2016 - end o year stats

So. What've we been up to in 2016?

However you look at it, it's been a heck of a year, but I'm going to ignore all the important stuff for now and go with my usual yearly round-up of how much I've written in the past 12 months, because that's something I feel relatively positive about and because I have some nice solid statistics to fall back on, rather than my own shouty opinions.

(I'm not posting all this to boast, btw. I just like stats, and I like being able to take stock of what I've done in a year. Also I hope it'll show that everyone's output is different, we all work at different speeds, we all have different definitions of what is a fair amount of work, and no one should ever make themselves (or anyone else) feel bad for doing more or less than the next guy.)

In total, I wrote 414,204 words, which equates to approximately 1131 words a day average. To compare, in 2015, I wrote 359,224 words (about 984 words a day average).

These totals include everything - first drafts, rewriting, editing, blog posts, competition entries... anything I can claim with a straight face as creative writing. I also included drawing as writing (using the vague definition that a finished picture is worth a thousand words).

Breaking this down into positives:

I wrote the first drafts of two new stories, one of which is now my favourite thing I've written.
I edited two other novels to close-enough-to-finished level.
I polished TERROR ISLAND and released it as an ebook.
I filled up two notebooks with notes, ideas, and random crap.
I wrote every day, even if it was just a couple of sentences (although there were a couple of close calls).
I read 91 books.

And into negatives:

I didn't get as much drawing done as I wanted. Maybe only two or three days included any drawing.
I didn't blog very much.
I didn't crit as many stories for other people as I should've. In fact, I still have three crits outstanding, which is very poor behaviour on my part.
I still don't reply to my emails in a timely fashion.

But in general, I'm happy with my output for the year. I feel like I've done okay. I really hope everyone else feels they've done okay too, despite this horrid year, and achieved something they can be content with.

I'm going to do a separate post about the books I've read, because I'm sure you're anxious to see my stats about those too. :)

Happy 2017, peeps. Stay safe out there.

2015 - end of year writing stats

That's a boring heading, isn't it? Anyways, fresh from the Rakie-spreadsheet, some stats about my writing progress in 2015:

Total Word Count: 359,224
(Total for 2014: 295,670)

I'm happy with that. The main projects I worked on this year were:

Finishing The Extra (my Nano novel from November 2014 which I finally completed in March and have ignored since).
A small amount of work on YA superhero story Search & Destroy.
Rewriting and editing Fourth to the Devil (including dreaded synopsis and query letters).
Finally redrafting my YA time-travel, haunted house bonanza 2114, which was started for Nano 2013 and has now been renamed 2116 in honour of how unnecessarily long it's taken me to complete.
Notes on a supernatural crime story, White Death, that I really want to start work on.
Completed NaNoWriMo 2015 with Animal Bones, a rewrite of one of my earliest stories.
And the first draft of Floor 156, a dystopian thriller which I'm pretty sure no one will ever get to read, ever (some things are only written for our own funsies).

Oh, and the ebook of Home Ground came out. :)

One resolution for last year was to write every day, which I just about managed, although it was a close call on a few days and frequently I achieved only a few scribbled notes. Even so, I appear to have averaged approximately 980 words a day (allowing a margin for my shoddy maths), which is very respectable if true.

I also resolved that drawing counted as writing. This was to encourage me to devote more time to drawing, and I assigned an arbitrary word count to time spent (given a picture's worth a thousand words, and all that). I didn't finish anything major, aside from some wedding invites for my sister that turned out okay, but I'm happy that I spent a little more time than usual on a skill I've sadly neglected.

Soooo... projects for 2016...

First and last I need to finish the rebranded 2116. I'm at the horrible stage of editing where you read everything aloud and agonise for hours about word choice ("Do I mean bright or do I mean clear? Is spiderwebbing a real word? Is a culvert what I think it is?"). After that I need to redraft all the crap I wrote last year.

And then I have a stolen idea about dragons that I want to pursue...

In 2016 I will write. I will read. I will draw. I will blog. It's also likely I will drink too much wine and shout at cooking shows on TV. In my spare moments I might sleep. Also, Fallout 4.

Best wishes to you all for a shiny 2016. ("SHINY! That's the word I want!")

how many drafts?

This came up in conversation a while ago: how many drafts do you do on each novel before you consider it finished?

Which led to the further question: what do you count as a draft?

My idea of a first draft differs hugely from someone else's idea. What I consider a second draft could be considered a third draft by some, or a not-even-first draft by others. It was interesting to see how opinions differed, and it revealed a lot about everyone's working habits.

