Timed writing challenge

[freeradical9]

The short fics that have been put up at saiyuki_time ever since the first challenge prompt went up on Wednesday have really been quite impressive--not just in the number being posted, but also in the level of quality overall. It impresses me that the plotlines are so coherent, given the speed with which the story has to be written, and the absence of time to edit much at the end.

There seems to be quite a bit of variation in story length. So, having an inquiring mind and being the geek that I am, I took a look at the fics for which exact times had posted and calculated a "writing rate" (average number of words per minute) for each story. Editing time (if specified) is included, to reflect the thought process involved, and not just typing speed.



For the "Rebirth" prompt, 30 minute time limit

1 writer at 8 words/min
1 writer at 9 words/min
2 writers at 12 words/min
1 writer at 15 words/min <----this is freeradical9--a happy median!
1 writer at 20 words/min <----chomiji, you are here!
1 writer at 26 words/min
1 writer at 27 words/min

Numerical mean=16 words/min


For the "First times" prompt, 60 minute time limit

2 writers at 6 words/min
1 writer at 8 words/min
1 writer at 9 words/min
2 writers at 11 words/min
3 writers at 12 words/min
1 writer at 13 words/min
2 writers at 14 words/min
1 writer at 15 words/min
1 writer at 17 words/min
2 writers at 18 words/min <---chomiji, here you are, again! ^_^ (Hey, can I borrow some of your speed?)
1 writer at 20 words/min
1 writer at 22 words/min

Numerical mean=13 words/min

Comments

[chomiji]

LOL ...!

You may have seen that I was asking louiselux about the whole process of timed writing on my LJ a day or two ago. I tend to think these out before I ever sit down to write, and I don't know if that's quite on. The Hakkai story incubated from just about the moment she put the prompt up until Thursday evening (in contrast, my story "Night Shift" cooked for about 2 weeks before I started writing). Now, theoretically, the shorter one was more true to the ideal - I realized that I wanted something tending a little more het for redbrunja and meganbmoore to find if I sent them over there, decided on Yaone and the fact that she had essentially started a whole new life, went to change out a load of wash, folded it, put in the new wash, came back, and started writing.

But ... I'm less happy with that one. I don't know why. It may just be Yaone - I don't get into her, but I've been writing her because others do, and I think I should try writing outside myself a little. I love to write Gojyo and Hakkai because I feel elements of them within myself.

[freeradical9.livejournal.com]

You may have seen that I was asking louiselux about the whole process of timed writing on my LJ a day or two ago.

I did see that. (I'm glad you asked it, I was wondering, too!)

I know for my own part, I would have a very difficult time if I didn't allow a fic to "incubate" first. Your thought process for the first one sounds a lot like mine--I wasn't planning to write something as of Wednesday night, but on Thursday an idea popped into my head, and I worked on it (without committing anything to MS Word) off and on Thursday night and part of Friday, and by the time I sat down at the computer, I had the whole skeleton, and complete sentences and bits of paragraphs all ready to put down (good thing, too, 'cause I barely finished in time!).

It might be a bit shady to do it that way, but I'm sure no one would be interested in the two-word fic that would result, otherwise!

I think it's really admirable that you tackled the second one, and wrote it straight out (it was so sweet of you to specifically write something for some friends!) I'm gonna leave a comment there later tonight, anyway--but since you asked for concrit, I thought I'd mention that the second one definitely felt "rougher" to me. I don't necessarily think it's Yaone (I thought you captured her character beautifully)--but I found the fic a bit hard to read because the sentences and ideas were so "clipped". Nothing terribly *wrong* there, just a lack of a chance to polish, I think. For example:

"But ... it continued. There was negotiation. He paid the guards. They went off, no doubt trying to figure how to square this with their king, He took her to an inn in the next village, and paid for separate rooms, and told her to rest in hers. She tried to thank him."

