From "10 Legendary Writers & Their Daily Word Counts/Is there a perfect amount of words to write every day?" (Writing Cooperative).
June 11, 2022
"During his most fertile years, Faulkner wrote at a frenetic pace. He once wrote to his mother that he wrote 10,000 words a day..."
"... working from ten in the morning to midnight. 'I write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.'"
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32 comments:
Faulkner fading fast? He's not talked about as much as he once was. Maybe the South, and the rest of the country, changed too much.
William Faulkner? I've Heard of him!
When Howard Hawks was making The Big Sleep, he; of course, wanted Raymond Chandler to write the screenplay. But Chandler was off on a drunk (from 1926-1959), and the studio was 'afraid' that he wouldn't be up to it. So Hawks hired some east coast hack (William Faulkner) to write the screen play.
The Hilarious Part is:
Faulkner called up Hawks,
and told him that he was Stuck, because he couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur.
Hawks, told him it was easy, it was... Well, he had to re-read the book but would get back to him
Days went by, with both Hawks and Faulkner rereading and re-rereading the book, but neither could figure out who killed the chauffeur..
FINALLY, they contacted Chandler, and asked HIM, Who Killed the Chauffeur ?
And Chandler said...
That he had NO IDEA and that it was STUPID to ask.. Because it was COMPLETELY irrelevant to the story*
THAT's the difference between a Great Author, and one that's NOT
the story* The Chauffeur (probably) killed himself.. Unless it was somebody else. But No: it was him
Are more words better? Doubtful. I'm sure I could crank out a few thousand per day. I'm beyond doubtful I'd be the next great American author.
Now, if I could harness that "infinite number of monkeys"...
Larry McMurtry said he wrote (first draft) exactly five pages a day, and would break off in the middle of a sentence instead of exceeding that limit.
Quantity over quality. He was a liberal Southerner for his time, and his books were thick and opaque, so of course he won prizes and acclaim, but ultimately there's no escaping the fact that his writing is an unreadable punishment.
I don't think the article mentioned the fact that Joyce wrote so few words partly because he had massive eye problems for the last 30 years of his life. He underwent constant operations and often in pain. By the 1920s the pain lessened, but his had eyesight degenerated to the extent he had difficulty reading what he wrote.
As for Faulkner writing 10,000 and Hemingway 500. We talking about the tortoise and the hare. Faulkner also sometimes wrote while drunk, and did Sinclair Lewis and Raymond chandler. I don't think Heminway ever did.
Just great. On a morning when I'm sitting here getting pissed at myself for dawdling and not getting anything written today (Althouse comments do not count), I see this post about numbers of words to write in a day. I've read more than a few books by writers on writing. And Faulkner's range is completely beyond the range of anything I've read.
But...reading this post is like a kick in the butt. Time to get to it. See you all tomorrow. Or...later.
Good writing is rewriting. I used to write monthly columns for a couple of hobby related magazines. They were usually between 1,000 and 1,200 words. I probably spent four hours or so on each column. But I'd write a first draft, let it sit for a day or so, then come back and edit/revise the draft. In the process, the first draft would usually shrink a bit.
10,000 words a day is a really frenetic pace--leaving no time for rewriting or editing.
For work, I can get up to 7- 10K words on a good day, but it leaves me drained and brainless and unable to deal with language.
By the time I'm able to retire, I doubt my brain will be up to writing novels.
Faulkner is overrated and will be seen as a regional curiosity in the future, if he is remembered at all. (Leave aside his Straightwhitemaleness.)
You wanna know what's hard? Writing 500 or 1000 word specialized encyclopedia entries on obscure people and topics.
Maybe it was an effort to assure his mom that writing is really a job and he’s hard at work. Who knows what he really did?
Hemingway hath said that -- at least while in Cuba -- he would start each morning's writing session (standing, at a typewriter on a book case) by reading and editing everything done up to that point so by the time he got done it had been edited dozens, perhaps hundreds of times.
The queen or writing (IMO), at least of productivity, is Enid Blyton, whom I'd never heard of before reading a book on typewriters (The Typewriter Century by Martin Lyons). Her stories seemed to come fully formed from within and she would sit at a typewriter and basically just transcribe them:
Blyton's daily routine varied little over the years. She usually began writing soon after breakfast, with her portable typewriter on her knee and her favourite red Moroccan shawl nearby; she believed that the colour red acted as a "mental stimulus" for her. Stopping only for a short lunch break she continued writing until five o'clock, by which time she would usually have produced 6,000–10,000 words.