This is how it breaks down for me... or, more accurately, how I'd define my drafts:

The first draft is the one with the spelling errors.
The second draft is the one with the plot holes.
The third draft is the one with the character problems.
The fourth draft is the one with the niggly little problems that are a complete ball-ache to fix.
The fifth draft is the one with the overwriting.

More accurately still, those are the times when I realise those problems are present and attempt to fix them. :)

So, for me (and I'm speaking exclusively about me here, since everyone's methods are different and no one should attempt to imitate me in anything ever), the first draft tends to be written as fast as possible and is therefore a bit of a hot mess. The first sweep I do it is mostly to make notes, figure out what works and what doesn't, fix some obvious problems, and generally sit with my head in my hands wondering how the hell this story will ever be made good. While I'm at it, I tend to fix any spelling errors I see. I know other people will advise not bothering with things like that at this early stage (chances are that the amended paragraphs will eventually be discarded anyway), but if I leave the spelling errors they'll annoy me every time I read through the story, and that distracts me from the process of, y'know, actual fixing.

At this point I can see where the plot is falling down. So the next draft is for shoring up the gaping holes.

The completed second draft is usually the one I send out to my writing groups for critiquing. I don't like to send it out any earlier because... well, if there're really obvious problems then I should be able to spot them myself. It's not polite to waste everyone's time asking about things I already know, and I'd much rather get their valuable input on the things I can't spot - which is usually everything else.

I find it very difficult, for example, to identify problems with characters, probably because I'm too close to them, and tend to find them charming and endearing rather than, say, obnoxious and annoying. I need someone else to point that out to me.

So the third draft is for fixing up the terrible characters. Which in turn usually creates more plot difficulties (at least for me) as the characters start to act/react in different ways.

Writing groups are also the best way I've found to spot the niggly little ball-ache problems. This can cover just about everything else - POV issues, technical mistakes, problems with pacing and dialogue, etc. Some of these are obviously easier to fix than others. And some create more plot holes or character difficulties, so then I've got to go back and fix those as well...

By now I'm completely sick of this story and just wish it would disappear into a hole forever. On the other hand, it's also the point where the story is finally taking shape and the finish line is in sight. Or, alternatively, it's where I realise the story is never going to work - its foundations are too wonky, its plot is too blah, or I've inadvertently stolen the entire middle section from a much better book. But I'm too close to finished now so all I can do is push for the end...

Final draft is for clearing out the overwriting. I overwrite a LOT. I don't know what the national average is, but I'm sure my writing is towards the top-heavy end. To be fair, I try to take out some of the overwriting as I go through the other drafts, again because otherwise I can't properly see what I'm doing, and because it annoys me. But on this final sweep I'll try to take out everything that's not needed. Take out the unnecessary adverbs, dialogue tags, redundant sentences and repeated words. Leave only the good stuff. Which is, obviously, much easier to say than do.

And then I'll read the bloody thing through once more, this time aloud. This is to catch any remaining awkward phrasing, bad dialogue, residual spelling mistakes (yes, they're still there), and that sort of thing. It's also my least favourite bit of the whole process, because a) I am SO SICK of reading this story by now, and b) I hate the sound of my own voice (not that you'd believe it, I know).

It all makes me quite nostalgic for the innocent times when I used to think the process of writing a novel was just writing it down, printing it out, then putting up your feet and feeling chuffed with yourself.

Too, too much

Very interesting article here about the origins of literary revision and how it has altered over the years:

Revising Your Writing

I've never been great at revising and editing. I'm much more a fan of plunging forward with enthusiasm and a vain hope that somehow the work I produce will magically turn out to be brilliant. Over the years though I've started enjoying editing. Taking a big enthusiastic mess and turning it into something I'm happy with (or at least something I don't actively want to set fire to) is a lot more fun than it used to be.

Writing always feels like drawing to me. You start with a sketch, you add lines and shading, you rub out what doesn't work, you add second and third layers and paint over the bits you hate. The finished result rarely resembles exactly what you pictured in your mind. And the big problems you notice straight away in the finished item (bad perspective, misshapen faces, upside down feet) are usually not caused by the last coat of paint, but by a problem deep down in the sketching.

I've come to like editing, especially the stage you reach where you're no longer looking at the sculpture with your eyes but running your figures across its surface and feeling where the lumpy, awkward bits are. You smooth out some places; add texture to others. But at heart it's still the same piece of work you started out with... even if you lose patience, smoosh the clay back down to a single lump, and build something entirely new out of it.

