Writing: Fast or Slow?

I personally take longer and write carefully, but everybody's writing process is different, so there's no right or wrong only what works best for you.

Nanowrimo primary purpose is to finish a manuscript. That's all it is about, it teaches people to sit behind a desk, on a bed, on the floor (wherever they feel confortable) and finish a work. Quality is not in the equation. Contrarily to what you seem to imply, your writing pace has nothing to do with how good your writing will be. I am a slow writer and thought that by taking my time to carefully choose the sentences I will lighten my rewriting and editing load... heck no! No matter how fast you write and even how well you write you will heavily be rewriting and editing.

Why? Because a novel is more than just beautiful sentences following each other. It's mostly an idea, a story which will evolve as you write it down. Some parts will be erased other will be transformed and most will be added. Like a piece of music, a book is something which grows with time, it always need some cuts here and there. You can't expect to write slowly so you don't have to make any changes later on, because later on you (the writer) will be a different person than now, with different perspective in things and different way of expressing your ideas. Your book will grow with you.

I pound out the draft, and then revise; but I'm a pantser, so that works for me. First drafts (and although I can usually top 60K for NaNo, that's not a complete story for me) take 2-3 months. With revisions, a book will take me 18 months - 2 years to complete.

I really do think it's an individual cognitive thing. People build stories in different ways. The important thing is getting where you're going.

Sarahani said:

Nanowrimo primary purpose is to finish a manuscript.

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I know this thread isn't about NaNo, but I'd dispute this a bit. NaNo's stated purpose is to get you to churn out 50,000 words in 30 days. As a practical matter, I've found NaNo to be more about:

- turning writing into a habit
- pushing through plot issues and ugly bits that aren't as much fun to write
- learning not to sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for the muse

I'd finished one single novel-length work in my life before I first did NaNo in 2010 (after I'd been writing for 41 years). I've now finished seven.

In some genres, 50,000 is a reasonable length for a full-length manuscript, but in a great many it's not. I'd hate for people to be discouraged from trying NaNo because they think they'll have to squish a story into a space that may be too small for it.

Kyuugatsu said:

I've done NaNoWriMo a few times, and something about the idea of writing a novel in just a month appeals to me. I'm working on an actual novel now, and so far I've been following the NaNo inspired approach of writing a lot in a relatively short amount of time.

I'm running into a problem, though - my "speed writing" isn't actually as good as my "slow writing" is. Now that I have a good outline and a fairly decent idea of where things are going, something about this approach of hammering out a sub par first draft feels off. I'm going to end up rewriting a lot of it, and I know it.

Since most advice around writing is something along the lines of "first drafts suck, just get it done", I'm struggling with the choice of either finishing a hasty draft and rewriting almost all of it, or writing carefully so that I don't have to change too many things in the second draft.

What's your opinion?

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Since you seem to like the idea of a deadline, but the month is hampering you, why not just change your timeline and say you're going to do it in two or three months? Adjust your pace accordingly, try it for a couple of weeks and see if you're still getting a decent, consistent output but a more polished product?

First drafts don't have to suck. I mean. They often DO suck, and they'll never, ever be as good as a finished product, but you can have a first draft which doesn't require oodles of overhaul. What I mean is, don't be resigned to that if you feel taking a bit more time saves you editing later

Write however suits, basically. A lot of indie authors regularly turn out a book a month, but that's not for me. 3-4 months for a first draft is what I'm comfortable doing (and then bloody forever editing afterwards... sigh).

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I don't like writing fast unless my imagination is running rampant in a scene and I can't stop getting it down. I get a draft down, then take my ever sweet time getting feedback, tearing it apart, and making sure as much as possible fits together. If I'm in a fiction writing class here at university I have to write at a reasonable pace due to our ten week terms. If I'm on my own time, I take lots of time...maybe to much haha.

Kyuugatsu said:

Since most advice around writing is something along the lines of "first drafts suck, just get it done", I'm struggling with the choice of either finishing a hasty draft and rewriting almost all of it, or writing carefully so that I don't have to change too many things in the second draft.

What's your opinion?

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Go with your instincts, which seem to be telling you to take your time. Getting it right is more important than writing it fast, particularly if writing fast is going to create more work or the kind of work you'd rather not do.

It's highly dependent on each individual writer. I've read writers who take five years to write a book and writers who take five weeks. If they're a talented writer, there's no discernible difference in the quality of the work.

I've found the same thing in my own writing. When I go back through and edit (after waiting a few months usually), I find that I can't tell which parts I churned out at a rapid pace and which parts I agonized over, barely forcing the words out.

If you want to increase your writing speed, you can change up what you're doing. If you're a plotter, try pantsing it and letting the story carry you to wherever it will. If you're a pantser and struggling to figure out what happens next, take a step back and plot out at least the next few chapters.

I've found that approach can be very effective for me. I struggle to plot an entire book beyond a general idea of where the story is going, but if I take thirty minutes before my writing session to plan out that writing session, I often find I can write 4,000 or 5,000 words.

In the 4 novels I've written (I'm in the process of editing one now), I've always planned a bit before starting and then just written. I can do 1500-2000 words a day in a couple of hours and then the rest of the day I think about what I'm going to write the next day. I can write 80,000 words in 3-ish months and then after that I set it aside and edit a bit later. I take as much time to edit as I have written. So I can churn out a manuscript in 6-9 months.