Tools, not rules. Anyone who tells you there's One True Path to writing is naive or selling you something.
My award-winning story "Today I Am Paul" was a single 5,000-word dictation session while driving to work one morning, 100 words per minute. After it was done, my first readers loved everything but the very ending. I looked at it, agreed with them, and replaced the last three paragraphs with two better paragraphs. That was all the rewriting I did.
After selling almost immediately, that story was reprinted in four different year's best science fiction anthologies. It was nominated for the Nebula Award, one of science fiction's biggest awards. It won the Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award. It has been translated into eight languages, with a ninth on the way. It's currently taught in a college ethics class, and will appear in their textbook (if they ever finish the thing). I've lost track of the number of times it has been reprinted in different outlets, but it's approaching 20. That story's going to outlive me. And I wrote it in an hour.
The Writers of the Future workshop includes an exercise called The 24-hour Story. You receive a random object. (Mine was an Alcoholics Anonymous 7-year sobriety coin.) You read from a random book, and you talk with a random stranger. Then you have 24 hours to write a story. You don't even have to include these elements, they're just prompts to get you started. But you HAVE TO finish a complete story--beginning, middle, and satisfying ending--in 24 hours after the prompts. Many of those 24-hour stories have been published in pro markets. Some have won awards. My 24-hour story, "A Hamal in Hollywood", was named a Year's Best Military and Adventure Science Fiction story. 10,000 words in 24 hours.
Those stories were early in my career. I was still finding my way. MY WAY. Every writer's different, but that doesn't make one writer's way "right" and another's "wrong". Find YOUR way. Seven years later, with practice and learning, I can reliably dictate 25-35 words per minute while driving, usually 50 minutes per hour. On the treadmill I dictate 45-55 words per minute, 90 minutes at a time (and burning around 500 calories). Sitting in my office chair, I can dictate around 65 words per minute (but I won't travel anywhere nor burn any calories). And on rare occasions when the story is crystal clear, I still hit 100 words per minute.
At conventions, I sometimes give a presentation I call The Instant Story Show: I take three prompts from the audience (a character, a setting, and a problem), and I dictate a story for an hour (finishing it after the panel if the story runs long). By the end of the convention, I edit the story, add a cover, and publish it on Kindle. Readers enjoy these stories, and the audience loves to see the story created right before their eyes. (Some of you may be familiar with Harlan Ellison writing award-winning short stories from prompts, right in a bookstore window as people watched. That was my inspiration for The Instant Story Show.)
There are plenty of prolific writers, 5,000 words per day or more, whose work sells. Many don't talk about it. Some like to preserve the mystique. Some know no one will believe them. And some know what happens if they discuss their writing speed: people will dismiss their stuff as trash WITHOUT EVEN READING IT, just BECAUSE it was written quickly. I know. It happens to me all the time. If you're fast, you MUST be a hack. Not worth their attention.
One writer I know of wrote a short story every day. He sat down in his office with no plan, he just wrote until he had a story. A story a day from age 12. What a hack, right?
That "hack" was named a Commandeur of France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. You may have heard of Ray Bradbury?
Tools, not rules. There's no One True Path.
Blogger Ann Althouse said...
"Who knows what he really did?"
And that's the truth, for more than just Faulkner. Hemingway was a famous bullshit artist. When he was asked for writing advice, he would tell people different things at different times: so many words per day, so many rewrites, so many months between the rewrites. Somebody did the math once. If he followed these "rules", his own published output would've taken over a century to write.
Writers lie for a living. Some of them get really good at it.
Althouse says:Maybe it was an effort to assure his mom that writing is really a job and he’s hard at work. Who knows what he really did?
She may be correct. Faulkner worked in a Post Office in Mississippi for a while, and then quit. Asked why, he said: "I did not want to be at the beck and call of every damn fool who had enough to buy a stamp."
So maybe he was lazy and he needed to cover that up.
gilbar said...
"Days went by, with both Hawks and Faulkner rereading and re-rereading the book, but neither could figure out who killed the chauffeur..
FINALLY, they contacted Chandler, and asked HIM, Who Killed the Chauffeur ?
