Year of Words: February — Quality and Quantity

Well, we’ve made it to February. And, much to my surprise, things on the writing front are actually going rather well.

Firstly, a short report of my progress. My spreadsheet tells me I’ve written 19,547 words so far this year, at an average of 337 words a day. This second stat isn’t overly helpful — on weekdays, I usually only have the time and energy to get to around 150 words, whereas on the weekends I can reach the heady heights of 800 words a session. Having a strict daily routine has definitely helped me, though, even if I can only manage just one paragraph most days. In terms of what I’m working on: the first draft of my short story, Rook, is finished, at just shy of 15k. I’ve put it to one side for now, and I’ve started work on the novel, Pine, where I’m well into Part I.

Now that I’ve started Pine, things have become much easier in places — these ideas have been brewing in my head for a long time — but also much harder in others. My plans are pretty detailed, so I’m not running into any pacing problems or structural issues. But I’ve never written a story of this scale before, crossing a wide range of point-of-view characters and settings across the world. I think it’ll be fruitless to agonise over the value of the prose until everything is on the table, and I’ve figured out what I’m trying to say, where it needs to go, and why. There’s lots to balance: coherent worldbuilding, exposition, emotional beats, character development, and thematic discussions alongside, hopefully, an actual plot. However, this has made the quality of my writing very, very poor, which is pretty demoralising in the short-term.

When I first started writing stories I focussed solely on quality, but it only led to countless unfinished projects that never made it past chapter three. But even now, as I’m trying to lean towards quantity, I’m struggling too — it seems I’m just not built to write huge volumes to then dig through later. It seems the Quality versus Quantity debate for writers is a heated one. You can’t reach quality without practicing in quantity, but at the same time there’s no point writing any measure of quantity if it has no quality.

Instead, I’m choosing to take two pieces of famous writing advice, accredited to various authors, very seriously:

"Write down everything that happens in the story, and then in your second draft make it look like you knew what you were doing all along."

(Neil Gaiman)

"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."

(accredited to various authors)

I’ve seen some people refer to messy personal drafts like the one I’m attempting as a ‘Draft Zero’, but I don’t think that’s a very helpful concept for me. Any writing, no matter how rough, has to be worth something. This first draft, then, is one where I’m going to tell myself everything that happens in the story I want to tell. Every character moment awkwardly spelled out to be later refined. Every piece of important lore written out in all its clumsy fullness. Every single story beat, which will later be hidden behind subtle expressions and changes in the wind. Nothing fancy, but nothing lazy. Nothing more, nothing less.

Regardless of whether this approach will work for me in the long term, I hope this might be a good exercise for my perfectionist brain. Besides, Pine is structured into several distinct parts, so I might try a different approach in one of the upcoming sections, to see what happens. Maybe this will revolutionise the way I write. Maybe I’ll be left with something unusably horrible. We shall see.

Until then, fare well, wherever you fare,

— H