Way of the Cheetah, by Lynn Viehl, is a book about writing fast — producing more books in a year. The first time I skimmed through it I found it useless; after re-reading I like it much better. It’s a good collection of advice for people who are relatively new to writing seriously.
It takes 50 pages (of 70 total) to get to the actual *writing*. Before that, it’s scheduling and equipment and space to write — all important, but not actual writing. (The section on equipment will probably be pretty useful to many people, given the number of times I’ve seen people in panic over computer crashes that lost a day/week/lifetime of writing.) If you haven’t already read a bunch of how-to-write books or been hanging out on the internet with other writers, it’s worth a look.
Her three-pass editing process is very nice and streamlined — in theory. Maybe someday I’ll be a better writer and be able to only edit three times; I would love that. Or maybe someday I’ll be a better writer and still go over each scene a dozen times.
She advocates writing straight through the first draft, editing each day’s work later that same day, but not while writing. (Editing here means changing wording, fixing grammar – minor stuff.) That’s it til the whole book is done and she prints it and marks it up, doing the line editing as well as rewriting scenes and chapters if necessary. The third edit is polishing the prose.
I don’t have any *problem* with that process. I just don’t see how to do it. Maybe she plans things in great detail before hand; I don’t actually know. And if that’s the solution, then I’m screwed. Even my “planning” stage (in which I write an entire zeroth draft) leaves me without a complete scene by scene outline. So as I start the first draft, things change, and I end up deleting scenes, adding scenes, moving scenes, rewriting scenes — all before I’m done with chapter two.
(Here’s an old post about my revision process. I’ve changed terminology — what I called the first draft is now the zeroth draft, and I am not doing step 2a of typing it in! I thought (correctly) that it might actually be more efficient to do a blank page rewrite. And I still haven’t read the book referred to in the comments.)
One might argue that I’m doing her second pass during my first (not zeroth) draft, and that’s probably true. I could leave it for later. Having tried that in the past, the idea of having a whole novel’s worth of horrible awful revision to do at once makes me want to give up in despair. So I don’t think that’s the solution.
Anyway, I do so much rearranging of scenes that I *can’t* also do line-editing stuff on the same printout, because it very quickly becomes impossible to read. So I revise on screen, print, scribble all over the page, type in changes, revise on screen again, and often, print it out again. I am trying to cut back to one printout per chapter. But I don’t want to streamline my revision process at the expense of the book’s quality, no matter how much faster I’d like to be working.
At least the current novel (my second) is going way faster than my first one did. Not as fast as I’d like, though some of that is due to lack of time spent on it rather than multiple revision passes. But I have learned a few things.
And writing this post was a good example of how *not* to get any work done.