First off, this is a well written article. I loved it.
Thanks for caring enough about the drivel I wrote to even rebuttal it in the first place. I love that kind of stuff.
Also, I love thinking and having to defend my thoughts. That isn’t a line either. If my thoughts suck/are wrong I want them out of my head/life asap. I’ve held on to wrong beliefs before in the past and it’s only served to wreck my life. If I don’t have to write so much I’d really rather not. So this is was awesome of you.
It will probably blow up in my face and have been a complete waste of time, but I sure had a blast doing it. I hope you did too. I think this kind of thing is important.
Second, I haven’t the time I wish I had to dive deeply into every aspect of your article (my wife is waiting to watch a chick flick with me) but I’ll try my best to respond to you as much as I can.
Ready?
Here we go:
tl;dr Version:
I think we might actually be saying the same thing here. Also, it feels like you didn’t read my piece entirely/maybe skipped over parts/my writing was just so bad it was unclear what I was trying to say.
I feel like this is your main argument: Writing that much must be bad just because it’s a lot of fast writing.
What about Issaac Asimov (500+ published pieces)? What about A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (written in 3 weeks)? The list of anecdotal evidence against your claim is long.
Most importantly, the basis of your article is that telling people they should write 10,000 words per day is dangerous advice.
I agree. Perhaps my headline threw you off, but I never tell people they should write 10,000 words per day. I just want people to outwork themselves.
The Long Version:
The title of your piece is: “Write 10,000 Words Everyday” Is Terrible Advice
I couldn’t agree more.
As a matter of fact, I wrote exactly that in my article:
You don’t have to write 10,000 words per day.
I don’t recommend it. Go outside. Get some fresh air. Locking yourself in a white-walled room and listening to yourself think all day has irreversible long-term side effects.
Insanity, depression, narcissism, anti-social behavior, back problems, “writer’s gut” etc. Science is still working on the long list.
But if you want to be a writer, then write more. That’s the whole point.
Your subheadline is:
While hard work and volume are important in order to improve at your craft, smart work and the revision of your work are significantly more valuable.
I’ve never understood this either/or approach to creativity.
I suggest you read this:
Particularly this line:
You may say “Gary, that’s cool, but I don’t have to work that hard, because I work smart.”
Yeah? Well I work hard and smart so what now?
Just because I write all day doesn’t mean I’ve purposefully ignored writing advice. I have three bookshelves full of “how to write” books that I’ve read, re-read, and read again.
I write all day because I work hard and smart.
Some points of your article make me feel like you didn’t actually read mine all the way through before deciding to write yours.
Like where you said:
You have to constantly critique and deconstruct and rectify your own work. That’s the only way forward.
Please see Step #4. Revise Cold where I said:
Being bi-polar helps in developing a writing career.
During the writing process, you must be open and honest with yourself.Love your words and thoughts enough to put them on the page.
But when it comes time for editing, you must hate your words. Destroy them. Question their existence at every step.
Or where you said:
it makes no sense to simply and mindlessly just write “10,000 words everyday”
I don’t think I said that in my article. I certainly hope that I didn’t.
If I did, then I was wrong and it was wrong of me to do that.
From what I can tell, the core of your article requires that “10,000 words per day = mindless”. Otherwise your thesis is moot.
Otherwise, it’s just an anecdotal piece. One that I could counter with several other anecdotes of my own.
Actually, if we were going to wage a war of anecdotes I believe strongly that the list of successful prolific midlisters far outweighs the list of successful one-offs, slow writers, and 39+ revision drafters.
I think Stephen King would agree >>> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/31/opinion/stephen-king-can-a-novelist-be-too-productive.html?_r=0
For example:
Every prolific writer ever and every book written under 6 weeks.
If you want a list let me know. It’s longer than you might think and full of more seminal works of fiction than you might choose to believe.
I recognize that few of even those writers wrote 10,000 words per day. But if I had written a blog post titled “How To Write 8,000 Words Per Day” your article would read no different. If I wrote one titled “How To Write 4,000 Words Per Day” it would be the same.
It doesn’t seem to me like you care so much about the specific word count as you do the advice: Write More.
If it is the specific wordcount that bothers you, why you decide 10,000 words per day was the cutoff? Why not 15k? Why not 7,345?
