I was impressed

[Teresa Edgerton]

I was a guest speaker for a high school writing club yesterday. This wasn't my first time visiting a school to talk about writing, but it was the first time for a group made up exclusively of kids who wanted to be writers.

And I was impressed by the questions they asked, and how serious they were about working to improve their writing. But there were two girls in particular. I can't tell you how old they were. They were sisters, small and conservatively dressed, so it would have been easy to mistake them for a good deal younger in another setting; even so, I'm guessing the older sister was not more than sixteen.

They stayed after the meeting was over to ask me some questions. I asked them how many thousand words they each thought they had written so far, counting revisions.

"Well," said the older girl, "I did write a story a while ago that was 80,000 words. But the story I'm working on now is 400,000."

"I haven't written as much," said the other sister. "I think about 250,000 words."

Now that strikes me as dedication. I certainly hadn't written anything like that much at that age. Even allowing for the fact that it's easier now when every home has a home computer, and I was laboriously banging out my deathless prose on a cheap manual typewriter -- still, they're a long, long way past the point that I was at in high school. In fact, I was well into my thirties before I had produced that many words.

 

[Urien]

Superstudentstypeterrificbutspellingisatrocious.

 

[Dean F. Wilson]

This is great to hear! Even if what they wrote isn't great, the sheer achievement of writing that much at that age will go a long way to making them excellent writers in the future.

-D

 

[scalem X]

Great, now I am surpassed by two girls, who are say three to five years younger...
But 400.000 words, that's 800 pages . That's, starting from her tirteenth, about every day a page, yeah talking about dedication...

I'm doomed, I'm doomed.
*talks to self*
'-Come on Scalem, quit on your short stories, go for the longer stuff, even a teenager can do it.
-But I am a teenager
-That prooves my point and let's face it, in half a year you won't even have that excuse anymore.
-Yaargh'

Sorry to talk about myself, it is of course great for them, but yeah I'm jealous, horribly jealous.

But hey wait I used to write in dutch, okay, adding that work might get me around the younger girl's quota phew

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

It doesn't matter what language you write in, scalem -- unless it's that annoying text gibberish -- it all counts.

Nor is anyone doomed if they haven't written hundreds of thousands of words by the time they're out of high school, unless their goal is to be professionally published before they're twenty-one.

But a lot of people never get there at all, at any age, because they give up before they've written anything like the number of words these two young women have written already. There are some things about writing we can only learn by trial-and-error. (Some of us, of course, require more of the whole trial-and-error thing than others.) And some things we aren't even capable of understanding, until we've learned some of those other lessons first.

So I agree with Dean, whether or not their writing is any good now (and I didn't see any of it, so it may be brilliant or it may be abysmal) they are well on their way. You have to turn out a certain amount of really bad writing before you can move on to the good stuff.

 

[Pyan]

You have to turn out a certain amount of really bad writing before you can move on to the good stuff.

And some people never do - but still get published, anyway

Seriously though, scalem - don't ever confuse quantity with quality. As a strict non-writer, I'd always prefer to read a shorter, gem-clear, polished piece of work than 300,000 words worth of padding and adjectives.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

And some people never do - but still get published, anyway

As a strict non-writer, you would probably be surprised at how much concentrated effort can go into writing even a bad book. And then, if it is going to be published and successful, it has to be bad in just the right way.

Moreover, the writer can't know that he/she is writing a bad book, but has to work on it with as much dedication and enthusiasm as if it were a very good book. Enthusiasm communicates itself, and for a great many readers it covers a multitude of sins -- especially if the book mirrors some of their own areas of enthusiasm. Which brings us back to being bad in just the right way. That usually means matching up well with the tastes and enthusiasms of vast numbers of readers at that particular moment in time.

And while quantity is, as you say, unrelated to the quality of the final result, it really does make an enormous difference in learning how to write well in the first place. Nobody writes that shorter, gem-like, polished piece of work without previously producing a tremendous amount of writing: good, bad, and indifferent. Writers who fail to realize this are doomed to disappointment.

Yes, even writers who become fabulously successful writing that right sort of bad book end up being disappointed, because (early success of that sort having a stifling effect on future development) they never achieve the kind of respect they think they deserve.

(Keeping in mind that most writers end up being disappointed anyway, but that's a different story.)