Why are writers such lazy bums?

by Guy Bergstrom

I don’t really think writers are lazy bums. I just want us all to talk about the elephant in the living room.

Why does writing TAKE SO LONG?

The average person types 50 words per minute.

And that’s slow. I type about 80 or 90. Faster if I have coffee.

Quicker if I have coffee, a deadline and something to look forward to after.

Image by bitzi☂ via Flickr

Here comes the math.

Fifty words per minute =

• 3,000 words per hour
• 24,000 words per eight-hour day
• 120,000 words per week

That’s a ton of words. An incredible amount.

Let’s do a little more math to see how much we should be cranking out, if we’re not surfing the net, Twittering our lives away and checking out Facebook photos all day.

Here come the word counts.

200 words = letter to the editor
500 words = five-minute speech
600 words = news story
800 words = op-ed
1,000 words = 10-minute speech
1,000 to 3,000 words = profile or magazine piece
1,000 to 8,000 words = short story
3,000 words = 30-minute keynote speech
15,000 words = screenplay
20,000 to 50,000 words = novella
60,000 to 200,000 words = novel

Stephen King is a literary god, a living, walking, breathing Jedi master of storytelling. I bow down before him, though he should do more short stories and novellas like THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (perfect!) than 1,000-page monstrosities that could’ve been 400-page works of art. Image via Wikipedia

If you work an honest 40-hour week, you should’ve produced 120,000 words.

That’s eight screenplays or 200 newspaper stories.

It’s 40 keynote speeches or one entire novel. In a single week.

Nobody writes that much. NOBODY.

Not even Stephen King, back when he was fueled by industrial amounts of caffeine, nicotine and whatever else.

In fact, writers of all sorts are happy to produce between 500 and 2,000 good, usable words a day.

I know novelists who are happy to produce one good novel per year. If you divide 100,000 words by 52 days, you get a smide less than 2,000 words per week.

I know reporters who crank out two stories a day, five days a week.

Columnists who do one or two op-eds a week.

Speechwriters who take two weeks to write a 3,000-word keynote.

Before the invention of word processors, writing gods like Hemingway would pound on their Underwoods and count every word, quitting when they hit 500 or 1,000 a day.

But let’s be generous and say 2,000 words a day is a good day.

Where are the missing 22,000 words? Why are we writers – reporters, novelists, poets, speechwriters – producing about 10 percent of what the math says?

Image via Wikipedia

Nobody writes that much.

NOBODY.

People are happy to produce 500 to 2,000 words per day.

So where are the missing 22,000 words?

Suspect No. 1: It’s not eight hours

This looks like the obvious culprit, because it’s the only person sneaking away from the crime scene with a guilty look and blood on the bottom of their shoes.

Reporters have to cover stories, get quotes from sources and meet with editors.

Novelists need to do research, talk to their agent, go on book tours and so forth.

Every writer, reporter and novelist has to do research and go to meetings. They’re not chained to the desk the entire workday, pounding on the keyboard like a typist. They need to eat of the food sometimes, and drink of the wine, and have a life.

HOWEVER, A lack of hours isn’t what’s wrong here.

Let’s say half the day is toast. Research. Meetings and phone calls. Email. Lunch with some big important person. Twittering to your buddies.

Fine, we’re down to four hours of banging on the keyboard.

3,000 words per hour X 4 hours = 12,000 words a day.

And the most we typically hit, on a good day, is 2,000 words.

If the “half the day is toast” theory is right, where are the missing 10,000 words?

Also, I know writers who spend four hours a day in meetings, doing research, returning email and all that – and they still bang on the keyboard eight hours a day because they’re working at least 12 hours per day. A lot of writers work weekends, too.

Yet 2,000 words per day is some kind of universal wall – for writers of all types. Reporters, novelists, screenwriters. Why?

Suspect No. 2: We type slower than narcoleptic turtles

This suspect doesn’t even get handcuffed and taken down to the station for a chat.

I used 50 words a minute because it’s the average typing speed.

