There’s an old story, perhaps apocryphal, about James Joyce, wherein a friend asked him how his work was going. Joyce, in obvious distress, confessed to having written seven words that day. The friend responds, “That’s good, at least for you.” Joyce responds, “I suppose it is . . . but I don’t know what order they go in.”
Writers often measure progress by the day’s word count. Hemingway (who wrote standing up because of a bad back) aimed for 500 words each and every day. Nifty little gadgets on the web let us put up progress bars for big projects, like the red thermometers fund raisers use to demonstrate how close they are to reaching their goals. Pure word count is important when you’re on a deadline — if you have to deliver a 100,000 word manuscript 30 days from now, it’s simple mathematics.
How do we measure our progress while revising? Words or pages revised? I suppose, especially if, as above, you’re working against a deadline. Raw word or page counts, though, often hide the truth. Take this morning, for example. I’m working on the second sixty-page block from my in-progress novel, handling feedback from my agent. Some mornings I can zip right along and handle revisions to an entire chapter (typically 10 pages or so) or at least five or six in my 90-minute (that’s a generous representation of the amount of time I actually work, which is probably more like 75) window. Today, I revised two pages. Over and over again. Taking out sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes moving them elsewhere in the manuscript, sometimes just tossing them in the bit bucket. Moving sentences, upending paragraphs, writing completely new material by the word, sentence and paragraph.
By the time I finished just before 7 am, those two pages hardly resembled what I started with at 5:30. The same character in essentially the same circumstances, but the psychology, the motivation and the atmosphere are all better now, or at least I hope so. I feel better about the revisions to those two pages than about any other writing I’ve done recently. On paper — or on the screen — two pages of revision doesn’t seem like much, but my writer’s soul knows differently.
I submitted a 950 word story to the first Wee Small Hours contest from Hellnotes. I like these little writing exercises. Since I’m spending most of my writing time in revisions these days, they’re a nice change of pace. 500-1000 words is only two or three pages, but I spend a lot of time revising my short short fiction, trying to make every word count.
Stay tuned early next week, when I’ll have a link to a new story online!
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