Long, long ago, back when I’d been rewriting the same novel for EIGHT YEARS, I took a class from bestselling and award-winning writers Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
And when they talked about writing multiple books a year–sometimes four books a year, sometimes double that–the scales fell from my eyes. No one had ever told me you could write more than one book a year, or that you could stop endlessly reworking the one novel you had and move on to something else.
I was cured. And thereafter became a happy writer.
Since then I’ve found my own personal pace and figured out how many novels my body and my brain like me to write every year. I’m not going to tell you, because as Dean says in this wonderful post about finding your own speed, people sometimes get mad when you talk about your method and your output, and it’s best to keep it to yourself.
If you’re currently stuck in the endless whirlpool of rewriting your one book, I encourage you to try the same experiment I did when I got home from that seminar: Just sit down and write a novel (or a short story, or whatever your favorite medium is) from start to finish, no stopping to rewrite those first three chapters again and again, and just see how quickly you can do it. For me that first time it was five weeks for a complete novel. I know a lot of people love to participate in NaNoWriMo every November because they have to finish a novel in one month.
Find your pace, but first be willing to see that it could be much, much faster than what you’ve always thought. Writing is fun. Fast writing is SUPERfun.
Onward!
Thanks… I’m in the whirlpool. Needed to hear this again.
Good. Glad to pass along this valuable service to other writers. We all need to hear it sometimes!
Thank you for saying this!! I feel exactly the same way. My last novel got written in four weeks and very little has had to be changed. It can be done!
Yes! It’s so easy to forget that we’re storytellers, and that it’s not that different from sitting around a campfire with people and telling them a great story from start to finish. You don’t keep going back and saying, “Wait, in that first five minutes? I meant to say ‘whispering like a willow,’ not ‘creeping like a vine.’” Whatever! Move on! Tell us the rest of the story!