Dec 05 2008
Tortoises and Hares
In the old tale, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes too many naps, counting on his speed to keep him ahead, while the tortoise just keeps plodding on towards the goal. Does that make me feel better about being a writing tortoise? Not at all, because I know it’s a lie intended to let us tortoises think we’re superior to the hares. In the real world, the hares win every time.
A race isn’t really the best analogy, because writing isn’t an area where there’s just one winner and a lot of losers. It’s more like a huge, self-renewing pie that allows each person to take what they can from it. That doesn’t prevent some tortoises from believing that hares don’t really exist, that they’re just tortoises with some unfair advantage, or who cheat their way into harehood and get more than their fair share of the pie.
Every year, National Novel Writing Month is backdrop to some cries of “unfair.” Those whiz kids who routinely churn out 100,000 words while the rest of us are slaving over 50,000? Cheats. The multi-taskers who write not just one novel in thirty days, but two? Cheats. That kind of production is impossible; we all know that, don’t we?
And on a writing forum on a site which will not be named, a discussion of income and output got knocked off track by someone who refused to believe that anyone could write five to ten articles a day, month after month. Obviously, anyone who made such a claim, and has the money to prove it, must be outsourcing their writing assignments to people desperate enough to write for 20 cents a pop.
The reality is that some people write fast, and they do it over many years, producing a volume of content that seems impossible for any ordinary mortal. Consider Honore Balzac, who wrote 100 novels and plays. Or Anthony Trollope who wrote nearly as much, and not just novels, but stories, travel books, and literary criticism. And the chances are that these fellows did their writing with quill pens dipped in ink. In modern times, we have people like Isaac Asimov, who managed to write or edit some 500 books. Stephen King isn’t exactly a slacker, nor are many other contemporary novelists, some of whom also turn out screenplays in their spare time.
The bottom line is that if writing is to be your full-time career, you learn your trade, you learn to write fast, you spend hours at the typewriter or computer, and you produce. Some of us are tortoises by nature, and we’ll never be anything else. That means our share of the pie will be smaller. But even tortoises can learn to run a bit faster if they really have to.
2 Responses to “Tortoises and Hares”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Not A Member? Register for Free!
It’s tempting for us slowpokes to believe that prolific novelists use ghostwriters, but it just ain’t so. For one thing, there would be no consistency of style if an author’s novels were written by different people. But if you know about some writer’s working schedules, there’s no problem understanding how they do it. Asimov spent a minimum of eight hours a day writing, and if you read Stephen King’s On Writing, you’ll see the goals he set for himself on a daily basis. The point is that it’s a job, and if you want to produce, you put in the hours. Not all writing lends itself to that kind of schedule, either, so it depends as much on your genre as on your ability to pound out the words for hours at a time.