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 :)