Faster Pussycat

Is it possible to speed up my writing process without sacrificing quality? Stop, you fool! You’ll kill us all!

I’m trying to figure out how to write faster.

Obviously this is risky. When you push the pace, you (by which I mean me) run the risk of ‘forcing’ the writing, i.e. writing stuff without feeling it, which is of course death, death, death.

But I’m also aware that the last time I wrote a novel I spent 10 years on it, and I cannot afford to spend 10 years on my new book, for lots of reasons. Financial ones obviously—three kids here—but also because, professionally, if I make a habit of leaving 10 years between books, I run the risk (by which I mean certainty) of people forgetting who I am.

Also I’m old enough that there’s an ever-rising possibility that I will be dead in 10 years.

Like a lot of writers I generally start my day by revising what I wrote the day before—fresh eyes, gets me back into the flow, etc. However I often get to the end of the day having revised about 2/3 of the previous day’s output and not written anything new at all. I do this like often often.

I have heard (unreliable source) of a famous writer (rhymes with Shmanzen) who, when he finished writing for the day, would take the sheets out of the typewriter and lock them in a safe so he COULDN’T revise them the next day and HAD to move on. This makes no sense in several ways (presumably he has the key to his own page-safe) and is probably not real. But I do get the point. So now I reread what I wrote yesterday, but I try to resist the urge to fix small stuff—comma errors, repetition, word choice. I only stop and dig in if there’s seriously bad character stuff going on, or structural problems, which will be propagated forward in whatever new stuff I write.

I also meditate at the start of every writing day. As the old joke says, everybody should meditate half an hour a day, and if they don’t have time for that then they should meditate an hour a day. (This joke seemed funnier before I wrote it down. The point is, if your day is too packed and disorganized for a half-hour meditation, you need to fix it, and the only thing that will fix it is more meditation … anyway.) I don’t get too mystical about it, I just think of it as a way of training my attention and becoming more aware of where I put it. I.e. not on Scrabble on my phone.

And then there’s pantsing. This is cute writer-speak for writing without planning out the structure ahead of time, just improvising as you go. When I started my new book I had never pantsed in my life, and I wanted to try it—I figured I’d go faster and be more alert to the moment-to-moment needs of the story if I wasn’t always beholden to some leaden narrative armature constructed by past-me, that talentless killjoy.

A mystery writer whom I hugely admire once told me that she literally doesn’t find out who committed the crime till the reader does. When she throws in a red herring, she doesn’t even know if it’s red or not. She doesn’t plan, she just charges ahead, scattering clues, giving everybody motives, and then at the end of the book when it’s to time solve the crime, Detective Pants just steps in and announces the perpetrator.

As it happens my new novel is structured as a mystery. Sounds like a case for Detective Pants!

But as it turns out, I am not capable of pantsing. I have taken Detective Pants off the case. I just can’t do it. To me writing a mystery feels essentially like writing two stories at the same time—I’m telling the story of the investigation, and at the same time I’m telling the story of the actual crime, as written by the killer, on top of the first story, in a coded language of clues and misdirections. It’s like I’ve got two novels going simultaneously, and I’m typing one with each hand.

To do that on the fly would require genius. Which like most people, I have to make do without.