I got into an argument today over how much a writer *should* write in a day.

The idea that there is any set amount a writer should write is just ridiculous. I’ve read so many books by newbie authors where it was obvious that they had religiously wrote every. Single. Day. whether they felt like it or not.

Writing isn’t like walking to the next town over. When you walk, every step counts. When you write, every word doesn’t. If you write 2000 words every day, you’ll have a book finished in a month and a half. If you haven’t given those words enough thought, there’s a big risk that of those 100,000 words, only 25,000 of them count as steps towards your goal.

When I read unpublished fiction, there is nothing worse than words that don’t have a point. I would take an interesting story that has been put through Google Translate to and from Armenian than a story that is not bad. Bad writing has a charm to it as you are left wondering what ridiculous analogy or purple phrase the writer is going to write next. I’ve scanned books looking forward to see what word the author will use instead of “said”.

But writing that looks polished but says absolutely nothing? I’d rather shoot myself in the foot. There’s such a huge difference between not bad and good. Writing that isn’t bad has a long, long way to go before it ever hits good, and good writing has a long way to go before it hits great.

Just because you’ve written a 100,000 words, doesn’t mean you’ve written a novel yet. I once cut 40,000 words of a novel because I’d written myself into a corner and couldn’t get myself out. It was like cutting off my foot. And as much as I liked the final product, it still was just a practice novel.

Having a short story stretched out to a novel still isn’t the kiss of death. The second draft is where you take all the problems of the first draft and smooth them out. When I was first starting out I thought that writers who rewrote drafts without referring back to their original drafts were mad, but after I tried it a few times, I really saw how useful the technique is.

There are a lot of changes you can make in the original draft. You can edit characters in and out, you can add a significant event or cut it out, but one of the things you can’t change once the story is on the page is your point of view character’s motives. Anything that is tangible can be cut out or sewn in, but intangible things, like a character’s motive or what’s at stake is going to affect every single sentence.

There are a million writers out there writing in your genre, but the only competition out there is yourself. Writing isn’t a lottery that you win by getting your book selected, it’s the culmination of all your hard work. If one publishing house doesn’t recognize the value of your work, another one will. Good story telling only competes with itself.

And if you’re not willing to put in the work, up to and including rewriting the whole story or abandoning the whole project as time well spent, but not worth the time and effort to fix all that is wrong with it, the next person will. Nothing is more heartbreaking than watching a writer write their first book and then throw a decade behind trying to get that book published instead of accepting it as what it is and going on with the next story in their heads.

Writing needs craft as much, if not more, than it needs talent. Whether a first draft takes you ten years or two weeks, it’s going to need to be tightened. The old saying, you have good, fast and lots, pick two is only half right. You only get two, but even if you’re cursed like I was at having lots and fast, you can still make it good, it just takes more time.

And time, as an unpublished writer, is the one thing you have lots at. The only person standing in the way between you and publication is you, and not as your evil twin

Though if you do have an evil twin, that’s awesome.