Quality vs. Quantity Which Are You?

How many words a day do you crank out? A thousand? Two? More?

Is this important to you? If so, why?

I just wanted to throw those questions out to you. Get you thinking a little bit.

But here's another one. Is the reason you do crank out thousands of words a day, or say 10,000 in a week, is because you're working to put out a short story, a novel or what have you, in order to keep the number of published works up so as to compete with other titles out there so that you are "discoverable" at Amazon?

Hmm. Really?

There are a number of writers--like Ray Bradbury--who wrote a story a week and could not only put out the quantity, bu also the quality without a problem. Other famous authors do too, but at the moment I can't recall some of them. Their names are household because most writers can't hold a candle to them. But you can emulate them as much as humanly possible. Good luck with that. In my younger writing years, I wanted to be like Stephan King. Not so much now. I've found that I like what I write much better. It's because I've found my "voice".

When I began writing it was either pen/pencil and paper, or the typewriter. In either case if you made mistakes you had no spell check. A bummer for me since I'm a lousy speller (better now, but I've been writing for 40+ years, and when you can see spellcheck you usually begin remembering how to spell some word you eff up all the time). I've told the story of my having to clean out my father's house after his death and I found all my writing from when I lived at home--which included journals--and thousands upon thousands of pages of my writing. Three grocery bags full. Most of it was awful, unfinished and rife with bad grammar and spelling. From my calculations--since I left my father's house to live with my husband in 1988, this would be approximately 16 years of work compiled. Was it any good? No. The ideas, might have been alright, but I was a novice. Yeah. I spent about 25 years being the novice writer. It took me a while to understand plot, and to have a natural in-born system that gave me ideas (in our circles they call it a "muse"), where as I write, or go along (I'm basically a panster), I allow problems of what comes next and why come to me naturally. I don't force-write. I've found that it frustrates my natural abilities, and this is why I shun NaNoWiMo. I'm not capable of churning out words without going back over things. I'm what I call (and maybe it's a word), a layering writer. I layer in details. I may not have the description of a room, a person, at the moment I write the scene. But I might have it tomorrow or the next day or the next--or I'll come back when I'm ready to work on the second draft (remember that term, I'll come back to this). This is how I write, it's like I've dug myself into a nice little writing hole and that's what I'm comfortable with.

Plotting is what it is. If you choose to write something that is easy to plot and you find these are easy to churn out, wonderful. Go for it.

I'm not a fan of easy plots. Not to read and not to write. For some reason I need to make it hard to do. It's the reason I don't like romances. Who winds up together at the end and do the nasty about half a dozen times? I can tell you probably in the first few pages. Boring me to death is not good. I've tried to read what is called "paranormal romance". It's romance between (usually) a human female or male and a supernatural (vampire or werewolf, or dear God, no a zombie). Off the top of my head authors of this would be Lindsay Sands, Michele Hauf, Cynthia Garner, Jeaniene Frost. I've read these authors, and out of all of these Lindsay Sands bores me the most. So, I've learned to steer clear of any of these.

Why does it bore me? I don't know. I've never made a point of watching soaps, I'm not a huge fan of any romance anything. Romance happens in my books, but it's more on a reality loop. Most people (men and women differ as to why) don't believe in romance, but if they did it would happen like in a book, or a movie. That's not reality. Real life and emotions have to be hit for a reader to react, or be reached on an emotional level. Your character can't always win every battle, even when it comes to romance. Something bad usually happens, and that's what I write, when it suits the story line.

Because of this I need sub-plots and a complicated story. Nothing that I can figure out how it will end. That's why with my Sabrina Strong series, if there is romance, its usually sexually oriented. The guy or gal who should win love, doesn't. Why should they? It happens so infrequently in reality, and I try to make the things that happen feel more like reality, because I write about fantasy. I need you to believe this could happen. The people in the story have to seem real, even if they might be a werewolf, a vampire, or a smart-ass leprechaun, or maybe a witch. I need you to feel that they might exist at least on the page. To do this I have to not just write one draft, it's many.

Oh, there's that word again. DRAFT. Does anyone really write drafts any more? You know. You write the work and go back through it again. Make adjustments, find mistakes and then put it aside, work on something else and come back to it for a third time... That's what a draft is, and it's not something you can do in a month or even two months. This is my work and I need to do the work (unfortunately I don't have a magic wand). Besides, I sometimes have ideas come to me two books down the line (in other words, I'm writing on the 8th book, and something occurs to me that maybe I should have put in the 6th one and I go back and put it in). If the work is already out there, it's sort of too late for me to change some detail. You send something to an editor, they don't touch anything but mistakes you've made in spelling and grammar. At least that's what they're supposed to do. If you've put a book out there that has some minor or large mistake in it, well... For example, I got a freebee from an author who I won't name, and read along and at this one scene the characters were watching the moon go down through a window and then they watched the sun come up--in the same window. Uh, HELLOO! The sun or moon rises in the east and goes down in the west. Needless to say, I could not read another word because of this. And the story seemed to drag on, anyway, so I didn't loose sleep over it. That's an easy example, and how the author or anyone else who read it didn't catch it, I don't know. But really, that's a big error that should not have happened. Possibly a rush to publish was part of the problem.

