Life, Writing, Weirdness

A few years ago, just about the time I returned to higher education full time and messed everything else up, I discovered one of Dean Wesley Smith’s blog posts about writing at Pulp Speed.

He updates this every so often, or dusts off and reintroduces the original post really, talking about the idea that we’ve entered into a golden age of fiction. There’s more available to read than ever before and writers have the ability to get their work in front of people in more ways and places than ever before.

His basic concept is that you need to write fast. Fast like the writers had to in the pulp era when their stories would be available for a few weeks and then gone forever. Writing faster meant publishing more often which meant your name stayed in front of your readers more consistently. The more of your work you can get to your readers, the better.

He explains things a lot better than I will and you can go read the most recent posting of his essential reasoning here, but it essentially comes down to keeping your butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboard.

Smith defines Pulp Speed One as 1,000,000 finished words per year, which is a massive undertaking, and he pushes it up by 200k more words per year with each integer increase. So Pulp Speed Two is 1.2M words per year, Three is 1.4M words per year, and so on. Finished words.

And this is the genuinely crazy part to me: the key point is the ability to write single-draft fiction. I don’t generally work that way. I’ve tried a couple of experiments with it and can manage it at flash fiction lengths (more or less – single draft but then a pass for corrections immediately), around 1000 words or under, but I haven’t had the strength of will to try it with longer work. I think I’d need to do some serious plotting.

Working on 3,000 words or so per day plus a blog post, Mr. Smith often (though not always depending on what the rest of his life brings him – sometimes higher and sometimes lower) ticks along at Pulp Two. And there are other aspects of his writing career than directly writing, so make no mistake he’s running a full day most of the time, and he probably has a different definition than most of us what a full day means.

For myself, I don’t think I can get to the point where I’m writing single-draft fiction as my normal process, nor would I necessarily want to. My multi-draft process (based on some heavy spreadsheet calculations) has me hit about 750 words per hour of finished writing, which is half of what I think of as my drafting speed, and up about thirty words per hour from when I first did that calculation about six years ago. Not too shabby. That means that if I could spend three hours and forty minutes a day, every day, working on some draft between first and final, I could hit Pulp One.

Of course, I’d have to do that on top of being a graduate student with a family. Seems unlikely. But, using Mr. Smith’s metrics, I’m hoping to maintain my current momentum to hit Pulp One-Third this year.

And there are two other big differences between myself and Mr. Smith: he’s been a successful full-time writer for a long time, and he manages most of his fiction in one draft (which I don’t think is something most of us can do). For word production, the first one of those isn’t relevant, but the second is huge.

But let’s pretend for a moment that I suddenly had the ability to retire comfortably tomorrow. I’d certainly still finish the MSc I’m working on, but I might just possibly elect not to carry forward into four more years for the PhD (I doubt it, but it is conceivable). Let’s further pretend that having retired and successfully defended my Master’s Thesis, I take up writing full time and can continue that equivalent of 750 words per hour for four hours per day, every day. This would give me a cruising speed of Pulp 1.5 and it would then take me four years, two months, and about a week to finish everything that’s currently in edits, in progress, or planned.

And I certainly wouldn’t be out of ideas at the end of that. Which is the real point: I’ll never tell all the stories I want to tell. And that’s okay. Someone else will tell more.

Dean Wesley Smith has a production rate I can only envy, something to aspire to, but I’m not him and have to tell my own tales, at my own speed. I do wonder if the right kind of practice will let me speed up my fiction production, though. Something to think about.

Be well, everyone.