Miss Four Hours and Mr. Types Slowly hatching a scheme to do us in. Also, they smoke cigarettes and play with revolvers. Image via Wikipedia

Professional writers are typically faster than that, unless they’re hunting and pecking on an Underwood because that’s what they’ve always done since they first got published in 1926. There aren’t that many authors in that category.

If you dictate your stuff with Naturally Speaking or whatever, it’s more like 100 words a minute.

But let’s be generous again and pretend we all type really, really slow.

25 words a minute = 1,500 words an hour and 12,000 words a day.

Even if we say Suspect No. 1 (Miss Four Hours) and Suspect No. 2 (Mr. Types Slowly) shacked up in a cheap motel and conspired to murder the creativity of all writers, it doesn’t get us down to 2,000 words a day.

Four hours at the keyboard at 25 words per minute is still 6,000 words a day.

We need a better theory of the crime.

Suspect No. 3: Writing requires deep, deep thinking

Ah, this one is good. It’s lurking in the shadows.

It’s evil. Hard to refute.

How can you say that writing is shallow and easy?

How can you deny the art required, the creativity?

This isn’t an assembly line. It’s not a factory were we churn out widgets. We write original pieces, whether it’s a 500-word story for the newspaper or a 100,000-word novel.

Except I know better. Because I’ve been watching.

Going off my own experience wouldn’t be proof of squat. Maybe I’m an anomaly, or a nut. Maybe I type 80 words per minute (true) and write things damned fast (true) because I turn my brain off (true) and think research is for nancy-pants (not really true, but let’s go with it).

But I’ve been watching, and talking to, writers of all sorts. Reporters, speechwriters, novelists, you name it.

Most professional writers bang on the keyboard at least four hours a day, and they are definitely faster than 50 words a minute.

I know writers who put in 12 or 14 hour days. It’s not like these writers are staring into space half the time. They’re cranking out words.

Even going with four hours a day of actual writing, why doesn’t the average writer have more than 2,000 words before they hit the sack?

We’re still missing words.

Suspect No. 4: We’re creating while destroying

This is our killer. I’ve seen him at work.

I’ve helped other writers catch the evil scumbag, convict him and send him upstate so he can’t do any more damage.

We are typing away on the keyboard, and we’re not doing it at 10 words per minute. We are writing fast. It’s just that we destroy those words just as fast.

Why do we writers destroy more than we create?

Not because the words aren’t pretty. Sentence by sentence, they’re fine.

It’s because the structure is wrong.

I’ve looked at bad drafts that hit the round-file. The sentences were pretty. It was the structure that failed.

We spend so much time trying to fix these things because nobody teaches us structure.

Nobody.

Oh, they taught me the inverted pyramid in journalism school, which is the best possible blueprint for a story if you want to give away the ending right away and put people in a coma the longer they read.

They teach us characterization and the three types of conflict in creative writing.

They teach logical fallacies and different types of arguments in speech and debate.

Yet that’s not really structure. It’s tiny bits and pieces.

They way most of us write is like trying to build a house one room at a time, without any blueprints.

Pour the foundation for the front door and foyer.

Frame it. Wire it for electricity. Drywall it. Paint it.

Now dig the foundation for the kitchen and build that.

Where should the living room go? Okay, we did that, but forgot to put in stairs to the second floor, so we’ve got to tear it all down and start over.

That’s how I used to write. It’s how most writers I know do it.

You start at the beginning and work your way through, trying to fix any problems with structure along the way.

But it’s no way to run a railroad. It’s building a house without blueprints.

I’ve had houses designed and built. If a contractor tried to build a house the way we writers work, it wouldn’t take six months to finish it. It’d take six years, or forever.

So this is our killer, our time-suck, our nemesis.

Question is, how do you DO structure – and how do we, as writers, learn to draw good blueprints, so we stop spending 80 percent of our time at the keyboard destroying what we created?

