Timing Isn’t Everything

I usually go around thinking I know everything there is to know about everything, but I recently realized that I have things to learn about the craft of writing. That may sound surprising, as (allow me an egotistical moment), having written many things over many years, I thought I knew pretty much all there is to know about writing in particular:

During my adolescence I wrote a few poems and short stories, some of which weren’t too awful. When I was twelve or so, I wrote a science fiction story that had aliens conversing, and since I had no idea how to craft a language (I’m no J.R.R. Tolkien), I simply strung a long series of letters together for each alien word. It made reading the story aloud very challenging.

During school years, just like everyone else, I’ve written innumerable book reports, theme papers, and many other types of such scholarly endeavors. However, if I’m being honest, I’d have to refresh my memory of constructing thesis statements and footnotes or I’d be in real trouble.

I studied Journalism for a short time, and a surprising amount of that education has stayed with me over the years. I can say with confidence that I could probably still write a news article and not have the editor blue-pencil it too horrendously.

Over a long career, I’ve written countless items attendant upon legal matters. In the beginning, I had a lot of red ink comments returned to me, some of which were pretty caustic. By the time I was heading into the last years of that career, I was training others in how to write such things.

The key similarity among all those different types of authored items is that the finished product was relatively short. Now that I’m writing full-length books, I’ve learned that the cadence of writing is very different. For the latest book in the series, I thought I’d try setting the goal of getting at least three chapters done each day. But I found myself pushing the story unnaturally, just to get words on the page to meet an arbitrary timeframe. The end result was frustration and ultimately having to rewrite entire chapters. I’m lucky that I don’t really have hard deadlines to meet, so I can let the story take its own pace. It works out better for everyone, and the characters are happy they don’t find themselves written into a corner with no way out.