There are just so many different ideas all jammed together in the same paragraph, with transitions so quick, a reader finds their eyes moving faster than the mind can keep up. With editing one could break it up and make the transitions from bartering to the guards leaving, to arriving in the inn, to proffering thanks--but in a timed challenge there's just no time. Part of the challenge, I guess! But I'm still very impressed that you managed to write something so complete going into it "cold". ^_^

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Count me as another one of the mental-incubator types. My usual writing pattern is to spend anywhere from days to months chewing over the idea, writing out chunks of it in my head until I've got the structure and the POV and the basic rhythm of the sentences down. When I finally sit down to put it to paper (well, pixels, these days), the story generally comes out all in one sitting -- the only times I've had to split a work into sessions is when I've started so late and worked so long that I wind up too sleepy to finish. Revision is usually fairly minimal and more of the nitpicky tweak-single-words-and-punctuation sort, since I've more or less done the drafting-and-editing stage all in my head; the only time I've ever really struggled with rewrites was in a particularly complex Avatar fic where I didn't want to admit I was trying too hard to jam two separate stories' worth of incidents in a structure that only had room for one. When I finally admitted to myself that I was more in love with the tricky layered structure than fighting to get in all the mismatched scenes, and just sliced it all in half, everything fell together smoothly.

Funnily enough, though, the piece that's come the fastest and smoothest of anything I've done to date is the most atypical -- it's comedy, and was done almost totally spur-of-the-moment with none of the usual lengthy pre-chewing of ideas. I'd been joking around in chat with a friend about how some characters she was doing might react in a particular scenario, and we both wound up cracking up so hard that I thought "OK, I'm going to write this up as a drabble, it'll be a quick laugh I can get typed out before bed." But when I started to set it down the situation just sort of organically got more and more detailed and ridiculous, and somehow before I knew it the sun was up and I had a 5,000+ word sex farce on my hands. *boggles*

[freeradical9.livejournal.com]

I noticed in the intro of your recent fic that it had been one that had been mulled over for a bit. It's really nice that it started with that vivid, strong image to anchor it. I'm curious (since we're comparing writing notes) how often do you jot ideas on the "back of a napkin". I'm constantly scribbling down bits of dialogue and pieces of phrase into notebooks so that I don't loose the wording (If I hoard something just in my head, I forget what I was going to write!)

Actually, I find it very impressive that you can manage to get something out all in one sitting. No matter what I write, it nearly always takes *days* and sometimes months. Part of that may be due to lifestyle, of course (I rarely have more than a few hours at a time to work on writing uninterrupted). But probably also part of it is that I keep going back to poke at stuff. The end result is that turns it into something of an evolutionary process. ^^

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I scribble things down on-the-run constantly when I've got sewing/jewelry/etc. designs in mind that I'm trying to plot out, or taking notes throughout the day for a perfume review...but I can't seem to do that with fic, oddly enough. I used to try, but that seemed to bring out my version of the can't-go-back-to-things issue Cho is talking about below. Somehow, once I get things down in black-and-white, if they're in anything but a near-finished form it really triggers the most horrifically self-critical side that thinks everything I do is utterly trite and needs to be destroyed now before I get any more embarassed by it. Keeping the drafting strictly mental somehow lets me do an endrun around that tendency.

The downside of this is of course that if I don't sit down and make the time to write when something has hit the end of that mental composition cycle, and instead get distracted by something new and shiny, I do lose all the specific turns of phrase I might have had and will have to start all over again. It's not a total loss as the plot outline is still there, but the dialogue and POV stuff has to be redone. I'm in that pickle with the companion piece I had in mind to go with The Lost and Found right now -- I was just about ready to work on that one when the kink meme came along and distracted me with the hair-fetish prompt, and now I have to sort of think my way backwards and find that particular awkward voice again. Ah well, it's not the worst thing to have back-burnered I suppose, after that last bit of amateur dentistry without anesthetic it'd be a nice change to work on something a bit more hopeful.

The single-setting thing doesn't seem all that impressive to me because most of my fics really aren't that long, and while I've never timed my usual WPM I know it's definitely higher than what I managed here for the timed prompt! Generally it seems to be somewhere in the ballpark of a few hours for stuff in the low-to-mid thousands word count. If I were better about being able to put things down and pick them up again, maybe I'd have some longer pieces under my belt!

[chomiji]

LOL! You clever person you! That part you cite? That and the remainder were written just after I glanced at the clock and went "ZOMG! I have 5 minutes left!!!

