Speed vs. Quality

[sarillia]

Another post inspired by a conversation over on fandomsecrets

How much do you think your writing speed influences the quality of your writing?

It seems to be general knowledge that if you write too quickly then quality will suffer. I haven't really noticed that in my own writing. If I push myself, I can write 4,000 words in an hour and it's not the mess that people picture when I tell them that. I fix typos, I go back and replace sentences I don't like, I do all the things I do when I'm writing just 1,000 words in an hour (a pace that feels very slow to me). I'm just more focused and I do it more quickly.

Have you noticed a difference in what you produce at different speeds?

Comments

[inkdust]

Holy shit.

Um...that's about all I can say to that.

I write on average 300-350 words per hour.

[sarillia]

That seems to be one of three main responses I get to this. The other two are 1)"Cool, me too" and 2)"But are they good words?" in a doubtful tone. My answer to the second is: of course, I wouldn't keep them if I didn't think they were useable. Or at least, even if I didn't delete them, they would go in one of the folders where I dump the stuff I doubt I'm ever going to look at again and I wouldn't brag about it.

[inkdust]

Instinctively I assume that anything of that quantity in that length of time needs a good edit, but I'm working on accepting that people's brains work differently when they write. Me, I never have the plot of a scene figured out point by point before I start writing, so I'm sitting there in the middle of writing and fiddling in my head with timing and the course of the dialogue and sometimes I don't even know where I intend to go with the whole thing. Then even if I know exactly how I want something to play out, I'm reevaluating how much description I want in this section and figuring out where I want to break up the dialogue and waffling on my individual words. I just can't wrap my head around what has to be going on in someone's brain to get words out that fast. The most I've ever written in one day, over several hours, is 1800 words, and I was exhausted afterward.

[sarillia]

Well I'm not claiming that anything I write at that speed is publishable, but I don't think the stuff I write more slowly is either. I honestly don't notice much of a difference, but a lot of people act like that's completely impossible so then I start questioning myself and deciding that maybe my writing is crap and I just don't see it because some of these people are really nasty about this.

[inkdust]

Nasty is never a good way to go. Even if I don't understand how it works, I hope you keep doing things your way. As for how good yo

[inkdust]

(Ugh, thumbs)

good your writing is, you'll have to let some people read it to know any more about that :)

[ljwrites]

I don't judge the quality of first drafts, mostly because doing so would curl me into a tiny miserable ball. Anything I've written, whether I've done it slowly or quickly, is going to need substantial editing and in some cases overhaul to be usable. It's almost more of a guidepost to where I'm going, and often I need to have gotten some words down before I realize I was going in the wrong direction. I do tend to get more words out when I'm focused and sure of where I'm going (which is by no means the same thing as going where I need to), so in that sense a higher word-per-hour rate can be useful--but even then it's just usefulness, not quality.

A bigger issue for me than speed is time, if that makes sense. I once banged out 20,000 words in a few days, only to dump them all because they were the wrong words in the wrong direction. I still think I needed to write them to get that realization, but of course I needed time to get those words out, get the feedback that helped me realize they were no good, then replace them with better stuff (which took only half as many words, thankfully). So a reasonable speed helps, and I can usually achieve that with a degree of concentration and planning, but above all I need time to mull a story over, figure out what it needs to be, get feedback from people I trust, and fiddle with it until it's right. And to run headlong into dead ends, make embarrassing mistakes, feel convinced I'll never create anything of worth, then get over it and start all over again. It takes time.

[ayumidah]

I'm usually a pretty slow writer, because the amount of time I CAN spend writing varies day by day. Which makes me feel bad sometimes because I have a friend who brags she can write 5000 in a night, when it sometimes takes me a week to manage that much. Then sometimes my really plot-extensive stories will take months to a year to finish, but my friends will read and then go "...Ok, that wait was totally worth it" so it helps a little. I don't think there's much difference when I CAN write faster, however. Like you said, I go back and fix what needs it, and it still seems to be the usual amount of errors when I write slower, haha.

[lunabee34]

Some of my most popular shorter fics (1000-5000 words) I banged out in a hour or two. For me, I don't think it's how quickly I write, I think it's the strength of the original idea I get. Sometimes I get an idea for a fic and the plot's all there and the characterization and it just flows out of me very quickly. Other times I get a plot point or a line of dialogue or a cool character revelation and then I have to spend all this time figuring out how to get there or make it happen. And that takes much longer. But you know, I don't think I necessarily notice any quality difference.

[serria]

Well, anything I write, no matter the speed, is going to need an edit. But I'm not sure I agree in general with this notion that fast = bad writing. In fact, I think I write better if I'm writing quickly. If I can write quickly, it means I'm inspired, I'm in my groove, the words are coming. If I write slowly, it is often disjointed and doesn't flow well because I'm struggling with each sentence.

I'm not sure of my exact pace, because I try not to look too much at word counts. I know I used to be able to write really quickly, when I wrote fanfiction for a fandom I was obsessed with. I was so inspired, I'd write 10,000 word chapters in a single sitting. I didn't even think about word counts at all back then, though, I just wanted to tell my story. I don't think I could do that now unless my muse was really on my side.

[agilebrit]

I don't notice a difference in quality, myself. My usual pace is about 1200 words an hour, when I'm cooking, but sometimes it's faster and sometimes it's slower.

Even Jim Butcher has said he doesn't see a difference between the words he gets when he's smoking and when he's grinding. I wouldn't worry about it too much.

[caecilia]

I've noticed that I require a lot of "pre-write" time, where I brainstorm the story in my head. Then when I actually write it, I can bang out a short story in a few hours and it's pretty good! They've been well-received by people in my workshops, anyway. But usually, the ending is rushed. So it would probably be better if I walked away from it for a while and came back to revise it later.

But writing doesn't have to have 5 million drafts and a team of beta-readers the way some people think.

[ljwrites]

Ooh, ditto on pre-write time! I also find the more time I spend thinking over the story first, the more time I save later in editing.

ETA: Still, even with forethought and planning I don't really know the story until I've written it down--I always get surprises along the way--and end up having to fix the first draft quite a bit before I get it to where I like. I guess I'm slow-witted that way.