Bev Vincent

If you’ve ever read an author’s blog for any length of time, or followed his or her Facebook feed, you will no doubt be familiar with the tradition of posting sporadic or daily word counts. It is, perhaps, the only metric that writers have available to measure our productivity.

My favorite anecdote comes via Stephen King in On Writing in which he recounts of a possibly apocryphal encounter between James Joyce and a friend. The friend finds Joyce in a posture of utter despair at his writing desk. Being familiar with Joyce’s issues, the friend asks, “How many words did you get written today?” Joyce answers, “Seven.” The friend is impressed. “That’s good…for you.” To which Joyce responds, “But I don’t know what order they go in!”

People comment on how prolific certain writers are, producing two or three books a year, even more. When I stop to do the math, I’m astonished that more writers aren’t that prolific. On a typical day, which for me means an uninterrupted writing window of no more than 90 minutes, I can write 1000 words. Some days it’s 750, some days it’s 1250, but 1000 is a good figure. If I did that every day for a year, I’d have the total word count of three decent-sized novels. If I were able to write longer, I could imagine writing 3-4000 words per day. I think my personal record is something on the order of 8000, which I cranked out at a beach house while on a working vacation during a NaNoWriMo marathon.

Of course, not all “writing” involves producing new words. On another sort of productive writing day, I can crank out -500 words. Yes, that’s negative five hundred, which means I’ve cut that much fat from a manuscript. I tend to write long on the first draft and it’s unusual if I can’t remove at least 10-15 percent of the total word count from a short story upon revision. How does one measure that type of productivity? It’s a different type of accomplishment, one that is at least as important as the one that created those words in the first place.

An efficiency expert might look at my process and tell me how much better off I’d be if I hadn’t written those 10-15% extra words in the first place, but I simply can’t. To do so would require editing every sentence as I wrote it and that would interrupt the flow, that mysterious gush of words that comes from a source I can’t define. I wouldn’t dare place a governor on that lest it slow to a trickle and stop. I don’t mind editing yesterday’s work before I start today’s—that’s one of my favorite ways to get that gusher going again—but I have to write things that I know deep down won’t all survive. At least not in that shape or order.

What about the days we spend on the internet doing research, or driving around a neighborhood to pick up local color, or reading a book to gather information on a particular subject, or simply sitting in a dark room or taking a walk to think about the work and where it’s headed? Our word count meters don’t record that creative homework, but it is part of the process, too, and contributes to the end product. Those words that we count don’t always just spring into our minds. We have to feed the mind with information at times.

The ritual of posting word counts is one way that we assure anyone reading our blogs—and ourselves—that we are hard at it. Doing the work. If too many days pass without anything substantial to show for them, we start feeling nervous, like a batter in a slump. At the end of the day, though, all the research and ruminating in the world is for naught if we don’t get AIC (ass in chair) and produce words. Because words count.

P.S. In case you’re interested, I wrote 2000 words today. Nearly seven hundred in this essay and a little over 1300 on my current work in progress. A very good day indeed.

Get the podcast – or Subscrbe in iTunes

When I started writing in 1999 after a long hiatus, I didn’t plunge straight into a novel. That probably sounds logical, but some writers skip the short story and cut their teeth on books. John Grisham hasn’t written many short stories, for example. Some successful novelists claim they have trouble with the short form.

For me, it was a no-brainer. I had written short stories in college, and I felt the need to exercise my writing muscles. I took many twenty- and thirty-mile bike rides before I embarked on my first century (100-mile) challenge. That was the analogy I used for writing, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I have no regrets.

I had another motivation, though. If a person writes a bunch of short stories, he stands a better chance at getting published a bunch of times, provided he is at least a proficient storyteller and can string together words into proper sentences. It’s the old “get your name out there” theory. Success breeds success. Earning a reputation with short stories would boost my chances at having an editor pay attention to my eventual novel submissions.

That notion isn’t entirely without merit. My short story in Borderlands 5 attracted the attention of the editor who handled the paperback edition. She called me out of the blue one Friday evening to tell me how much she liked the story and to ask the magic question: Do you have a novel I could look at? Unfortunately, at the time I didn’t, so it was a missed opportunity.

I’ve now published over fifty short stories, some of them in the sorts of places that look good on a cover letter. I also have a backlist of another twenty currently seeking good homes. However, unless I happen to get published in The New Yorker or Playboy, it’s hard to imagine much that would enhance my resume significantly. I’ve demonstrated to myself and to some others that I can write. Now I have to finish novels and get them in front of editors.

So, why do I still write short stories? Why do I spend weeks on something that will bring in, at best, a few hundred dollars in income, when I could be writing novels?

I am writing novels. I finished the first draft of my fifth novel a few weeks ago, and am about to embark on the first round of revisions prior to sending it to my agent. He thought one of the earlier manuscripts was good enough to shop around, but editors didn’t snap it up.

But I’m still writing short stories, too. Why?

Because I love writing them. When I’ve finished drafting and revising one, I feel like I’ve accomplished something special. I’m much better at it than when I started nearly a decade ago. Not only has my writing improved, my editing has as well. Writing and revising short stories continues to make me a better writer. Working on novels develops different skills: Plotting and sub-plotting, characterization on a grand scale, pacing over the long haul. However, I seldom feel like I have improved as a wordsmith after working on a novel. Books are about big things, like sections and chapters. Short stories are about smaller things, like paragraphs and sentences. With a short story, I can (and do) agonize over every word, moving sentences around in paragraphs for maximum effect. If I spent as much time (proportionately) revising a novel as I do for a short story, I don’t think I’d ever finish one. That might change once I spend more time with novels, but at present short stories are where I am continuing to learn to write better.

When I’m working on a novel, I can seldom divert my attention from the story to do anything else, although I did knock out one 5000-word story during the course of writing this latest book. If novels become my daily routine, there might come a time when I have to put short stories on the back burner.

I can only hope that I end up in a situation where I have to make that choice.

Why do you still write short stories?