Over the years, I've collected rumours about how much writers write. I used to think this was for inspiration.
So, what has inspired me? In 'On Writing', Stephen King says he writes 2000 words a day so (get this) completes an 180,000 word novel in THREE MONTHS. I was at the Brisbane Writers Festival in the early noughties (or maybe the late nineties) where Matthew Reilly (on a panel with Kim Wilkins who writes so many books she needs two selves and is also Kimberley Freeman)... anyway, Reilly said sometimes he writes more than 9000 words a day when he nears the end of a novel. But, he added, he wasn't exactly writing anything literary so didn't need to worry about characters.
I haven't read any Reilly but King does (ahem) the odd memorable character and Freeman/Wilkins is frankly pretty amazing. And a writer who really worries about characters (or, if 'worries' isn't the right word, someone who creates truly authentic, memorable characters) is Joyce Carol Oates, who apparently writes from 8-1 every day and in that time has quite possibly written more books than I've read.
I'm in my forties and have published one novel, word count about 60,000 words. I've been writing all my life, so (leaving out the unpublished stuff under my metaphorical mattress i.e. on my hard drive) that's 1.5 words per day. One of my literature lecturers once said that Ernest Hemmingway wrote 500 words a day, so he could concentrate on quality. I write 1.5 words per day, so I can concentrate on deciding whether or not to get my hair recoloured, on whether the calories in a piece of cheese are worth it, on what to wear out on Friday, on Facebook, and on picking off bits of nail polish.
On a positive note, today I've written 600, which is well above average. Even more if blog posts count. If I ever meet Stephen King, I'll have to ask.
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1 comment:
I remember hearing John McGahern talking many years ago. He tended to average a novel every eight or nine years. He said that he wrote more than 20 pages for every page that made it into the final draft. He wrote everything in longhand using cheap biros and rewrote each manuscript in its entirely at each edit. In that context, Hemingway's five hundred words of finished text would need more than ten thousand words of McGahern's draft.
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