wordage

Somehow over the weekend I ended up doing no writing during the day, and then a burst after what should have been my bedtime. I tried for some self-discipline this morning and actually got in the daily minimum before lunchtime. 1441 words on Saturday, 997 on Sunday, and exactly 500 before lunch today. Where do people get the idea I'm a fast writer? (And thank you for the namecheck, sarahf :-) Anyway, today's post at Romancing the Blog is leading to thoughts on differences between genre cultures, and perceptions of output, which I may elaborate on after I've had a cup of tea. I've done the minimum on the paying word count, so I can play a bit this afternoon. And read.

I'm probably going to regret kicking this beehive...

Today's post at Romancing the Blog, "The Proflicacy Problem", discusses the high output of some romance writers, and questions whether they can keep up the quality of their work when putting out finished work at the sort of speed being displayed by some. Now, I wouldn't completely disagree with the sentiment expressed, but something struck me as I read the article and the comment thread. Most of the people involved seemed to be measuring output purely in terms of titles per year. To which I went, "Huh?"

I think of output at least as much in terms of word count as in number of titles. That's partly a reflection of my being a writer, and therefore having a very strong interest in word counts, and how well the word count in my manuscript matches up to the word count in the submission guidelines. But it's also something I did even when my interest in books was purely as a reader. You can do a lot of fiddling with the words per page, but even so, it's pretty obvious that (picking a couple of examples from the bookcase next to me) Tanith Lee's Kill the Dead and Mary Gentle's 1610: A Sundial in a Grave have somewhat different word counts. And both are the length they need to be for the story contained therein.

I could start a long and entertaining flame war by enquiring whether length is of itself an indicator of quality, with reference to Extruded Fantasy Product; the death of the novella; and what happens when a market decides at two minutes' notice that it wants sleek 100 kword novels instead of doorstops, and that includes anything turned in but not actually in the printing press at this very moment. However, I know someone with far more experience of kicking beehives, and I'll leave that one to him. I'm more interested in this one:

If four writers each produce 200,000 words of finished book product per year, who has the highest production rate -- the one turning out one EFP doorstop, the one turning out two of "standard length for first sf novel", the one turning out three category romances, or the one turning out several novellas?

Now, I have a personal interest in this, because I'm actually named in that comment thread as an example of a fast but good writer. Which boggled me slightly, because while I'm pleased enough with the compliment and the free publicity, I am not what I think of as a fast writer. I'm actually a pretty slow writer compared with some of my friends.

But I'm also a natural novella writer, and I've managed to get two to three titles a year out by dint of writing things that are only 25-50 kwords long. And since I'm epublished, it's a lot less obvious that the books are quite short. That's a large part of why I'm epublished, in fact -- as far as sf genre markets are concerned, my natural length is too long for the print magazine market and too short for the print novel market. So presumably people are seeing the title count, and not realising that much of the time the combined length is about the same as or even less than a single title from one of the people whose natural length is doorstop.

So is an emphasis on word count vs title count a difference between the sf and romance genres, or is it a difference between writers and readers? Or perhaps it's both, because as has been discussed repeatedly and noisily of late, it's not easy to draw a solid line between pro and fan in the sf genre.

Any thoughts?