I was planning on writing this blog from St. Petersburg, FL after attending a couple days of Sleuthfest, however atmospheric conditions had very different plans. The organizers made a difficult, yet proper, decision to cancel the conference. That left me with three days off from work and a family prepared to live life without me until Sunday. So I could give back all of this time, or take advantage of it. I decided, with the blessing of my wife, to retreat up to the Catskill mountains and place focus on the second book in the Overlook Trilogy.
Now, I’ve never done an actual writing retreat, where my complete focus has been on a single project and where I was more or less isolated from the outside world. I was amazed how exhausting it was.
I operated in “sprints” of 45 minutes where I wrote non-stop until my alarm went off. I didn’t count exactly how many sprints I did over the three days, but it was in excess of ten. About half of these sprints ended mid-sentence, the loud call of alarm legitimately jarring me out of my concentration. A quarter of the sprints ended “early” where I finished a scene or completed a thought and still had about five minutes left. Then, the last quarter of the sprints were slogs of endless time where I dragged myself across the finish line.
The end result was that I completed the first act of the sequel, which I had previously started but was having trouble getting traction. I wrote a total of 16,304 words, averaging 5,500 words a day. Now, I’ve never measured my output like this before, but I feel in my bones that this is a personal record. I broadcast my progress over social media, posting the first videos on my writer page and Instagram. It was relatively successful. I was very happy.
But then I got a text message from a very good, very old friend of mine. He sent me a screenshot that discussed the very topic I had preoccupied myself with all week: how much should I write? The TLDR is that output varies from writer to writer, but an anecdote of one of the most renowned writers of the last 100 years, James Joyce, had a very different opinion. The article claims that Mr. Joyce was agonized after a day of work and a friend asked him how many words he had written. The answer was “Seven”, to which the friend was pleasantly surprised. However, the distraught Joyce lamented that he didn’t know which order to place them in. I replied to my friend that my approach was different than Mr. Joyce. He simply said in reply “Less is more.”
One of my favorite writers is Ernest Hemingway (I know me and a million others), but his advice falls into the same vein: “Write one true sentence.” I used to feel this way, when I was young and had nothing but time on my hands. But with a full time and demanding career, a daughter involved in numerous activities, and a wife who has a demanding career of her own, I simply don’t have time for “seven words” or “one true sentence” anymore. If I get 45 minutes, or three days, I need to get my ideas out and onto the screen. I’ll worry about what those words and the order of them later.
I’ll close with this thought, however. The very first draft of Our Lady of the Overlook was approximately 80,000 words before I began working on the second draft, which for me was a complete rewrite. I completed draft number two over 100,000 words, and by the third draft I was hovering near 105,000. Then, after my editor got through with her review and my proofreader finished his work, the final draft sits at 104,500 words. Should I have added so much? Should I have cut some more? To quote my father though, “It is what it is.”
R.L. Carpentier, writer 