***

Guy Bergstrom won awards as a journalist before working as a speechwriter and cashing checks from The New York Times as about.com’s expert on public relations. He wrote a thriller (FREEDOM, ALASKA) that won some award and he’s represented by Jill Marr of the Dijkstra Literary Agency. Follow him on his blog redpenofdoom.com, or Twitter at @speechwriterguy, or Google+

Writers, we are doing it BACKWARDS

A guest post by Guy Bergstrom

Oh, it kills me to say this: we are doing it backwards.

Maybe you’re the exception to the rule. Perhaps you’re that rare writer who figured this out 10 years ago.

But I doubt it. Most of the writers I know – whether they’re novelists or journalists, speechwriters or screenwriters – go about it roughly the same way.

Step 1) Research, whether it’s six months of intense study or six minutes of looking at Wikipedia and playing Angry Birds “to let it all percolate.”

Step 2) Boil down the research into useful nuggets of meaty goodness.

Step 3) Use their secret recipe of writing methods to cook up their piece (outlining first or winging it, 3 x 5 index cards or spiral notebook, Word 2010 or Scrivener, one draft or six drafts, coffee or bourbon).

Step 4) Hand the draft to our spouse / best friend / cousin Joey to get all coffee-stained and edited.

Step 5) Spend five or fifty minutes thinking about how to present and sell the sucker for SUITCASES STUFFED WITH TWENTIES.

Those first four steps, they’re essential, right?

Here’s the thing: We writers are incredibly talented at screwing up Step 5.

Backward is bad

Step 5 is the monster lurking under our typewriters. (Yes, I know most of you use computers. Maybe I have a magic typewriter connected to the Series of Tubes.)

It’s the troll under the bridge, snarfing our lunch and saying, “Whatcha gonna do about it, tough guy?”

Now, boiling down a novel clocking in at 100,000 pages is rough. I have author friends who’d rather leap out of a perfectly good airplane, trusting in the bouncy power of their Nike Air Jordans, than write a three-page synopsis. Tagline? Logline? Forgetaboutit.

Doing Step 5 for anything, long or short, is tough.

Tough for screenwriters, who need to boil it down to an elevator pitch.

Tough for editors in newsrooms, who have to write headlines that fit into tiny nooks and corners of the newspaper layout.

Yet nothing else matters if we botch Step 5. Because nobody will see the fruits of our labors, the hard work that went into Steps 1 through 4, if we can’t condense the whole idea into a killer pitch and hook.

Reversing course

Instead of performing the labors of Hercules before even attempting the torture of Step 5, reverse course.

Start there.

Before you invest hours / days / weeks / months into research. Before you sweat bullets to put words on page after page.

Begin with the shortest and most important words.

The logline (or pitch, but in a sentence, not a paragraph) – “An alien monster stalks the trapped crew of a spaceship.” Optional second sentence: “Sigourney Weaver also does a short advertisement for Hanes.”

The tagline – “In space, nobody can hear you scream.”

The headline – “Alien devours spaceship crew; heading for Earth?”

Test that out, not with friends and family who are constrained by the need to live with you and be liked by you. Try a single sentence on people in line at Safeway or Starbucks, neighbors you barely know, visitors from out of town, tourists, people who won’t wound you forever if they make a face and tell you the idea is stupid.

And to get inspiration, use the series of tubes to check out “movie loglines” and “movie taglines” and “great headlines.” Or head to The Onion and read their headlines, which are seven separate flavors of awesomesauce.

Don’t do a thing until you have a logline, tagline and headline that sing.

Go do it. Throw ideas around on a piece of paper or whatever – and not about whatever you’re working on. Dream up a few crazy ideas and write down loglines, taglines and headlines that are shorter than short. Then kill every word you can to make them shorter.

You’re going to notice a few things.

First, the hero doesn’t matter.

Second, the villain matters a whole bunch. If you remove the villain and threat, it kills the logline / tagline / headline. Because stories – even newspaper stories – are about conflict. No villain, no conflict. But if you take out the hero, it usually makes the logline a lot shorter and a lot better.

Here’s another example I’ve used before and will use again, because it is short and sweet – and the logline for about six movies that have already been made: “Asteroid will destroy earth.”

See? We don’t need Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck-whatever (Matt Damon‘s buddy, the one who dates & marries Jennifers) in there at all. Heroes just clutter things up.