Like most of my metaphors, I'm sure this one will fall apart if I poked at it too long, so I'll leave it at that.

moving house

Someone much smarter than me (quite possibly Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, although I can't be sure because for some reason I can't access their brilliant site at wordplayer.com) made an astute observation about identifying problems within a story or screenplay. Some problems are minor and can be easily fixed, others are a complete ball-ache and require a complete tear-down-rebuild in order to set right.

They compared it to building a house and then asking someone's opinion on it. One person might say, "I hate it, it's awful, it's completely the wrong colour." You can then spend an afternoon repainting the outside and it's all better. Someone else might say, "I love it, it's perfect, there's only one thing I would change--can you turn it round so it faces south instead of north?"

The reason I bring this up is I'm currently trying to edit a story, and have just stumbled over a very slight change that needs to be made... but which might well require picking up the whole damn house and turning it around. In essence, the first scene of this story takes place in the morning, at an art gallery, and then the story continues through the rest of the day and the events therein. This time factor is pretty much essential to the story (it wouldn't be feasible to, say, extend the narrative over an extra day). But it's just occurred to me that... why would anyone schedule a wine-and-canapes reception for the opening of a new installation at an art gallery, first thing in the morning?

It's a really daft point that completely escaped my attention up until this moment. And it's easily enough fixed--nothing more than changing the word "morning" to "evening" on the first page. But that little change is going to have an impact on the rest of the story. Instead of taking place over the course of a day, concluding in the evening, it would have to take place during the night and conclude early the following morning.

Doesn't sound like a bit problem, does it? After the art gallery, the character goes to a market. Would said market still be open in the evening? Whilst there, he meets a couple of auxiliary characters, including a pair of young children. Would they still be awake and out of bed at that time of the day? Would the subsequent actions of the main character seem more or less suspicious if he's sneaking around at midnight rather than early afternoon? And so on.

Stupid little niggly problems, none of which are insurmountable but all of which are flipping annoying and will take more effort than expected to fix. Too many problems of that type can make you seriously consider just knocking down the whole stupid house and having done with it.

But, of course, there's always the possibility of a quick-fix... I've not found one yet, but I'm working on it. Sticking with the metaphor, there's a chance we can just take the front door and the back door off the hypothetical house and swap them over, which technically at least would mean the house is facing south instead of north...

Gone on way too long

Here's a question: Am I doing something wrong?

I've been writing for almost twenty years now. I'm still trying to get the hang of it, which means I subscribe to a lot of blogs and newsletters giving hints and tips for aspiring writers. One of the things you see coming up over and over again is the question of how to trim down a story or script that is far too long. People have issues with their 300,000 word novels and their 165 page screenpages. My question is... how are you producing anything of that length in the first place?

To date, I think the longest thing I've ever written was about 130,000 words, and that was years ago, before I learned how to edit. On average, my novel-length stories tend to come in somewhere between 50 to 90,000 words. The few screenplays I've tackled struggle to break 100 pages. This isn't boasting, it just seems to be what I'm comfortable with. Like the stories find their own natural length, if that's not too pretentious a way of putting it, and anything I do to drag them out makes them, well, dragged out.

So where do people find the fortitude to keep a story going for two or three times as many words? And why exactly can't I do the same?

Offhand, I suspect one of the problems is my attention span. I've always favoured short, concise books over lengthy tomes (notwithstanding the fact that Gormenghast is my favourite book in the world). I've got little or no patience for movies that go on for more than ninety minutes. (Oddly enough, I also have difficulties reading short stories, but that's probably a separate problem for a separate post.) So basically, I just don't have the mental energy to keep going with a story once it passes a certain length. Eventually I'll reach a point where I just go, "and then they went home, the end".

But you have to wonder whether there's something else that I'm fundamentally lacking in my writing. Are my plots too lightweight? Are the characters too flimsy? Is my inability to keep track of subplots and hence my dislike of including them holding me back? Realistically speaking, there have been a bunch of times when I could have used a story turning in at 10 or 20,000 words more than it did, simply so there was some leeway when it came to editing. Trimming out the suggested 10% from a first draft would mean the second draft ending up far shorter than anticipated... which means I have a disincentive to tighten up my flabby prose. And don't get me started on screenplays. Apparently my ideal length for a screenplay is about 80 pages, which is no use to anyone - far too long for a short film, too short for a feature.

So yes, in essence I'm somewhat jealous of people who can and do write these huge bloated epics, who have the ability to follow and expand a story into a trilogy or beyond. Or if not jealous then at least bemused by how they manage it.