"How long does it take?" is a popular question on Quora. So are similar questions about how many words you can or should write in a day. And the other side; how much planning do you "need" to do.
Nanowrimo is coming up next month. The battle lines of Outliner versus Panzer, or, as George R. R. calls them, Architects versus Gardners, are drawn up.
Because while everyone recognizes that Art is Art and in a perfect world it should take as long as it needs, in this imperfect world writers need to eat. By selling their writing, once. Well, that era is largely over. So instead writing time is for many not even a break-even proposition and every hour of writing is the loss of a potential billable hour.
Even reading falls into this dismal math. Even for me, the time it takes to read a novel works out to a potential hundred bucks in billable hours. Of course you do have to take a break some time, and reading is still to me a decent use of off time.
In short, we'd all like to know how to write faster and more efficiently. Not necessarily the same thing! But two very common and entwined questions.
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This is why I bring up Nanowrimo. National Novel Writing Month is structured so that Outlining would appear to have the advantage. Appears. Any Panzer worth their pants can get 50,000 words deep into a novel before realizing they have no way to end it.
The lovely theory -- the one the serious Outliners cleave to -- is you get all the hesitations and the back-tracking and the research out of the way once. And then you just write. I think the strongest argument for Outlining as a time-saving strategy is not the simple math of having every hour in the chair be an hour making text. It is, instead, that the act of writing text is a flow, a zone, and the longer you can stay in that zone, the better.
I hit the zone a couple days ago and had passed 2,500 words...until I realized the direction I had taken the scene wasn't working for me.
And this is the great flaw in Outlining, at least as usually described. Heck, I tried to outline this one a lot more than I did. But I realized I could not visualize my protagonist, I could not see how she actually worked in a scene, without writing text.
And that's why I am thinking a better answer than picking a comfort point somewhere on the number line between Outliner and Panzer is to find a way to plan that is properly iterative.
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Every prop I've built, every major project, has used an iterative development. Even the current novel was iterative, as far as it went. I think I probably could have iterated just the way I was going; outline until I needed to see if something worked in text, did some test text, came back and modified the outline.
The problem with the current novel is that the thing I needed to see in text keep happening. I needed to see how that character worked in the Ordinary World and Refusing the Call space. I needed to see how the character worked when she was ready to confront the Threshold Guardian. I needed to see how she worked when she landed in the Pit.
And the way the book is designed and paced, these points come pretty much one after another. There really wasn't sufficient reason to go back to the outline because the very next scene was going to be another question that could only be answered by writing it.
I'm hoping the next book has a different kind of problems.
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Reality is, Panzers stop and plan, too. They just do it in different places. This is why Outliners laugh a them; "You could be writing the next scene, but no, you are stuck figuring out what is supposed to happen next!"
The retort the Panzers should give more often is that the Outliner's gain in efficiency is illusory. They spend months and months not writing a damn thing. At least the Panzers got to their first chapter already.
The thing is, as R. R. points out, the Gardener already knows what she planted. There probably are some Panzers who just started with a nameless character in a white room and let the page tell them what happened. Most of them have more of an idea than that!
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And, yeah, all of this is coming because I'm 5-10 thousand words from the end and I'm still trying to find the best way to tell the Nadir. I wrote the "worst day of my life" scenes, and I wrote a "Let's Get Dangerous"** moment that I loved.
But it isn't right. And at the moment my biggest question is one I could have solved in Outline but wasn't ready to. And that is; "should I do this particular thing here or is it best explored in the next book of the series?"
Yeah. A series. I was not about to solve that question in Outline when I hadn't written Page One of the first book!
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Target is still November 1. I got back from Athens on October 28, I had a finished outline on Jan 1 (see! I do outline!) and Nov 1 makes it ten months to draft. With the goal being to edit, cover art and upload by...Jan 1.
** "Let's Get Dangerous" was the catchphrase of Darkwing Duck. An interesting character, he was a self-made, self-promoted hero who would spend most of the episode fumbling and failing. And then in the last-act turn-around, pushed to the limit, he'd suddenly morph into the cool-as-hell hero he's been styling all along, and dispatch the bad guys with attitude and panache. When you heard he words "Let's Get Dangerous" you knew he was no longer Drake Mallard in an ill-fitting mask, but the Terror that Flaps in the Night -- Darkwing Duck!
And, yeah, I just solved it. That's really why I write these things; to sort my own thoughts, not to annoy my five subscribers with more TL:DR.
A day or two I posted about classical essay structure on Quora and that's still on my mind and, yeah, there are things you come back to. So the way the Indiana Jones archetype clashes with the real world of Archaeology is going to be explored more deeply in the next book. Whether it is the Japan book or the England book I don't know yet. That's another post.
But I can broach the subject in this book. Bring it up, put it aside. Plant it for later exploration. It is why I sent her to the New Acropolis Museum, after all. To think about Lord Elgin and put that together with the rapidly fading hero worship she had on for Schliemann and the various mentions I've made of Evans and Carter.
But this won't be the turning point. She's going to recognize it is a problem, and may even be part of the problem she's having right now, but ultimately the escape from the pit is on different reasons.
Now I just have to figure out if it is stronger symbolism for her to don the hat again, or to show that she doesn't need the hat....
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