I guess I could come back to it ... that's another problem I have. I don't like coming back to stuff once I've left it. It's really impacting any ideas I have about longer fics - I have one in the planning stages about Gojyo's experiences during the 3 days in Reload 7, before Goku woke, where he's left in sole charge of two badly comrades, and another one about the history of my favorite obscure Samurai Deeper Kyo character, Anayama Kosuke (who for some reason looks just like her lord and master ... ). But they'll both be considerably longer than anything I've written before in fanfiction, and I can't make myself start them beyond running through scenes in my head.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Would it help if the longer idea was something that could be structured in chapters? I really hate to leave things broken off in the middle, but for me at least that mental block doesn't seem to apply if it's a "natural" scene-end stopping point instead of just an arbitrary ran-out-of-time-or-energy breaking point.

[chomiji]

Errrg ... I dunno. The natural split for the Gojyo thing is the 3 days ... but actually the first one is going to be the longest, because it's got the whole thing about how they get out of town and why they end up where they end up. I might have to break it down further, into scenes.

The Kosuke thing is a similar problem. There are definitely several sections, but they're not at all even in length.

Another part of the problem is my reluctance to start when I don't have all my factual bits in hand. For the Kosuke story, there are some bits of Sanada family history I need (and sanada was going to help me with that - I need to bang out a list and e-mail her). For the Gojyo thing, I need some info about people in a coma state, under primitive medical conditions. I could probably just ignore the whole issue - Goku ain't human - but that isn't how I do things, dammit. I probably ought to just post my questions on http://community.livejournal.com/little_details/ - that's what it's for.

[avierra.livejournal.com]

LOL It's funny you did that, because I was thinking the exact thing, how varied all the stories were in both length and content. (This new comm has made me so very happy).

Geeks ftw! :)

[freeradical9.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I can't keep up with the new submissions (I've yet to read yours, I'm afraid, but plan on looking at it soon!) I think I'll wait until after Wednesday's next challenge post and crunch the numbers again.

I'd also be interested in tallying character appearances, since the comm is really collecting quite a bit of breadth. It's making for fascinating reading, that's for sure! ^_^

[macavitykitsune.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I've just joined the challenge so I've not participated yet, but my speed could be....anywhere, to be honest. I've taken hours over drabbles and written a 2000-word oneshot in two. It's weird. But this is really thought-provoking. Thanks!

[freeradical9.livejournal.com]

Yay! Another taker! If you find the current challenges inspiring, you've got until this coming Wednesday to post a fic. On Wednesday a new challenge will go up.

I figured with the calculations that there would be a range. I suspect most people vary a lot in their writing--some pieces are like pulling teeth, and others practically write themselves.

I am sitting here watching your icon and grinning like an idiot. I love that it has a "therefore" symbol. Oh, I am such a geek....

[macavitykitsune.livejournal.com]

^_^ I might give it a try.

That icon is seven kinds of shiny. It's one of my favourites, though I don't use it often.

[freeradical9.livejournal.com]

You. So. Fast. *boggles*

I can't believe you got 640 words in 20 minutes. Yep, you broke the current record!

Will leave an actual comment on your fic later (I loved it!). It is midnight in my time zone and I'm just about to fall over now....

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I suspect most people vary a lot in their writing--some pieces are like pulling teeth, and others practically write themselves.

Oh, yes, totally. My drabblet there was a total teeth-puller, and the WPM reflects it. It's not that I didn't go in knowing exactly what would happen, and not that I didn't even have most of the sentences already in my head. This was something that had been incubating for months and was mostly not getting set down because I didn't want to face it quite that closely -- echoes of the structure of the fic itself, where chibi Gojyo is trying not to look and not to think about things that are unbearable. The words usually come out faster for me, but this time it just *hurt* to write because there wasn't any sort of hopeful ending to leaven the pain.

[freeradical9.livejournal.com]

I can see how the hurt of the concept (a difficult topic and a difficult situation) could really slow down writing speed. It's good, in a way, that the challenge popped up, because it provides a forum to start to explore painful issues in a limited way--to allow a working-out of ideas without being too overwhelming.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I might not have noticed quite how badly I kept trying to back away from this one if there wasn't the timer going to remind me that I couldn't afford the distractions, but it was very atypical for me. Usually when I've gotten into a truly focused writing groove, I get a sort of tunnel vision and my attention doesn't wander at all. But here, an awful lot of the elapsed "writing" time was actually wasted on fiddling with the Winamp playlist, rereading the Yeats (even though I have it all but memorized), looking up lyrics I was thinking of for the cut text (even though they were also practically memorized), or glancing at the timer itself...anything to delay going back to the notepad window.