Really it's all subjective. Whatever works for you works for you. Some people write fast and some write slowly. There's no correct way.

I know people who have done lots of NaNo competitions and written super fast and then not done anything with the manuscripts as they can't be bothered or think it's too poor quality to bother with. I've never been tempted to do NaNo as I know I cannot write that fast and it would simply be a mess at the end. Also my novels are longer than 50,000 words.

The advice "first drafts suck" is partially true. If you take a bit of time and plan and make sure that your first draft is reasonable, you'll have to spend less time revising and editing and fussing over problems. It all depends on where you want to put the effort in: planning, writing, or editing.

If you suffer from writer's block though, the best advice I can give is just try to start writing anything. Yes you'll need to edit heavily, but just write and the blockage will clear.

I've written the start of many novels, some amazingly awesome paragraphs, a literal encyclopedia of crappy ones, and a random short story or three. No matter how slow or fast I was in the writing process - readers are never going to know how long it took you to write it - they will read it at whatever pace they read it.

If I write fast, will that change your reading pace?

I've only managed to write 50k in November once, and it wasn't even a single cohesive draft. I've lost the file since, but from what I can remember the first 25k was A, written in five days, and B, relatively cohesive and almost completely devoid of SPaG errors, though it rambled a bit. So it's possible for at least some people to write quickly and get a first draft that doesn't need to be relegated to the depths of oblivion.

Nowadays I can only write about 2k in a day max, and usually closer to 500, but I haven't noticed an increase in the quality. If anything there's a subjective decrease, as my own inner critic has time to nitpick everything instead of me just barreling through. I also find my writing quality decreases when I don't know what I'm doing in a scene, because then I flail all over the place.

This is all my personal experience, though, and if you say your writing quality decreases when you write quickly there's no reason for me to disbelieve you. Speed without loss of quality is an advantage for authors looking to make a living at their writing, but I think it's something that takes practice and working up to it. In the meantime you can only write as fast as you can write, and if that means going slowly to get a first draft that you don't consider subpar then there's not really a problem with that.

I love Nanowrimo, but I think everyone gets something different out of it. It's terrific for developing a writing habit, and for understanding your capacity to write. Sometimes it's useful for getting the start of something.

Writing fast doesn't necessarily make for bad writing, but I do think it demands lots of practice first. I think it's a misnomer to say that all first drafts suck - they don't have to, and the fact that they are first drafts also doesn't mean they suck. I also reckon it depends enormously on the project itself. When I was writing a plot-driven story, I could add 3000-4000 pretty good words in a day. Right now I'm writing literary historical fiction, and I'm lucky to get down 500. The quality of the words isn't that different, they just demand different kinds of thinking.

There's definitely something to be said for just getting it down. Writing a novel can be a slow and frustrating process. But editing a novel can be even more slow and frustrating, so I guess you have to decide which process you want to labour over more.

Both of my published novels started as Nano projects. One of them took almost three years of editing with the publisher, and the other needed almost no edits. Both written in the same amount of time(ish), from the same process of chucking down 50,000 words in a month. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm envious of any writer who can write quickly and produce quality work. It takes me a year or more to write a novel.

If I write by hand, I can do up to 60 pages a day, but that's the most I can do in one day. The least I can do in one day is 20 pages. If I type, I can do up to 10,000 words a day. The least I can do is 6,000 a day, typed. It all depends on how fast the story is going and how quickly you can get your ideas out.

as worded, that makes it sound a bit like you're compelled to write 20 pages/6k a day whether you wish to or not

I think the whole "first drafts are crap" thing is taken as gospel a bit more than it should be. They *can* be crap, and if a writer is being hobbled by their internal editor, that concept can be liberating. A way of saying "let's just get the words down because we can fix them in post" rather than freezing up and staring at a blank page. Sort of like how NaNo participants talk about having "permission to write crap." It's not that anyone is actually encouraging people to write garbage, or suggesting that quality doesn't matter -- it's just meant to get you past mental blocks of perfectionism so you can write.

I write around 12-15 books a year, and my daily quota is 5,000 words. NaNo 2008 pushed me to a) write every day and b) see how much I could write each day, and I just kept going after that. It took a few months to figure out that 5K/day is a pace I can sustain (been doing it for almost 10 years now) without burning myself out or letting myself slack off. I also edit as I go, so my drafts are usually reasonably clean, and they've gotten cleaner with time (as people have mentioned before -- with time and practice, you'll write cleaner even at speed).

Everyone writes at their own pace, and that's totally okay. There's nothing right or wrong about any speed as long as it's comfortable and sustainable for you, and results in work that you're happy with. Work you're happy with can mean a pristine first draft that only needs a cursory edit, or it can mean something messy that needs heavy editing, or something in between. Some writers do their best work during revisions. Some do their best while drafting. It's just a matter of figuring out your own strengths, your stamina, and what ultimately gets you to the book that satisfies you.

I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to increase your speed/output -- I literally wrote a book on how to do that -- but you shouldn't feel like you have to write faster (or slower) to meet some arbitrary standard. Find your speed, go with it, and make no apologies for it.

It takes me at least a year to get my novels, which weight in at 140 to 160K words, through a first draft. That's just the way it is. Oh how I envy all you speedies.

I wish I could zip through writing and all the chores and demands of life, but I am fighting my basic nature, which is to dawdle, to wallow, to move dreamily through time. I do have another gear, but it is difficult for me to stay with it for very long . . . unless you piss me off.