Third, shorter is better. If you can get it down to three or four words, you are golden.

A new way to write

Let’s get practical. Here’s a new way to write anything.

New Step 1) Nail the logline, tagline and headline.

One sentence apiece, as few words as possible and, yes, it is cheating to have sentences that go on and on forever, sentences with six different commas and possibly semi-colons, which are a sin against the English language and should be taken out and shot.

New Step 2) Make it work as a paragraph.

Expand it a little, but not too much. Half a page.

New Step 3) Nail it as an outline on ONE PAGE, treating each side fairly.

Whether you’re writing an oped or an opera, a novel or a speech, figure out the biggest possible difference between the beginning and the end – and do it from both POVs. The villain / problem and the hero / solution.

So if it’s a romance where the heroine ends up as a great cook who’s happy and in a great relationship, what’s the greatest possible distance she can travel? On page 1, make her (a) the worst cook in the world, (b) unhappy and (c) alone. How can you take that up a notch? Make her a nun who’s loses her sense of smell (and therefore taste) in a car accident. You get the idea. Read this for what I’m talking about. The Red Pen of Doom whips SWITCH by Camryn Rhys

If the ending is happy, the beginning better be sad.

If the ending is sad, the beginning should be happy.

If the hero is a tough guy in the end, the best story shows him starting out weak. Only after he suffers and sacrifices and paints the fence FIVE THOUSAND HOURS does he become a tough guy and prevail. (The Karate Kid.)

And you’ve got to make it a fair fight. Nobody thinks they’re a villain. The other side – whether it’s an speech about taxes or The Empire Strikes Back – has a point. If you don’t give it credence, your writing will be one-sided and weak.

I used ALIEN before. What’s the story for the alien creatures? Maybe they’re a dying race. Maybe that crashed ship contains the last of their kind. The stakes just got a lot higher for the alien, right? You are our only hope, little face-hugger. Get in that ship and lay some eggs.

Put yourself in the shoes of Darth Vader and the Emperor, who don’t see themselves as enslaving the galaxy. They’re helping people by establishing law and order. If nobody is in charge, it’s chaos and confusion. A strong empire means safety, security and economic growth. The rebels are violent terrorists who don’t appreciate what they have and will kill whoever it takes to gain power.

Now figure out your turning points. Put in your setups and payoffs. Make it work as an outline before you move on.

New Step 4) Research only what you need.

New Step 5) Write and have a professional editor bleed red ink on the pages until the draft is A SHINY DIAMOND MADE OF WORDS.

You’ll notice what used to be an afterthought – step 5 in the original way of writing – becomes the first three steps.

I did that on purpose.

Say you write a beautiful op-ed, 700 magnificent words about why the death penalty should be abolished or whatever. Now you’ve got to pick up the phone and pitch an editor at The Willapa Valley Shopper or The New York Times.

The first five seconds (aside from the “hello” nonsense) will determine if they even look at the piece. Maybe six or seven words, if you talk fast. Part of that will be confidence, tone of voice and other things you can’t learn via a blog post.

Your logline / tagline / headline, though, will matter. A lot.

A great speaker with a muddled pitch will lose out to a mumbler with a tremendous idea they can convey in four words.

Hollywood calls this five-second kind of thing “the elevator pitch.” Websites abound that devote many, many words to it. Use the powers of the Google and check them out. They are useful.

Bottom line: those four words matter more than all 700 words of the op-ed, all 3,000 of the keynote speech, all 15,000 of the screenplay or all 100,000 of your epic novel about elves with light-sabers riding dinosaurs. Make those four words count.

Related nonsense:

Writing secret: Light as air, strong as whiskey, cheap as dirt

Everything they taught us about stories was WRONG

Quirks and legs matter more than talent and perfection

How to write KILLER headlines and hooks

Evil storytelling tricks NO ONE SHOULD KNOW

Forget the Twitter: free ink and airtime are your MOST DANGEROUS WEAPONS

Blog: redpenofdoom.com
Twitter: @speechwriterguy
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