I didn’t see anywhere in your article where you lay out a compelling argument to back that specific claim. You do try and use “diminishing returns” here:
The other demoralizing aspect of “write 10,000 words everyday” is that the more you do this type of hard, non-deliberate work over a number of years, you will reap the benefits of your hard work; however, there will come a time, when simply showing up and writing 10,000 words will not make you a better writer (as Kameron Hurley poignantly writes in his quote above). This is showcased by a simple, but brilliant concept in economics called the “law of diminishing marginal returns.” The law states that as you increase your activity or input in a task, you will experience significant gains, however, over a protracted period of time, the same input will begin to garner lesser and lesser gains until such a time arrives when continuing the same efforts will begin producing flatlining — or even negative — gains.
Before I got kicked out of college (a story for another time maybe) I was an econ major. I don’t remember much, but I do remember how poorly equipped economics is for use in subjective areas.
Here’s the problem with diminishing returns as it relates to creative work:
It’s an absolutly unreliable way to measure subjective work.
Example:
If the Guiness Book of World Records can be believed, Pablo Picasso created “about 13,500 paintings and designs, 100,000 prints and engravings, 34,000 book illustrations and 300 sculptures and ceramics.”
According to the Law of Diminishing returns (as you’ve decided to use it) somewhere in all of that prolific output Pablo Picasso started to see negative gains. His work would have been getting worse.
Did it get worse? Did he really start seeing negative gains?
That depends.
That depends on your taste. If you like the kind of art he produced later in life, then the Law of Diminishing Returns doesn’t seem to apply to him. If you don’t, well then you could stand justified.
But that’s the problem with using the Law of Diminishing Returns on art — or anything subjective like writing, design, ideas, etc. — you’ll never be able to objectively measure the results in any reliable and meaningful way.
You could ask a room full of 100 people:
“Do you like the art that Pablo Picasso produced in the last 20 years of his life?”
Some will say ‘yes’, and some with say ‘no’.
If you plan on playing ‘art by mob rule’ then you’re playing an even more dangerous game.
But that’s beside the point.
The point is, that from what I can tell you haven’t made a sufficiently strong enough case to persuade me that this is true:
“Writing a lot is bad”
Next, I think you tread on some very dangerous waters with your section about Andy Weir’s success.
You make claims that you’ve reverse-engineered his success engine.
Here’s how I know that you haven’t:
You aren’t locked away in a room somewhere in the back alley of Hollywood with an IV drip of $1,000,000 bills hooked directly to your bank account while you pound out guaranteed Hollywood blockbusters based on your Andy Weir Success Engine hypothesis.
Nobody knows why books or movies take off.
If they did, they wouldn’t need spec writers. They’d hire a bunch of college interns at $12/hour to pound out guaranteed money makers.
That doesn’t happen.
Here’s what I know about how Andy Weir got successful:
I fucking don’t.
You do it again here with this wild claim:
This is what sets the Andy Weirs, the Malcolm Gladwells, and the J.K. Rowlings apart from the average writers of the literary world.
No.
If the path were so clear it wouldn’t be worth taking.
I caution against anyone who claims to know what made someone’s work a breakout hit. There’s almost ALWAYS a lot more going on behind the scenes than will EVER be revealed in interviews, or ‘post-game’ analysis.
Always.
I think you oversimplify the reasons behind Andy’s success anyways. In a way, I think you may be making the more sweeping assertion of us both.
A summary of your conclusions about Andy’s success could be:
A. He knew a lot about what he was writing.
The book was born out of Weir’ fanatical love for watching “every” documentary known to man about NASA and the space programs. As a hobby, Weir also dedicates large swathes of time towards cultivating his deep passion for physics and astronomical phenomena, which meant he willingly spent thousands upon thousands of hours laboring over the science behind “The Martian,” which is one of the most revered aspects of the book.
And…
In essence, Andy Weir, before he even thought about publishing “The Martian,” had to shore up on many incredibly dense topics in fields like chemistry, astronomy, physics, electronics, and space history
B. He wrote a lot. (aka: He practiced a lot)
…in addition to improving at crafting an intriguing plot, creating relatable characters, and an engaging writing style before “The Martian” became a best-selling reality. This is not just hard work, it is “hard to do” smart work. And it was absolutely necessary in order for “The Martian” to be an enormous hit pre-, during-, and post- release. Not an easy feat.
And…
This, of course, parallels the arduous years Weir spent honing his writing abilities.
