Wittering Writer

The thing about writers (and I’m not the first person to observe this) is that the quality of their day depends solely on their writing. For example, today it’s cold and dreary outside, I have to work tomorrow, I have too many bills and a wife who’s slowly getting sick.

…but, I wrote 6,000 words so far in my manuscript, in the space of a couple of hours, and I intend to get more done later this afternoon after I take a bit of a break. I’m thinking I could manage a smooth 10,000 words today, which would be nice. It’s all good stuff, too. I write a pretty tight first draft, and these are so far words worth keeping.

Just like that, I’m having a good day. A euphoric day, so to speak. I’ve had a couple good cups of tea, I played with the rats a bit and the cats a bit (not at the same time, though) and I realized happily that I  have two older short stories of mine that I can re-write into things I would be proud of. They go on to the end of the list of things to do after the current manuscript is done.

Once I tidy it up a bit, by the way, I have a scene from my manuscript that I really enjoy, and really want to share, so I’ll probably post it here.

Something I’m very proud of, that I forgot to mention by the way: With a bit of MacGuyver ingenuity, I went out and bought an adapter which you put into the cassette player in an older car, and then hook into a CD discman, thus giving yourself a CD player in your car. They’ve been around forever. My wife had one when I first met her, though I couldn’t find it now.

I hooked it into the big stereo that sits on the top of my desk, in my office, and then I plugged the other end into the headphone slot on my speakers. Thus, my computer sound comes out of my big stereo. I don’t know how many watts it is anymore for sure, but I know it’s 800 or more. It was a point of some pride when I was younger. I have to be careful now, though, because if I’m playing a video game, the bass from the explosions is enough to rattle windows.

The original purpose for it was, I can now set up another stereo like this (we have two; the second one is also powerful, also my wife’s) in the living room, and then through clever use of adapters and converters, I can plug my SLVR L7 phone into it, and let my iTunes playlist blast through the house.

…

Neil Gaiman pointed out, while editing a volume of Sandman short stories written by various authors that he was finding stories that only needed to be 2,000 words which were 6,000 instead. He theorized that this was because people write on computers, and thus, things balloon out of control. It was why he started writing things longhand.

It’s a sound idea, and it’s one that I found to be a bit true. When I write a short story by hand, it’ll come in shorter and tighter than it would have otherwise. Today, however, when I did my 6,000 words, I did it all on the computer, because I was sort of racing myself to see how long it would take. It occurred to me that one valuable reason for writing on a computer is, you get a better rhythm going. Mostly, I was writing a scene between two characters, and the dialogue wouldn’t have flowed so comfortably on paper. It would’ve been shorter, but it wouldn’t have been as interesting, or as colorful.

So I guess they both have their values. I find that when I’m tired, I have an easier time writing on paper, whereas days like today where I’m high-strung and in writerly mode, I can hardly type fast enough to keep up. I was doing about 120 wpm this morning, and even then, my hands were shaking and I was trying to go faster, and faster. I think really, I was trying to write at the speed of a conversation.

(No wonder my arms hurt.)

I’m off for a bit. When I return, for my second post today (I think there will be too) I’m going to talk about the Pete Tzinski trail-across-the-internet. Why, I don’t know, but I’ve wanted to talk about it for ages now, I was just too abashed to do it. You’ll see.