I know I've been guilty of this too. I'm trying to clean up my act. I'm not going to put out a work unless I'm sure I've gotten as many boo-boos as I can find corrected, and the only way to do this is going over and over it, and getting a couple of betas to read it through too helps.

I also do research for most of my novels. I might need to dig into historical facts or such things as styles of dress, as I did for Vampire Nocturne. I may research a number of things about each book before I can even write about it. Like my fourth novel. Even though I did write Vampire Caprice in a matter of three months, because it simply came out of me, it wasn't finished in three months. Not really. I had to research cars, missile solos, GPS devices, Nephilum, and other things. These things take time. I've had certain people contribute their knowledge toward something I was absolutely unfamiliar with, like the scene where someone looses a wrench under a car and it lands somewhere unreachable in the undercarriage. Someone who knew components of a car gave me a wonderful description, I wrote it, sent it to him and he told me I did a super job on it. I couldn't have done that scene without such a person. It's what makes the story feel like reality. If I tried to dummy it up and a mechanic read the scene they'd probably want to throw the book across the room. I'd never have that reader touch another one of my books again. I don't want anyone throwing a book (well, they're now eBooks), across the room for any reason because I neglected my job as a good writer.

This subject keeps coming up the fact that some writers are trying to churn out more and more work, and publish it quickly so as to beat the odds that someone will find your work out there. Here is one such link.

If you write and publish frequently, and do a great job of it, that's great. You're one of a kind. But there are those who put out work that is far below excellence that muddies up the waters, so to speak. My thought is that hopefully they no longer sell because their work is so inferior or they continue to get bad reviews, and they just decide that maybe they can't really write and quit, freeing up some space for those of us who can.

When to Chuck it Out

I'm a Panster. And since I don't like outlining--to do so just wastes my time--the posibility that I will have to discard what I've written happens more than not on any WIP. You get so far and see where it's going and think Nah!

I was doing that in the 6th book WIP where I followed a scene till I realized I really didn't like it, or where it would wind up going. I could see I'd be following this secondary character way too much, and all I really wanted to do was to show his character since his "change".

As with any characters who have become part of Sabrina's story, I'm always trying to find some way of keeping it all fresh. Some characters who change either change for the good, or they've become evil/bad/dead. You need to kill a few of the evil ones off, but do so in a way that someone comes out the hero of the story, and the good ones, well, I need to bring them back because I think they could fulfil something in the plot that I need in a certain moment of drama--usually at the end.

So, when I got so far with this scene--which I thought was going well--I saw that it was going to involve that secondary character way too much, plus a tertiary character who was just introduced and I was beginning to not really like her, her life, and surroundings and knew I was never going to make her believable anyway...
So... delete,delete,delete.

But it's all good. If you get frustrated by the work you need to do, you need to ask yourself if you are up to the challenges of what it takes to actually make your WIP better. You may have to rip out whole chapters, and even characters from a WIP. You have to ask yourself the tough questions. I think I've been writing for so long, I know when that moment is, and without much thinking over it, I just get rid of it and start all over. They say you have to kill your darlings, and it's true. Sometimes they look somewhat like Frankenstein's monster when you're working on it. But when you get into the last drafts it should all come together as a whole and work--and no one sees the stitches!

So, I was wondering about this secondary character and how I wanted to make him different--not just another vampire--and where I wanted to go with him. It hit me this morning when I woke up. I knew what I had to do and got working on the concept. I had to do some research on Greek Mythology, and believe it or not found something that seemed as though it were made for what I needed. Since I'm so far ahead of my published work, I'm not going to say which character. I might start making people worry needlessly.

Until next time... keep on writing!

Chapter Three

Well, I've been excited about my newest project ~ the mystery. I knew I wanted to do this book, a far cry from my normal very wild Sabrina Strong series. Way back in the fall I had taken out a very old manuscript (about 10 years old), and was looking through it. My main character's name was JanVladislav in this. I liked the name but better yet I came up with a totally new name: Jansen Crosse - thus this is called my Jansen Crosse Murder Mysteries. If there actually will be more than one.

Anyway, I had some characters figured out, borrowed, if you will, from the former novel (which, BTW was a vampire novel--eh-hem).

