My current story is moving along more surely than my previous one, though. It's in the draft process. Just other priorities are getting in the way and other craft endeavors are depleting my reservoir of creative inspiration. It'll be done for the Q-4/08 WOTF deadline, regardless.
On the other hand I'm working on a piece at this very moment that I think I have a chance of finishing today. I started it an hour ago.
It really depends on the work. Sometimes a story flows and other times you agonize over a paragraph for days.
It never gets easier but you do begin to accept that there is no magic formula to tell you how long a story will take or even how long it will be until you are done.
But, if you are like me, writing is the fun part. Once I'm done with a story I feel like a mother lion who has watcher her cub leave the borough for the last time. Bittersweet.
Anthony
Sometimes I write fairly fast, other times slowly.
But writing only gets harder. I demand more and more of myself.
Another question. I read someone say that the first million words of your writing career are just practice. Has anyone found that to be true? Anyone had any success selling the first thing they ever wrote?
There have been one or two people who sold the first thing they ever wrote, but I understand that they lived to regret it. If you sell something before you've really learned what you're doing, it can come back to haunt you.
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Does the first one take longer than the rest? I've seen some posts lately about shooting for a short story a week.
I'll tell you at the end of this week ...
Shooting wildly,
Pat
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I read someone say that the first million words of your writing career are just practice.
I'm 1/2 way there.
Does it get any easier?
Yes, and faster. My first novel took 18 months, 2nd 9 months, 3rd 2 months, 41 days of actual writing. But of course, the first novel I thought didn't need to be edited, but I gave it 2 weeks. The second gave it 3 months of editing, and the third going on 6 months.
I guess my point is, for me, the writing came easier, and faster, BUT the more I learned about writing the more editing and polishing I realized I needed. The truth of the matter is my frist draft of my 3rd novel was far better than my "finished" first book, or my 2nd for that matter.
So, yes it comes easier at times, but also the more we learn the better we want to become, which can slow the process down as we push ourselves to improve.
Of course that is until we sell that first novel that sells a zillion copies and then we can live off our names.
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There have been one or two people who sold the first thing they ever wrote, but I understand that they lived to regret it. If you sell something before you've really learned what you're doing, it can come back to haunt you.
hmm. that is the conundrum I have been in. I have written a handful of short stories, the first 2-3 I would never dream of submitting. The next two I have at least some satisfaction with, but I would not consider them representative of where I'd want to be.
Options:
1.) Start testing the waters with a semi-pro publisher (advantage - learn that side of the business).
2.) Same as option 1, but use a pen name?
3.) Keep writing and writing for 1-2 years until I reach a level that's closer to my ambition.
4.) Other option???
[This message has been edited by psnede (edited August 06, 2008).]
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I read someone say that the first million words of your writing career are just practice.
My first attempt at a science fiction novel will never see the light of day. On purpose. I wrote it during a time when I had no clue what I was doing, but my passion for telling stories tasked me to write it anyway. I distinctly remember reading through it years later, and feeling somewhat embarrassed at how I portrayed myself as a relayer of stereotypes and cliches. Still, there were some fairly decent ideas tucked inside, so I expanded on them in the form of a new story. Looking back on it now, this second wave of efforts chronicled the emergence of my own writing voice.
Many of my early works, regardless of genre, played out the same way. With one notable exception. The very first story I ever wrote, a novel-length young adult manuscript, will be ready for submission later this month. Yes, this manuscript was the beneficiary of several rewrites (the timing of which paralleled my various evolutionary steps as a writer), but I see the resulting product as the practice squad participant that might actually make the starting lineup. A million 'practice' words for this story is probably fairly accurate.
S!
S!...C!
What's that famous expression? "Sure, writing's easy. Just stare at the computer screen/keyboard/typewriter/notepad until my forehead bleeds."
In my opinion, it doesn't get easier because I know so much more now, I have so much more *work* to do, because I see so much more subtlty in stories and want to evoke what it is that I love in good stories - which takes me a heck of a lot of work. Sometimes, though, something great turns out. The story I'm most proud of at the moment is one that I wrote in 90 minutes. First draft. I've tinkered another 2-3 hours on it and have at least 1-2 more hours due to work on it, but I'm still mighty proud of it. I know it represents some of my best work. And I look forward to unseating it as my best story by the *next* story I write.
Its all about the muses. It takes however long or however not-long that it takes. And I dont think that ever changes.
The more you learn about writing the more you leanrn that you still don't know. And the more you realize that you can and should improve. That's what makes it hard. And writing is darn hard. Much harder than I ever suspected when I started out.
