Hooray! Karen's group flourishes, you finish your novel, and readers everywhere win.
I may appear to be a fast writer now (by non-Nanowrimo, non-Jay Lake standards, anyway), but for years I was glacially slow. When Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day first came out, I made fun of my friend mischievouspie for buying it. "Sarah," she said, "if you were spending as much as 15 minutes a day on your dissertation, that would be a fucking lifestyle change."
"Oh," I said. "You're right. It would."
When my dissertation director finally decided to direct my dissertation by giving me actual directions (You'd be surprised at how radical that idea is--usually people are left to sink or swim at the dissertation stage), she wanted to see three pages a week from me. Oh, it was a stretch to produce those three pages a week! And, by dissertation-stage grad student standards, that pace of production is a pretty fast clip.
Once I was finally done with the damn dissertation, I made time to read Carolyn See's book, and following her advice on building writing time into my day...well, actually, I took her advice to extremes, and then some...anyhow, in the first year after I escaped from academia, I cranked out 325,000 words of very rough draft. It was a completely unsustainable pace, and I don't anticipate ever being that productive again.
Last year, I did Nanowrimo and hit 50K on the last day of November, yet I think it's taken me about the past three weeks to rack up ten pages in the chapter I'm currently limping through.
Every time I think I've figured out what kind of writer I am, something changes.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-10-29 07:39 am (UTC)I may appear to be a fast writer now (by non-Nanowrimo, non-Jay Lake standards, anyway), but for years I was glacially slow. When Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day first came out, I made fun of my friend
"Oh," I said. "You're right. It would."
When my dissertation director finally decided to direct my dissertation by giving me actual directions (You'd be surprised at how radical that idea is--usually people are left to sink or swim at the dissertation stage), she wanted to see three pages a week from me. Oh, it was a stretch to produce those three pages a week! And, by dissertation-stage grad student standards, that pace of production is a pretty fast clip.
Once I was finally done with the damn dissertation, I made time to read Carolyn See's book, and following her advice on building writing time into my day...well, actually, I took her advice to extremes, and then some...anyhow, in the first year after I escaped from academia, I cranked out 325,000 words of very rough draft. It was a completely unsustainable pace, and I don't anticipate ever being that productive again.
Last year, I did Nanowrimo and hit 50K on the last day of November, yet I think it's taken me about the past three weeks to rack up ten pages in the chapter I'm currently limping through.
Every time I think I've figured out what kind of writer I am, something changes.