editing is more like being a master craftsman carpenter on a construction site shaping the fine woodwork. There's still some creativity – but not as much. What I'm trying to doing in editing is to zoooom up the pace of it – turbocharge it – to make it more truthful to all of the raging energy & storms that are inside of me.

Think of an Aleutian storm (Alaska) raging throughout the land. That's the first draft for me. Editing is picking up the pieces and making it all work and cutting out the fuller.

[Scheherazade]

For me editing is more like being a master craftsman carpenter on a construction site shaping the fine woodwork.

But not like being potty trained?

[miyako73]

I wish writing is like defecating. I'll just poop on squares of toilet paper and smell the metaphors. Thinking is a torture.

[Delta40]

I have 'marination time' It's a feeling inside of me when I know something is cooking. I let it happen and don't consciously go into it. Then I know it's time to write and it pours out. I edit and leave it to set in stone. On longer projects, it's pretty much the same but the edit process may take longer.

[morinia]

My head is full with words and sentences and ideas. But when I start writing I don't like any of it and I find myself changing everything. Sometimes I delete all of it, very quickly.
Still, as a student and later when I learned Journalism I was considered a brilliant writer. Teachers used to praise my stories in class or bring them as an example for good writing.
So where did it all go?
It's sad you know, since this has been my profession for years. Translating and editing. It is such an ungrateful profession having to erase and change and delete. Eventually I put an end to it and became a gardener......

[Rainyhawaii]

I used to have the same problem. It'd be super slow and take forever to get anything done. Then I did NaNoWriMo this year and I didn't really have time to care about how it sounded, I just had to write the 50000 words in a month. It really helped me to get over the re-editing one sentence or paragraph dozens of times before moving on. It was easy because I had all the ideas so I just kinda went with that. Editing it isn't as fun though. The stuff is all there so it's not as hard as when you're still writing it all, but it still takes a really long time.

There's a person in my writing class who had the same problem so they taped a piece of construction paper to their screen and just kept typing. It prevented them from seeing what they had written so they couldn't go back and edit it. Apparently it helped them a lot. I'd either suggest NaNo or the construction paper if you really need to get over it. NaNo because when you're writing it's only about getting the 50000 done so you're not supposed to care about how it sounds. Just let go and write away kinda thing. I'd suggest the latter method simply because I've heard it works from a few people, although I don't know anything about that method myself.

[jayat]

Pardon me if you find the topic of the writing process "inside baseball," and consider "creativity " as so sacred a phenomenon that any questioning of "how" a work is produced is sacrilegious.

But I'm curious. When you sit down to write something, do the words come out easily or with difficulty? Does everything flow through a Muse directly to the page (or computer screen)? And once the material is put down, is it good enough to leave alone, so that, aside from a quick read-over, editing seems almost superfluous?

Or-- does it seem like a long, hard slog-- occasionally exhilarating, but mostly time-consuming, frustrating, and painful -- in line with the famous quip from sportswriter Red Smith: "Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and just open a vein"?

Thanks to the extremely useful "backspace" and "delete" keys, writing with a PC helps save paper. It also allows yours fooly to write up to twenty versions of the same sentence until I find the one that satisfies me (or decide to give up it and move on to the next sentence.) Consequently, it takes me hours to write just one paragraph, a full page the whole day.

What I'm doing is revising while I write. Does that work for you as well, or do you have a saner approach whereby you get the whole draft down first and then go back and revise? The latter method seems more logical to me, but as much as I try, I can't work that way. (Hope it doesn't mean I'm carrying some deep-seated psychological problem, some yucky-sounding syndrome like "anal-retentive." One thing I do know: I'm not a "perfectionist" -- you should see my apartment!) But that may be part of the reason why it takes so long to work on projects. Most of them usually end up finished. Eventually.

Even so, I never ask myself -- "If it's so damn hard, why do it?" I can't imagine not writing. It's a strange kind of obsessive-compulsive behavior, sort of fun, and sort of not.

So--tell me, LitNutters. Are you fast or slow writers? Or a little of both?

Hi, well, I realise I am not the only one who wanted to ask about that. Actually, I wished to.
What I do is writing two or three senteces and then come back to see if:

1- they are written as I would like to read them in terms of style, expression and, of course, 'grammaticality' (use of dictionaries as well as thethinking time, in which I experienced the real joy of writing: just the moment after to write a sentence, the moment you cook it in your mind.)

2- Pay attention if these two or three sentences I begin the story with fit with the whole scene in my mind. If there are non-wished anticipatons, the order of the facts is respected, that's it, the logical issue that arises when you try to "weave" (I do not know if that figurative word works) a story.

snags: I read and edit eight or nine times a page, which takes me hours, that is, days. I spent the rest of the time reading which is the fuel of what we're doing not "to open a vein". All that can make I get upset. For the moment all the try outs in my life has ended in my stories upsetting.