And Chandler said...
That he had NO IDEA and that it was STUPID to ask.. Because it was COMPLETELY irrelevant to the story*"
Chandler was an early practitioner of what is sometimes called a fixup novel: you take a number of existing short stories (for which you've already been paid), and you "fix them up" into a novel. It's a proven way to turn old work into new money.
A typical way to write a fixup novel is to combine stories with common characters and settings, but Chandler took a different approach. He might combine three or more stories about different characters and settings into a single novel about a single detective in a single setting. And remember this was more than half a century before word processors and simple copy-paste buttons. This was the era of typewriters and retyping (and sometimes even literal cut and paste, using scissors and paste). That is unimaginable effort to writers today (myself included).
The Big Sleep was one of these fixups based on three other stories. My theory on the chauffeur is that Chandler simply forgot him in the fixup process. The chauffeur wasn't the point of the story he was reusing, the family was.
Trollope was the most prolific writer I ever heard of. He would knock off some five or six hundred page novel and, upon completion, immediately start work on the next. He didn't even get up and walk around the desk. It's amazing the amount of work you can get done if you have a lousy sex life......Is there anyone alive who has read the complete works of Trollope? For that matter, are there any more than a dozen people who have actually made it through Finnegan's Wake? Prior to Gravity's Rainbow, this was the best selling unread novel of all time, but Pynchon's work has perhaps replaced it. Faulkner frequently lapses into intelligibility. I have actually read and enjoyed some of his books, but there's quite a lot of sound and fury to get through in the others......I read a bio of Lenin. He wrote sixty books, all of them over six hundred pages. Probably crammed with a lot of statistics, but, still, that's a lot of writing. I think people in the USSR actually had to read and study those books.
I understand why people dislike Faulkner. But I remember reading the story The Bear in high school, and being blown away. There was something about his loquacious style that was mesmerizing.
"he wrote 10,000 words a day..."
Let's ask Bach how many notes he wrote. Considering his other jobs and rather large family, his output is pretty astonishing.
So who would be the most prolific author/composer in terms of amount of published work per day/year? We could judge by adult lifetime or by best decade.
I was very influenced by Jack London's commment that he wrote 1000 good words a day. I got into that habit and if I hit 1000 words I felt it was enough, sometimes more but I'd push myself to get to at least 1000. Wrote 4 books, a long dissertation, band several hundred thousand or more unpublished stuff just for my own growth and interest.
It's a great target for me. I learned from Michener the importance of a steady schedule and like him write in the morning, edit in the afternoon.
In the 19th century, people read novels to find out about a country or a society. You read Balzac to understand France, Tolstoy to understand Russia, and Dickens, or one of his rivals, to understand Britain. Social science wasn't that developed, and neither was journalism. There weren't any blogs and diarists and letter-writers could only tell you so much.
In the '30s, if you wanted to understand the American South, you read Faulkner. It was either him or the mythmaking of Margaret Mitchell or the cynicism of H.L. Mencken. If you were White and wanted to understand Black America in the days before Richard Wright, you probably hadn't heard of many African-American writers and you read Faulkner. Even in the second half of the century, if you were trying to understand segregation or civil rights or Jimmy Carter, people directed you to Faulkner.
All that is gone now. You have so many sources of information and opinion that Faulkner doesn't have that automatic appeal that he once did. I suppose also that any big literary movement, any discovery of fresh literary territory, leaves people bored with it after it's exhausted most of its material.
I read Faulkner in college and liked it. I tried to read Toni Morrison on my own and didn't get it. I've wondered since then if that was because Faulkner was a better or a clearer writer or just because generations of critics, scholars, and teachers had been explicating him to the point where one already knew what the book was about when one opened it.
I struggled with Faulkner on the high school assignments - but have returned in my old age and really enjoyed his work. Read Light in August this year - wonderful book, but certainly beyond 16 year old me back in the day.
Martin L. Shoemaker said...
My theory on the chauffeur is that Chandler simply forgot him in the fixup process. The chauffeur wasn't the point of the story he was reusing, the family was.
Martin? Have you read Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder"?
He makes the point, that 'who done its' are not just stupid, they're BORING. It's the Characters (and, more importantly, the settings) that Chandler thought were interesting. I totally agree. Who killed who, isn't why he's great; he's great because he makes 1930's LA come alive.
