Life, Writing, Weirdness

Social media has driven a lot of us to assume that our first impulse is our best response. This is the case a lot less often than most of us realize and I think it’s ultimately the reason for the overall breakdown in reasonable and reasoned social discourse in the last decade or so.

In the same vein, it feels like the ease of posting wherever and whenever we want has let a lot of writers believe that the first draft is a final product.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are some authors who seem to be able to manage single draft fiction. Here, I’m thinking specifically of Dean Wesley Smith, one of its most prolific proponents. I’ve tried it here and there at flash lengths but if I’m honest with myself, it’s not really single draft when I do it but a slow first draft and then an immediate read through and polish. And I can only do it at lengths that let me work out the whole story in one sitting, composing at a slow enough pace that I can see the problems coming and fix them as they arrive instead of circling back to identify them. Every word is chosen in advance and every sentence examined as it’s going by. Even still, I need that “read it out loud” pass to make sure I haven’t missed anything.

And again, this only works for things I can draft in a single run at the keyboard. The nature of the rest of my life suggests that I can very occasionally carve out a two-hour block and my single draft practice suggests that I might be able to manage a 2500- to 2800-word story in that block, which is substantially faster than the 2000-2200 words my normal four-draft process would produce in two collected hours. I could be more productive in my short fiction work if I kept to those lengths and shorter.

But it would have to be mostly shorter. My life doesn’t currently offer me two-hour blocks of creative time most of the time, more like 30- to 45-minute and that’s only getting worse between now and the end of the calendar year.

So, that means I’m mostly (or exclusively) going to work in the four-draft process I’ve built into a habit for the foreseeable future, and that fine.

And while I’m fairly certain that a multi-draft approach is what most authors work with, I’m completely certain that it’s not universal. There is a sizeable minority of writers who work on the “one and done” principle so they can move onto the next story and treat it the same way.

The more one reads or writes (or both), the easier it is to tell when something is a first draft. The error rate is higher. The number of sentences that don’t quite make sense is greater. The punctuation is less consistent. Something feels wrong or weird more often.

If I do a quick search on what the average number of words in a sentence is, I’ll read a few pages of results that put that number between 15 and 25. (This blog post has an average of 17.1, and I calculated that at the end of the edited version.) Let’s use 20 to keep the math simple, although 15 is the number I’ve encountered most often.

Now, let’s pick a mythical author who has just won NaNoWriMo and has a complete novel that’s exactly 50,000 words long. They worked at a breakneck pace to finish that novel in 30 days, as per the classic rules. Let’s allow them the incredible statistic that 99% of all sentences have no problems. Everything in them reads exactly as they want it to. Only 1% of the sentences have a typo or a weird word choice or a grammar or punctuation error.

That’s a great accuracy rate. Spectacular, really.

A 50,000-word novel, using our 20-word average sentence, has 2500 sentences. If 99% of them are good, that means 25 of them are not. Still sounds all right, doesn’t it?

But if it’s a printed version, 50,000 words is pretty short. A paperback usually has around 400 words per page, which means that novel has 125 pages and each sentence having 20 words means there’s an error every five pages.

The average reader in English hits about 250 words per minute, which is 15000 words per hour which is 37.5 pages per hour. So they’re hitting an average of 7 or 8 sentences every hour that make them stop and go, “Huh?” That’s going to start to feel pretty frequent to a reader and if it goes on long enough, they may not come back.

Now what if the accuracy rate is 95%? I think this is still pretty good when I consider getting a story out of my skull as quickly as possible. But now there’s something on every page that throws the reader out of the story for just a moment.

That’s certainly not what I want for a reader experience. But I’ve experienced it as a reader. A lot. And a lot more as time goes on. (Not because of AI, that has different issues.)

And from a personal perspective, my final draft is much better than the first draft. I’ve done a read through to identify every structural issue from getting an eye colour wrong the second time it’s mentioned to unaddressed plot holes and incomplete story arcs. I’ve done an editing pass to fix all of those problems. I’ve done a pass to make every scene, paragraph, and sentence say what I want it to. That might involve layering in extra sensory data, fixing or adding descriptions, getting rid of dialogue tags, and a hundred other things. And I’ve read the story out loud to find anything I’ve missed and fix that.

After all that, I can almost guarantee a handful of errors still in the manuscript. I can also guarantee the story is longer than that first draft.

And I’d like to think it’s a lot better.

Be well, everyone.