Justine Larbalestier

reading, writing, eating, drinking, sport

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Time

Time. Time is a peculiar item.

So said Benny (played by Tom Waits) in Rumble Fish. A movie I watched obsessively when it first came out. Nine or ten times in its first week of release (which was considerably later than its US release). But I haven’t seen it once since. So I may have that quote arse backwards. Fact remains, Time is weird.

Some of your wonderful responses to my last post mentioned time management and the notion that you should have an estimate of how long a particular task is going to take you. Which is a brilliant idea. In theory.

When it comes to writing I have no idea how long it’s going to take me to write or rewrite anything.

I have written a first draft in six weeks.

I have written a first draft in eleven years.

It took me four months to rewrite Magic or Madness.

It took me eight months to rewrite Magic’s Child.

Sometimes it takes me less than an hour to write a thousand words. Other times it takes me many days.

Some writing days run smooth and fast. Some run ragged and torpid. I can be writing with rhythm for weeks at a time, clocking in between 1,000 and 3,000 a day. No worries. And then it breaks down and I can’t write more than one hundred. Or ten.

Maybe at some time in the distant future when I’ve been a professional writer for a dozen or more years (fingers crossed!) I’ll have a better sense of what I’m capable of. Right now I’ve only been doing this for (barely) four years. I feel like I’m still serving my apprenticeship. There’s so much I don’t know about my profession. Including just how much and how fast I’m able to write.

I know I can write a book in a year because I’ve done it five times. But I don’t know if that’s going to be true of every book I write. It’s part of what makes contracts for unwritten books so scary.

Am I the only one who’s this out of touch with their writing abilities?

Posted by Justine at 14:29, 11 June 2007 under Publishing business, Writing life | 13 Comments »

Comments

  1. May Says:

    i don’t think so. at one point, i was writing 2k or close to it every day.

    i haven’t had a 2k day in months now.

    but i’m also a younger writer–been writing seriously for only 18 months.

    i don’t even know how long my first draft is going to be, much less how long i’ll take to write it.

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:14 PM

  2. Rebecca Says:

    def not. i’m not professional, but i am serious. i have days just like that, when i can’t write for crap. i had an entire year like that. *shudders* but i don’t think you’ll have that problem. :) and i have good days too, even a few really good ones. and the first draft thing, i did one in three years and one in under two months. i don’t think it’s anything you can really control, b/c most of the time, for me anyway, if it’s forced for a lengthy period of time, it’s worthless. and then there are the times when you’ve been writing all day, and now you’ve been tossing and turning in bed for two hours and finally you give up trying to sleep, and you keep writing all night. ahhh, those time are indescribable.

    June 11th, 2007 at 3:39 PM

  3. Gabrielle Says:

    I’m not pro either, but I’m homeschooled, so I can work my schedule to write more. This past school year I haven’t been very productive though. The first of my two current projects has taken a clearer form, but that doesn’t mean I have a lot written. I guess I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. And I’ve been pretty busy with school, which doesn’t help. And each project is different, even if it’s only between a fantasy novel and a YA fiction novel (à la Maureen Johnson). So yeah, writing is very unpredictable.

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:15 PM

  4. Chris S. Says:

    Time, bah! Forget trying to figure it out – even Einstein couldn’t quite get a handle on time.

    Pretty much the only constant you can count on it: Time spent doing what you love (or at least skiving off from what you don’t) always moves faster than normal time.

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:23 PM

  5. Alma Alexander Says:

    In a word, no.

    I wrote the 200 000 words of “The Secrets of Jin Shei” in three and a half months.

    I wrote the first draft of “Gift of the Unmage” – some 80 000 words of YA – in close to ten months.

    I sometimes write a chapter a day (and a chapter is currently around 5000 words). I sometomes write HALF a chapter a day. I sometimes write a chapter a week. And I never know what kind of chapter I’m going to have served up to me until I start writing it.

    Writing is a funny old beast.

    June 11th, 2007 at 4:31 PM

  6. Penni Says:

    Og good lord no. I have days where I write 5000 words (not many) and days where I delete more than I write. I have no idea how long it takes to write a novel. ANd surely some novels just take longer than others by their nature, but it’s hard to know what kind they are before you start writing them. I often wonder what sort of book I would write if I had years to do it, but I can’t see that happening again for quite a while.

    June 11th, 2007 at 5:42 PM

  7. haddy Says:

    wow lots of people are writers here im just a kid writeing for is like being pinched for a long time

    June 11th, 2007 at 8:16 PM

  8. capt.cockatiel Says:

    I have no idea what my writing abilities truly are because I wrote in November — you know, that month that provides everyone with super writing powers? I wrote over 52k in eighteen days. Usually I come nowhere near 2k in a week because I take a long time to think out what will happen next, and therefore do not write for several days at a time (excluding November). Which makes me quite a lazy writer, I think. So I don’t really know what would happen if my writerly powers were to be unleashed in all their glory without days of think-breaks. I don’t think I want to know. November was scary ebough.

    June 11th, 2007 at 8:27 PM

  9. Ally Says:

    Well I don’t write books but we have to right alot of essays in school. Chunk tests are timed test and we have to right a atleast five sentences for a paragraph and 5 paragraphs for an essay, essay (if that makes any since at all) in 30 minutes. Sometimes I can write it in the first 15 minutes and sometimes I don’t get done. It depends mostly on what subject is. Sometimes they give you really confusing and hard ones and sometimes they are super easy (for me). On the good ones I just write and write without thinking twice and it goes by really fast.

    June 11th, 2007 at 9:21 PM

  10. margo Says:

    I agree it’s good to have an estimate; it gives you the illusion that the task is under control, and a rough idea of how you should be pacing yourself (hell for leather, or slow and steady).

    But I’ve found it a rare project that doesn’t come in very wide of the estimated end date, either surprising me by finishing early, or just requiring me to come back and back and back to it – or just completely falling apart and mystifying me as to how to pick it up and put it back together again.

    Writing is a funny old beast, and each fiction project is funny in a different way.

    June 11th, 2007 at 11:08 PM

  11. Dawn Says:

    I have faith in you, Justine! :-) I really do consider you a professional writer, and as “out of touch” you seem to think that you are, I look up to you at least. Writing is unpredictable. Some people who I think probably think that they are in touch with their writing abilities seem to actually just produce the same novel over and over with new character names and small detail changes. It’s actually the ones who tell us that their writing processes, their characters and so much more drive them to the edge of their sanity with intensity and pressure…that I think produce far better and more genuine books. Maybe it seems like you’re out of touch, but I think you’re far more in touch than you realize.

    June 12th, 2007 at 12:50 AM

  12. hwalk Says:

    I totally agree with you.

    June 12th, 2007 at 12:02 PM

  13. Gwenda Says:

    Yeah, the only truism I know about writing is that it always takes longer than you think it will.

    June 12th, 2007 at 10:01 PM

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