But then you go on to say:
So, hypothetically, if we are trying to become the next Andy Weir, why would we spend an inordinate amount of our time and energy writing 10,000 words each day when writing is only one of a litany of many valuable skills and knowledge we’ll ultimately need to produce an impactful and lasting work?
Are you asking why, if we wanted to be Andy Weir, we’d want to practice getting better?
This is another part of your article where I think you didn’t read mine all the way through/are ignoring parts by accident.
When I say “writing” that includes the 5 things I outline in my article:
#1. Planning
#2. Hoarding Ideas
#3. Writing Hot
#4. Revising Cold
#5. Working Harder
I don’t tell people that I’m a “Planner, idea collector, writer, editor, hard worker.” I tell people I’m a writer.
When my wife asks if I’m working tomorrow, I say, “Yes dear, tomorrow I have to write that new project.”
Perhaps that’s where my shitty writing mislead you.
When I read your article I imagine you imagining me just blindly typing into my computer whatever drivel comes to my brain and saying “Fuck it! It’s good enough for the bastards!” and just trying to do that as much as possible.
It’s not like that at all.
I suggest reading the re-reading the article where I talk about what I do to reach 10,000 words per day.
My minute-by-minute process is actually a lot like this (from your own article):
They’ll write in focused bursts of roughly 2,000 or 4,000 words. Then, they’ll spend time going through the written material, recursively fixing every mistake and supplementing the bleaker parts. These proofreading sessions are then interspersed with more writing and changes.
If I just spoke into Dragon Naturally Speaking for an hour straight I could pump out 6,000 words PER HOUR! I know because whenever I get interviewed on a podcast (ok… the two times it’s happened…) I get those hour long transcripts recorded. They’ve never come back under 7,000 words.
But…
I don’t just sit there and spit out 6,000 words and hour and then move on to the next 6,000. I wish writing was that easy.
On average — with planning, editing, and revising taken into account — I average 1,200 words per hour. I write 1,2000 words per hour.
If that was misleading, I didn’t mean it to be.
I also don’t quit writing by noon like most writers. Issaac Asimov didn’t. He wrote 12–14 hours per day too. It’s nothing new to work hard as a writer.
If you think writing is hard try fighting wildland fire in Alaska. That was just one summer and I’ll never complain about writing as “hard work” ever again.
Plus, if writing is so terrible that you think it’s sucking your soul through a straw then you might think about getting into a different line of work. Writing is my “flow” work. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t get some other benefit than money from it.
It’s 11:22pm right now on a Friday night as I pen these exact words. I write all day long. I wouldn’t say I “enjoy” it, but I can’t see myself doing anything else.
Is it good for me? Hell no. Let me re-iterate what I wrote in the article:
You don’t have to write 10,000 words per day.
I don’t recommend it. Go outside. Get some fresh air. Locking yourself in a white-walled room and listening to yourself think all day has irreversible long-term side effects.
Insanity, depression, narcissism, anti-social behavior, back problems, “writer’s gut” etc. Science is still working on the long list.
As a matter of fact, you probably said it better in your article:
So, if my math is correct, out of the 168 hours all of us have every week, Mr. Shreeve is purportedly spending “65+ logged hours of writing” in any given week. That leaves him with only 103 hours to apportion to other activities like travel, sleeping, relaxing, reading, “family time, dinner,” and other activities (Shreeve mentions running). The mental and physical strain and exertion that arises due to your writing 10,000 words everyday would also mean you would have to reach into additional reserves in order to do the other activities — research, proofreading, reading books on topics outside of your field, among others — that are just as integral to your improvement as a writer.
Yes. All of that.
I work too hard. I don’t recommend it.
I’m a workaholic to avoid being some other type of -holic. That’s a true story. It’s the same story as my father. I hope my son has a different one.
I hope that someday I can get a better balance going on in my life. I suck at balance.
I don’t run 5ks. I don’t run marathons. I run 50 & 100 milers. Ultramarathons.
It’s not because I’m a badass (I’m not). It’s because I’m that broken up inside. I have PTSD. I have demons like everybody else — I just choose too much running & too much working in place of too much therapy or too much [INSERT VICE HERE].
Anyways, I should probably stop here. It’s freaking late and I was going to write for a new pen name I set up this last week, but this seemed more fun.
If you read through the whole thing you should be given an award.
