There's more than one way to skin a wordcount.

One of the things that discourages me about most writing discussions, podcasts, forum advice, and so on, especially when the dual topics of writing speed and quality come up, is the insistence that "writing is rewriting", i.e., just get something down no matter how bad it is and plan on several nuclear-level revision passes to fix it later.* This just does not work for me. (I hate that phrase, "writing is rewriting". No, it's not; writing is writing. Rewriting is just doing it over because you didn't do it right the first time.) Not only does the spew-word-vomit approach make my writing brain completely lock up -- literally, I've tried it, if I take off-line the part of my brain that makes sure the words I'm making are the right words, I can't make any words at all -- but I've never seen the merit of producing crap at high speeds only to take just as long going back and fixing it as it would have taken to do it right the first time.

Of course, any time I attempt to present this position to someone, I can see them immediately slotting me into the category of prima-donna-who-thinks-her-every-comma-is-golden. (This is probably why I rarely see the do-it-right-the-first-time approach championed elsewhere; any other writers who write that way are doubtless tired of being tarred with that particular brush, too.) Which is just not true; I'm willing enough to revise when necessary. I just don't enjoy it, so it makes sense to get as much right the first time as possible. And since that's the approach that comes naturally to me anyway, why wouldn't I do it that way?

So it made me happy to come across this post on The Secret to Writing Faster by Karen Dionne. She's advocating writing longhand, which I don't entirely agree with -- unlike her, I'm just as capable of making write-os as typos, if not more so -- but I was particularly struck by this bit:

My sentences are also cleaner. Because I write more slowly by hand than I can type, I give more thought to what I’m writing, and am thus more careful about what I put on page.

And that’s the corollary to writing faster. Slow down. Think about the words before you put them to paper, and the words you write are more likely to be ones that will stay.

Now, I don't approach her speed of output, either on computer or on paper. I'm not advocating do-it-right-the-first-time as a speed issue (though I can't help but wonder if it's not faster in the long run, given equal quality of final result). But I certainly do think it's more efficient to produce, as she says, "Good words [...] that didn’t require so much tweaking and polishing." And I like efficiency.

So I'm tucking that article into my little folder of evidence for my side, to be pulled out the next time someone tells me I "have to" spew word-vomit and embrace revision like a religious ritual. I'll just be over here, smiling at my pretty damn good first draft and tweaking as few commas as possible. ;-)

*If the word-vomit method works for you, great, fine, have at it. What matters is the end product, not how you get there. But if it doesn't work for you, or if you're only doing it that way because everybody and their dog keeps insisting that it's the only way to go, consider that there are other approaches.

Queryitis: Recurring Condition

Queries sent: one on Sunday, one today. Which puts me current for the month so far, even if not quite on the every-seven-days schedule.

Feels good to be getting back on the horse again, despite the frustrations inherent in the process.