When Speculative Realms were calling for submissions, I wasn’t planning on sending anything. The “where there’s a will there’s a way” theme hadn’t sparked any ideas and as I’ve spent my entire life not submitting stories anywhere I didn’t feel a desperate need to start now.
Until seven days before the submission deadline, when I wrote the forum post I talked about yesterday. And to prove to myself that my story-in-seven-days plan would really work, I decided I should try writing something.
That was Sunday. By the end of the day I had an idea which would fit the anthology theme.
By Monday, I had the plot worked out. But I didn’t start writing anything down. I just spent the time thinking about it.
By Thursday, I had a breakdown of every scene in my head, which meant that I knew what each setting was, what characters were involved, and what they must say to each other. I had a lot of specific dialogue in my head, too, so I knew what “voice” each character had.
I had Friday afternoon off work, so that’s when I started writing.
Yes, I can comfortably compose 1000 words an hour at the keyboard, but not a lot more. The limit isn’t my typing speed (a pathetic 36 works per minute, but even that would let me do 1000 words in half an hour) but my thinking speed. Composing isn’t copy typing — I have to think about each sentence before I type it. Even if I know exactly what the sentence has to say (which I did), I still have to pick the right words to say it in. (There are probably people who are more natural writers than me, but for me it takes effort.) The thing was, if I got a sentence wrong at this stage, it would add to the editing burden later on, and time for editing was already extremely tight. So I had to get it right first time.
I wrote the whole thing without changing a single idea or plot element, as my seven-day plan specified.
I finished by the middle of Friday evening (including one break in the middle to go out for some fresh air). I closed the document (and backed it up!) as soon as I finished typing, to resist the urge to start editing then.
The depressing thing was that the word count was 1000 less than I had expected it to be. But it was still within guidelines, so I let it stand. I resisted the urge to go back and add words. I had told the exact story I had planned to and it didn’t need any more words. I didn’t want to waffle just to make it look like I had done more work. And the low count wasn’t due to the tight deadline. If I had started six months previously with the same idea, it would still have needed exactly the same number of words to tell it.
Given more editing time, I might have been tempted to go through it and add more descriptions. The whole story is very plot-oriented and dialogue-heavy, with just a minimal description of each scene. But that’s how I like to write. And I think I got the pacing right, anyway. Padding with descriptions (of things that weren’t really important to the plot) or adding “weather reports”, etc., would suck the energy out of it, I think. So from that point of view, having a tight deadline was a blessing because it removed the temptation of doing that sort of fiddling.
On Saturday morning I printed a hard copy and edited on that. Working on hard copy stopped me from going back and rewriting the same bits over and over until they looked right — instead, I thought about each bit until it was right and then wrote the correction on.
The edits took about two hours. Most of that was marking up the draft. Retyping took almost no time at all (because that was simply copy typing at 36 words per minute).
Then I printed one final copy and read it while I was eating lunch. I found two typos and fixed them. (I knew there would be more typos… but I had an editor to fall back on.)
Then I sent off the submission. Six minutues before the deadline! (I think it might have been an hour and six minutes before the deadline because I worked out the time zones wrong. But just six minutes sounds more cool so I’m sticking with that :p )
And (in case you hadn’t noticed) the story was accepted by the publisher.
I am convinced it wasn’t a fluke. My way of writing is the right way. Well… the right was for me…
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