Writing Report August 1, 2021

Word counts.

As mentioned before, I keep a daily tab on my word count, striving for at least 1,000 words a day.

By “words” I mean material that I actually intend to see published / produced / posted, not notes abut projects or social media comments (though I’ve used some of my social media comments as the basis for longer blog posts).

Not a bad pace if one can maintain it.  Assuming one writes only five days a week and takes two weeks off at some point, it’s 250,000 words a year, the equivalent of three average size novels.

And that’s assuming it’s an average pace; books need to be revised and polished, so while 1,000 words a day can produce three novels worth of first drafts, there’s time to be spent rewriting – and I don’t count that in my daily totals.

I can blitz stuff out in a single concentrated burst.  Just recently I wrote the first draft of a one act stage play in an eleven hour stretch, clocking in at 37 pages and 6,846 words (thank you MS Word for doing those autocounts; makes my life easier).

My big project for the year ended up with a first draft around 105,000 words long, much too long for this type of story (i.e., a contemporary mainstream social satire).  I spent the last week getting very little productive work done (other than the aforementioned one act play) while trimming back the first draft to just under 94,000.

That’s in the nervous range; I might find an editor / publisher who’ll accept it at that length, but it’ll sure improve my chances if I can keep trimming to under 90,000.

For my second draft (the 94,000 version), trimming wasn’t difficult.  I tend to write loose and shaggy, often repeating phrases and descriptions.

It’s easy to trim stuff like “he went down the stairs” to “he went downstairs”.

I also slashed away mercilessly at everything that didn’t advance the story, either by moving the plot forward or providing vitally needed character insight to explain later actions.

Some cute stuff went by the wayside.  Quelle dommage.

I also trimmed stuff that went to far (and I can hear jaws dropping from people reading this who know me and go “Buzz is worried about going too far?!?!?”).

In this case, yes.  My basic premise requires a PG approach, maaaaaybe occasionally brushing up against a PG-13 but never venturing over into R-rated territory.

Even while writing the first draft, I needed to go back and remove two scenes that -- while funny and entirely in character for those involved -- bumped the story up into soft R territory.*

Eliminating those necessitated revising an earlier scene which set them up, and to the betterment of the novel, I must say.  The story works better the further certain elements can be kept off stage.

(There’s no avoiding mention of the concept of those elements, but the elements themselves don’t need to be paraded out in the open.)

While I often use collegiate notebooks for short story and blog post first drafts, for this project I used my computer to get it on its feet.

Every week I printed up what I’d written to date and shared it with the writers group I belong to.  This gave me good feedback on the clarity of the story telling and specific problematic areas.  I accumulated those printouts on 3-hole punch paper and put them in a large notebook along with regular notebook paper.

As you can see in the photo above, I write notes to myself about specific areas to be addressed in red on the notebook paper as well as on the printouts themselves, but also write additional scenes by hand in black ink to slip between the printed pages as needed while prepping the second draft. 

The second draft is the trimmed down version of the first but also with name changes (for example, I had two characters with similar first names who are rarely in a scene together, but each interacts frequently with a third character; that could be confusing so one got a completely different name).

I didn’t nail down all the characters and locations names, so I’d use placeholders for those and when prepping the second draft swapped them out for their final names (or at least better ones).

The second draft isn’t completely prepped yet, but it’s 80-85% done.  Once it’s prepped then I’ll have it printed out at the local FedEx store and use that to edit my third draft on.

The way things are progressing, the third draft will go to beta readers and after their feedback, one last polish and it’s ready for submission.

As posted above, I try to write 1,000 words a date for publication or posting, and I have reached that number right…now.

© Buzz Dixon 

* The late William Rotsler once laid out the history of US movie ratings for me.  Before the MPAA rating system came into effect in the 1960s, theater owners and distributors used an unofficial rating system of “mature” (talked about or hinted at), “adult” (a few flashes of female flesh), X (partial female nudity), XX (full female nudity / partial male nudity), and XXX (full blown porn, if you’ll pardon the expression).  When the MPAA launched its official rating system, the original categories were G, M, R, and X.  M quickly vanished as “too confusing” replaced by GP (yeah, that wasn’t confusing…) which then became PG and eventually added PG-13.  X used to be any film previously unofficially rated XX or XXX but has since been supplanted by NC-17, X being handed back to the professional pornographers, presumably at the end of a long set of tongs.  In the 1970s these official categories were unofficially refined by theater owners, movie distributors, and audiences as soft R (the old “adult”), hard R (the old X), soft X (formerly XX), and hard X (i.e., XXX).