LA should be glad they had him, basically (to me); EVERYTHING that's interesting about southern Cali is in his works.
"He makes the point, that 'who done its' are not just stupid, they're BORING."
And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little ______) has sold more than 100 million copies. Seems to disprove that thesis.
Faulkner wrote 10,000 words a day -- but how many periods did he use? Not enough.
When I worked for weekly newspapers (1974-76), I copy-edited a very bad writer. I used to tear apart the pages with a metal pica pole (ruler) and glue the paragraphs in a more logical order on blank copy paper. I fondly remember my pica pole and glue pot.
Lurker21 mentions Mencken, which makes me wonder--as a Southern writer? (Baltimore was a Southern port with Southern social mores after all.) Or as the bete noir and unwitting godfather of The Agrarians? Or both?
HIs famous Bozart essay is what is recalled easiest now, but HLM being HLM he was also capable of praising aspects of Southern life as it suited his whim or rhetorical need of the moment.
As a Southerner of Confederate maternal lineage, it was bracing to read that critique, and even better to see him turn on all the other icons of his age. An older friend--a historian, also a Southron--once told me that criticism of the South can only bother a Southerner who sees the South as a continuing political-spiritual community. That was very clarifying.
Same for the country, the USA such as it is now. The South was NOT a continuing political-spiritual community, or if it was, I was out. How long will it take for the young to opt out of what is no longer much of a continuing community?
I suppose the best way to measure a composer's productivity would be to determine how many hours of music (roughly) his works take to perform. In theory you could even work out monthly or yearly rates . . .
I understand that Mozart's complete works are available as a CD set of 225 disks.
--- I remember reading the story The Bear in high school, and being blown away. There was something about his loquacious style that was mesmerizing.
I agree, Andrew. And the book in which the full version of "The Bear" appears -- which is Go Down, Moses -- has over time become my favorite of all Faulkner's books. It's a group of six or seven separate but related stories about common characters. Two great themes run through it -- the interwoven, interdependent worlds of black and white Americans, down South; and the gradual taming, changing, and slow disappearance of the American wilderness, as he had seen and heard it in Mississippi.
Who can say what's the greatest anything, but for my money, there is no other American fiction that is better than Go Down, Moses. Whatever that may make it. Faulkner at his prime around 1940. Not the easiest reading, maybe, but once you've caught his tone of voice, vivid.
And even, in some instances, terse. Unlike, say, the better-known Absalom, Absalom, which has a couple great sections but is mostly so wildly overwritten it becomes painful or even comical, IMO.
Most fertile years? So how many kids did he father during them?
"(Some of you may be familiar with Harlan Ellison writing award-winning short stories from prompts, right in a bookstore window as people watched. That was my inspiration for The Instant Story Show.)"
I attended the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona where Ellison was the Guest of Honor. He set up a tent made of transparent plastic in the lobby of the hotel where he wrote a short story while con-goers watched. (I can't remember the story's title now, but I believe it was later published.)
Robert Cook said...
"I attended the 1978 World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona where Ellison was the Guest of Honor. He set up a tent made of transparent plastic in the lobby of the hotel where he wrote a short story while con-goers watched. (I can't remember the story's title now, but I believe it was later published.)"
Most of them were. Some won awards. The man was a meticulous stylist.
I would've liked to see that. You're fortunate.
"I would've liked to see that. You're fortunate."
Yes, I was.
To prove he was really writing a story, and not just typing, he taped the pages up under glass in the lobby as he finished them. I think it took him about three days to finish it. He didn't sit there for hours at a time, as, being the Guest of Honor, he had other Con events to attend. (He was protesting Arizona's vote against ratifying the Equal Right Amendment. He only came to the Con because he had committed to it before the vote and he felt obligated to the fans who might have come to the con because he would be attending. However, he vowed not to spend a single cent in the state, so he slept in a motor home somewhere nearby, presumably stocked with provisions.)
It's hard to believe it was so long ago. I recall walking through the hotel lobby late in the evening wearing my home-made "Sex Pistols" t-shirt and Harlan, standing nearby in conversation, gave me--or my shirt--a long look as I walked by.
(He was quite a charismatic and volatile public speaker, as he was in all his filmed or broadcast interviews. I saw him speak and take questions at two or three events at the 1978 convention and in two later conventions I attended where he was present as a guest.)
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