I, of course needed a MURDER to solve. I also had to figure out the basics. You know the...
WHY?
WHO?
WHAT?
HOW?
WHEN?
...questions. I needed the murder victim(s), and the basic mystery plot. I had to know the who/why/how/when stuff; in otherwords who did it and why.

I also had to totally leave behind whatever ideas were in the vampire novel and just allow myself time to relax. After being off the job for about a week, the ideas began to naturally slam into me at the normal time they always do--when I've lain down to go to bed!

Of course! That's it!

I grab my recorder and begin rattling off my ideas.

At this point of writing (two days) I'm into chapter 3, but I see I need to lead my two detectives--Jansen has a partner, Detective Evans, off on some wild goose chase (a false lead). I've aready planted a clue and interrupted it with introduction of another character who will be a main player in the whole sceme of things.

I'll need a red herring--have not yet decided on them as yet, but I'm working on this. I may have it by tonight.

But the one thing that I did hold on to was the mansion, and an old tunnel that leads from the old mansion to this very old church--or, if I decide later that there is no tunnel (another false lead), but a hidden room inside a hidden room where slaves were given a place to stay during the Civil War erra... all of this I will consider and decide as I go along.

The mystery is harder to plot, of course. I need to know when and where to plant certain clues, how to minimalize them by certain tricks of the traid. I'm still learning how to write a mystery, actually. I know I like to read them.

Have you read any really good mysteries lately? Want to share which ones? I happen to like Janet Evanovich, But I could use something with a male main character.

When the Writing Gets Complicated & Plotting Scenes

Hello all two of you! *chuckle*

I'm still working along in the 4th book. And because I will now be working longer days, it will be difficult for me to post most of the time in here, or elsewhere.

However, here is where I'm at in my WIP: 43,227 words. Which I would consider at half-way through, depending upon where I want to end it. I don't try and reach a limited amount of words, but at the same time I don't want an overly long novel. With my publisher, he doesn't limit word count, but the book will merely cost more for the consumer, depending upon the pages. Thus, with the economy as it is, I'm trying to work toward much less than 100,000 words. I try and keep the work within 300 pages, if possible.

My pick for best book on
 Nephilim and fallen angels

So, with that in mind, and knowing that I am working with several character's POV's, I have to limit what each one gets to have in their moments/scenes in the book. Because I've been just working along from the beginning with what I had, I'm now adding the other characters, having their scenes in here, I have to now drop them in as I go along. With one character in particular, Bill Gannon (who is introduced in second book about to come out), I've had to develop his history. He is the off-spring of Nephilim, and I had to develop their history according to what I wanted them to be and so forth. I've read only two novels pertaining to Nephilim, and one was very good, called Angelology, by Danielle Trussoni. I would recommend this book over all. I felt she did the most extensive work on the background and history out of the two I've read so far. The other book was a YA. Not that into YA, but it was an alright book for young adults. This was called Fallen by Lauren Kate. The cover, and the first chapter are a bit deceiving, so I had to read into the center of this book to even become interested. I don't care for young adult, I guess it's because they always have them in some sort of school. Which is fine. I simply hated school, when young. I guess nothing will even touch the Harry Potter series for most interesting schools for me.

Anyway, what I've had to do is think on who Bill is, his history, and come up with some moments from his past. I had to also decide how old he was. Came up with that he's at least 110 years old, but still looks in his 20's. I had to decide--earlier than this book--what his purpose was to finding Sabrina and trying to woo her, in second book. I knew he would have to be brought into another book to address him, his true background, history, and so forth. It only took a few days for me to come up with his history. Now I need to sprinkle it in.

In order to keep him straight--because there are several characters who I will get into their heads and have scenes with--I've taken note cards and briefly written each scene down on a card for Bill. In a separate document, I've written the ideas more fully, to the point in some cases dialogue, or the scene itself. This is easier for me than to try and write it into the main doc. itself. I have ADD, so if I begin reading portions of my writing, I get distracted away from what I want to do.

The note card ploy works with anything you need for plotting your novel. You can briefly describe the scene, lay them out on a flat surface and figure out what goes first. I've addressed numerous advantages of using this method, and the plot planner, etc. over on Lorelei's Muse in my WORDSMITHING 101 series. If you wish to take a look at those, that's the heading for any you wish to take a look at in past posts of mine. One happens to be on my most viewed at the left side bar. It was the first one I'd written, and it must be pretty good, or I wouldn't have that many people looking at it.

Well, I'll leave you two for now. If you have anything to share here, or at Muse, please do. I always like to hear about what you're doing. Also know that I'm unable to see who my followers are here. I don't know why it's blocked for me. So, if you wish to leave me a link in order to find you, do so. I'll be happy to stop by, and follow you as well!