Thread: SpeedWriting vs TimeTaking?

In the race to get my novel out as fast as possible while maintaining the same level of quality, I have to ask this question:

Should I "speedwrite", writing large masses of words daily without any special regard to quality, and then go back to revise my work-which is destined to be flawed beyond belief.

OR, should I take my time with each writing session, to ensure the quality of my writing stays intact?

Right now I get a good 1000-2000 words out a day with Speedwriting...I just don't know which is the right way to go...suggestions? How do you go about writing your novel?

Don't rush your novel! If you set certain quotas for each day/week, that's fine! But, ensure that it's within reason. Try to keep from setting impossible deadlines or ceilings. Quality over Quantity, is what I usually stress. Take on what you can take per day, and stick to it. You'll find that as time goes on and your experience accumulates, the extra words will come.

I think either is fine, so long as at the end you are happy with the quality of your writing. Whether that quality is checked during the process or at the end, the final product is all that's important.

All I can say is, if you hit a day where you don't feel you have a lot worth writing, just keep writing. It's better to get something down on paper than nothing at all. On a more creative day you can go back and revise what you have done.

The spice must flow!

Capulet, I'd love to listen to your advise, but...I'm a Montague...alas!

@Powerskris, if I revise later, won't the quality be there?

The spice must flow!!!! Didn't the utlimate end of those novels prove differently (i.e. the manufactured spice)?

AaronTP, revising is always gold. There has been more than once that my writing colleague has said; "Jeez! I just want to go back and fix that!". I'd always say back to him: "Do it on your second draft, just keep writing!" When you're writing there is always a thought in your head that, at one time or another, that you're writing crap. So yes, revising can always improve. There is a difference though, between racing for a deadline and ensuring that you're pacing yourself. Just as a good marathon runner won't wear themselves out on the first kilometer, you shouldn't either. Do what you can, and improve it later. And, just as a marathon runner finds himself or herself having more stamina each time, so will you.

Both methods produce good results. Speed writing gets you a bigger word count and helps you to finish your novel/story faster which gives you time to revise.Time taking lets you edit as you go along and you work out the kinks of your story, getting it perfect. It depends how YOU want to write. If you want to write freely and then go back and edit, then you use Speed Writing. If you want a more perfect first draft, then Time taking is the better option.

It's going to seem like a dumb obvious answer, but to each their own.

In my novel-writing class at uni last year, we were fairly divided. Some writers churned out thousands of words a week, only to keep maybe a quarter, maybe less, and even that was in first draft stage. Other writers edited as they went, wrought all that they could out of every sentence as they went along.

Doing that would make me pretty nervous. Structurally I find a novel hard to understand until you've written a fair bit of it -if not all of it. So why waste time perfecting a scene that may well need to be rewritten, or scrapped entirely?

I put a lot of faith in the second draft. First draft, for me, is to get the story out. Even if it looks like a huge mess. Once it's all out, the storyline will be easier to find, and big structural edits can begin. Then the nitty gritty comes. That's my process.

Do the hard work now, or later. Your choice, won't make a huge amount of difference to the end product.

If you decide to go on the low volume/high quality route I would suggest having a very good outline and structure before you start.

Why will it be destined to be 'flawed beyond belief' if you write 1,000 to 2,000 words a day? With all due respect, that's nonsense. I write at least a thousand words every day. Sometimes I've written upwards of 10,000 in one sitting. The notion that writing more equates to writing badly is farcical.

I've two friends who tried both of your options - each decided they had taken the wrong route! Use what is best for you!

Cheers

My tendency is to edit as I go, but I've found that if I actually try to write in this manner I don't get much past the first couple of chapters. So I force myself to just plug through and write, bearing in mind that the editing will come later, and that there will be a crazy amount of it. I'm signed up for Nanowrimo this November and they are all about the "write now edit later" mentality... so much so that the entire goal is to write a 50,000-word or more novel in one month. Their website talks about how as a writer you have to overcome your "inner editor" and just write out your thoughts, and that there will be plenty of time for the inner editor to come out later once you have gotten everything down on paper (or on screen).

Thanks for all the specific answers! ("It's up to you")...haha. But it does help, I guess. I think I'll find a happy medium (?) and maybe crank out fairly large chunks of text and then spend a bit of time editing them when I'm done...best of both worlds? I'm leaning towards 'speedwriting', so I guess I'll do that. Thanks for all the feedback!

@VanishingSpy, I failed NaNoWriMo last year. Why? Because I didn't take any time to even consider the quality of my work. It was terrible. I gag when I think of what I wrote. That bad.

@ Sam it just feels like that the quality of my work is inversely proportional to how quickly I write. It's not the amount of writing that effects the quality, it's how quickly I write the words (a thousand words written in thirty minutes has much better quality than a thousand written in twenty. I can barely write a thousand words in twenty minutes to begin with...).