To me "difficulty" isn't about time spent. For instance I could spend days, even weeks, reading through a harry poter book - but it's an easy read, a light and simple read - where you fly through it like you're coasting on air half-asleep. But forcing my way even 3 pages into the Scarlet Letter is much more difficult, even though it requires less time.
That's the best analogy I've got at the moment.
However...when I was young (and unemployed), I could turn out short stories every week or so, and a novel in a few months. (Not that they were any good.) Now that I'm older (and employed), it takes months-per-short-story and as for novels...well, my last completed novel took five years and my last stab at one is dead in the water after almost a year...
At first I thought you made it up--and was prepared to throw a huge party in your honor, since it's a cool sounding word, but alas--since it is not your invention--you'll have to settle for this imaginary two-pence I'm giving you.
(Spend it in America, the dollar is down low enough for you to buy a house with the current exchange rates/mortgage crisis)
[This message has been edited by Zero (edited August 07, 2008).]
I make up new words all the time, and people throw things at me. Embrous. fatuitous. Analogican.
But that's all beside the point. Everything gets easier the more you do it, Alliedfive. And the more you know what inside you you want to express. I see themes in what I write now, that were not there when I was younger. Unfortunately, just about the time it gets really easy, you have a stroke and then go into a nursing home with no internet for the rest of your life. I figure I've got about five years left if I move the walker really fast. so it goes.
I can say that the more I've practiced (and corrected, which I do for pay) style, etc., the easier it gets and the more esoteric it becomes.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 08, 2008).]
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Idjit
Try to find mommick, mammock, or mummuck, three words, three different regions, same meanings; tatters, shreds, flinders, or shattered ruins of nerves, clothes, lumber, homes, or villages. The origin of those words derive from the cotton rags collected from Elizabethan era English homes and fermented into a raw material used in papermaking, cotton rag paper pulp, mammack.
"They's young-ins got me all about mommicked up."
Oh, and the etymology of persnickety indicates an earlier version, British circa 1818, pernickety, which has an unknown origin.
[This message has been edited by extrinsic (edited August 08, 2008).]
these characters talk, and I just write it down--they could be telling me anything, and I'd believe it.
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Persnickety isn't in Webster's as Mr. Nowall spells it...
It is, however, in the reference.com's dictionary and in the OED as the "North American term for PERNICKETY". Idjit, however, is not. 
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited August 09, 2008).]
NO. It actually gets harder – much harder. However, you get much better with time and you get used to it. So in that sense it’s easier and even more enjoyable. Short of being absurdly gifted, there are few shortcuts. There are a few ‘how to’ books that aren’t just a stupid attempt to make a quick buck. The good ones will completely open your eyes and change your approach, helping you with everything from structure to characterization to developing plot and story ideas. Men have always added bricks to a house built over much time by their predecessors and this is the wisest choice with regard to your learning curve. “I want to do this from scratch, all by myself,” is unlikely to project you too far unless, like I say, you are absurdly gifted.
I can list the good ones I know of, if you like.
Tracy
My opinion will vary from others, but personally I am in the quality not quantity camp.
I've read through a few (including King's and OSC's "Characters and POV"). Bradbury's Zen and the art of writing is good too, depends on what you are looking for.
I'm a newbie compared to most on the board, so my viewpoints are only worth 1/2
I guess that's one good thing about being unpublished, I haven't had to aim for the middle with my writing, or think about 'sales' over 'stories'
Seemed to me the guy who wrote the afterword, a "published writer" I've never heard of (which proves nothing), was trying very hard not to admit he didn't like the book that much anymore...
Read the thing and see what you think...
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And after you get good at editing, READING becomes the difficult thing. I can't tell you how many books I used to love that I can't even read anymore because all I see are their problems.
Though that internal editor never completely goes away again, it does tame down a bit, when you realize that nobody is perfect. Just like it took a while to accept the stories you love aren't fine examples of prose or mechanics, it takes a while to accept that you can enjoy a story despite its flaws. It took me a while to go through both of those stages and learn to appreciate a voice that seemed clunky or stilted again--but a story is not good or bad because of mehcanics or prose, unless the plot needs the help.
Sometimes you have to grow some before you understand. I think that was a problem with some of the "literary" books I'd be assigned as reading in school---not that being forced to read something wasn't a barrier, either. I recently finished a reread of The Brothers Karamazov---I know I read it in school, but I remembered nothing of it at all. This time around I got a lot out of it. I'm enheartened enough to want to sample a few other Russian novels that defeated me in my teen years...
(I wonder if I should reconsider The Catcher in the Rye. I hated that book when I read it in school, for school. Would it be any better now? Or have its "tropes" been dispersed so much among the anguished teenager stories and movies that nothing in it would be unfamiliar to me?)