From the Mailbag #8

How many stories have you written?

22 novels, one nonfiction book on writing, and a bunch of short stories (I lose track of the short fiction very easily).

What was your first story written? Published?

The first story I tried to write was a novel I started in seventh grade; I think I got about thirty or forty pages into it. I had some articles published in my high school’s annual magazine, but my first professional sale was Shadow Magic in 1980.

Who did you look up to as writers when you were young? Who were your favorite authors?

Until I was almost out of college, I didn’t pay much attention to who had written the book; what I was interested in was the story. So I can’t really say that I looked up to particular writers or had favorite authors. What I had were favorite books, and many of them were series. The two that come instantly to mind were the Oz books and the Narnia chronicles, both of which still have pride of place on my bookshelves. I was also inordinately fond of collections of myths, legends, and fairy tales, the majority of which were written by that prolific author “Anonymous.”

How long does it take to properly finish a story? To go through the whole process?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. The writing part, from the first idea spark to the final manuscript (which I am assuming is what is meant by “properly finishing a story”) takes as long as it takes, and will vary depending on the author, the author’s process, and the story.

Every writer has a lower limit to their production speed, a point at which, if they slow down any further, they start getting rusty and have a harder and harder time picking up the pace, or they start losing track of the story (and eventually may stop wanting to write at all), or they start getting twitchier and twitchier because they haven’t been writing enough. Every writer has an upper limit to their production speed, the point at which, if they push to get stuff written faster, the quality of what they write suffers. Somewhere between those two points is the writer’s normal cruising speed for normal stories.

The trouble is that the limits and the cruising speed vary wildly from writer to writer. I know writers for whom “writing too fast” means taking less than two weeks to write a novel (demonstrably, as the one that got written in less than 14 days was sub-standard, but the one that took two weeks was fine) and writers for whom “writing too fast” means taking less than a year to write a novel. I know writers who get twitchy if they don’t produce 1000 words per day, each and every day, and writers who can go for long stretches averaging a sentence or two per week with no appreciable problem.

The second thing that affects writing speed is the author’s process. Some writers prefer to handwrite their first draft in a notebook; some prefer working on a computer but are hunt-and-peck typists, or just not that fast with their touch-typing. Some writers use dictation software. Each of these methods affects the amount of time it takes to get a novel’s-worth of words on paper. This is further affected by things like how much pre-writing the author does, whether they start at the beginning and write straight through or skip around and piece the manuscript together later, and how many drafts they normally go through.

The third factor that affects writing speed is the story itself. Some stories are straightforward and linear; others are sprawling, complicated spiderwebs. Some require a single viewpoint; others use multiple viewpoint characters. Some stories are well within the author’s current capacity and skill level; others are stretchy. Some of simple structures; others have complex ones. And while it is possible to say that most writers will write a straightforward, single-viewpoint, simple, non-stretchy story faster than they would a sprawling multiple-viewpoint stretchy complex epic, it isn’t at all clear how a straightforward but stretchy multiple-viewpoint simple-structure story would compare to a non-stretchy complex single-viewpoint non-linear story.

Or to put it in more personal terms: the fastest I ever wrote a novel from scratch was ten months (I’m not counting the movie novelizations); the longest it took me to write a novel was around two and a half years, not counting breaks to work on other projects. So basically…it depends.

How do you limit or direct or harvest the hundreds of ideas and directions that go off in your brain when trying to write a short story?

I don’t; that’s why I’m a novelist.

That isn’t as flippant as it sounds. It took me years to figure out how to write short stories instead of novels, and the answer was simple: focus. It’s like taking close-up photographs of flowers or spiderwebs hung with dewdrops – the rest of the world is there, but it’s so blurred that you can’t see it because the camera is focused on this one tiny patch of the world. As soon as you decide that you want to get the mountain range into the picture, you lose the spiderweb, because the scale is too different.

Focus is simple, but it is far from easy, especially if you are, as I am, naturally inclined to the novel length. Therefore my usual advice to people is that if they have tried multiple times to write short stories, and keep having “hundreds of ideas and directions that go off in their brains,” they should try writing novels instead and see how that goes. There is no point in making writing any more difficult than it already is by trying to write to a length that doesn’t come naturally.