Rethinking "Sad" Percentages (September Roundup)
SEPTEMBER TOTALS
Words: 37,345 (goal: 33,333)
7 projects
25 days written
YTD total: 318,961
In light of my regular successes at breaking my 33k monthly goal, I adjusted my yearly goal from 400k to 425k just to see what it looked like. Increasing my monthly goal to 35,417 seemed like a negligible change, and it increased my year-to-date goal for the end of September to 318,750, putting me 211 words ahead on the year. I like the sense of challenge this gives me more than I like being 18,961 words ahead, so I’m going to make this adjustment and see how it feels in a month.
This month I’m also giving Inktober a whirl, where instead of drawing for the Inktober prompts I write a short little story each day in my fantasy universe inspired by the prompts. So far I’ve written four entries of between 150 and 600 words. I’m really enjoying this as a worldbuilding drill and can’t wait to see how the whole thing links up.
I’m in the process of overhauling my drafting process. With my newfound skills in outlining, I’ve started writing draft zeroes and disposing of early drafts more and more as I work to conform plot to structure.
Formerly, the way I wrote was that I would write scenes that weren’t exactly fit to publish on the first try, but they had the approximate structure, language, and purpose that would make it to the final draft. Rarely would I look at a scene and redraft it wholesale; more often I would adjust a sentence here and there. The final scene might ultimately look different from how I first put it down, but that resulted from minor adjustments spread over time instead of wholesale replacement.
Now, much more often, I jot down scenes just to make sure the idea is recorded and rewrite it wholesale several times to fit tone, character, and the arc of the scene to my vision for the novel. The result is that I have a lot more “cast-off” material than I used to.
Like many writers, I keep old drafts. When a passage of more than about 70 words is no longer doing the work I want it to, I cut it out and put it in a blank document with the date. The logic is that I may want to go back and rescue this writing later; this happens maybe 1% of the time. Mostly, subsequent drafts are better than the first one. This should be heartening to me! I’m improving!
It is not.
I used to reliably have a cast-off pile of about 25-30% the final wordcount of a piece. If a work was finished at 20,000 words, I would expect a total of 6,000 words in the cast-off pile. A writer friend of mine, Em, started calling this castoff total the “sad percentage.” I liked this term and started using it myself.
That was before my sad percentages skyrocketed to the 60-70% range of my project’s final wordcount total. That’s very sad. Increasingly, I am also sad.
I started a novel in March I’ve been fighting to wrap up for a few months now. It usedto be pretty normal for me, with my swaths of unscheduled time, to be able to wrap a 70k story arc in 4-5 months. August was month 6. September was month 7. As of October 1, the novel’s working wordcount is 53k of an expected 65-70k total.
That’s a gain of less than 10k a month. This has been my central project for five of the months since I started it! Why on earth is this taking me so long?
Then I look at my rejected material for this project and start to understand.
I’ve written 91k on this novel altogether. It’s just that only 53k has survived.
As noted in these monthly roundups, I work on a number of projects at a time. I find it necessary to my growth as a writer to flex different styles, work with different characters, and help to kill the ennui of the end stages of a novel when you’re mostly hitting your head against the wall. I’m also trying to keep up my romance novel production without abandoning my SFF publishing goals, so I keep in touch with my fantasy novel when I’m stuck on my romance work. It’s also important to me to have passion projects so I can remember what it’s like to feel excited about something I’m writing. Not sure if you’ve noticed this here on Out of Character, but I tend to get a bit analytical about writing.
So while more than half of my total wordcounts each month tend to be committed to my main project, I’m not working solely on it. I aim to add about 20k to my main project in a month, and this novel has only been my main focus for four of seven months I’ve worked on it. Taking in my total including the sad percentage, I’m on track to meet my own expectations.
It’s just that I’m throwing more and more words away.
37k—my rejected total—is about 70% of my 53k working total, which is high by my old average but on track for my lately average. I finished a novella earlier this year at 25k that had a sad percentage of 108%: of the 52k total I wrote on that project, more than half of it was deleted in the course of rewrites.
I think I need to start looking at my writing process differently. The thing is that I really think early drafts are valuable: they’re stepping stones to better writing, like Legolas in that one absurd clip from one of the Hobbit movies. No structural integrity to speak of, but by god if they’re not gonna carry me to solid ground if I hustle enough.
(I believe that I too am sexy enough to defy the laws of the universe.)
The more I turn into a multidrafter, the less the frame of the sad percentage works for me. I’ve gotta figure out a way to celebrate these words I wrote that no longer work for me—or else to figure out a way to write where I don’t produce quite so much detritus as I do now.
This novel is a bit of a wash in terms of reforming my approach; it’s almost done. Suffice it to say I won’t write another novel the way I’ve written this one on purpose. The next novel I outline from the beginning, I’m going to try something I’ve never done before: to write as brief an outline as humanly possible, and then to write a shitty first draft from start to finish without intention of keeping any of it before starting to rewrite with an eye for quality.
And then I’m gonna come up with a more festive word for my reject piles. Maybe “adolescent words.” Maybe “we tried.”
Actually… not to be too Millennial about this, but a “We Tried” percentage doesn’t sound that bad. I want a ribbon for participating. If I relabel my castoffs—that’s the same thing, right?
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SEPTEMBER MEDIA ROUNDUP
Here’s some of what shaped me in September:
BOOKS
THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN — Paula Hawkins (2.5)
LOT — Bryan Washington (5)
PHOENIX EXTRAVAGANT — Yoon Ha Lee (3.25)
EVERY HEART A DOORWAY — Seanan McGuire (4)
MOVIES & TELEVISION
Netflix’s THE WITCHER—4.5(rewatch)
DUNE (1984) dir. David Lynch—1.25 (the .25 is just for serving Looks)
GAMES
I finished XCOM 2, which I absolutely did not play for the story and hated the last mission of, but I did kind of dig the ghost aliens that came out of nowhere in the end. I may replay it on hardmode and stop before the final mission just because I like the turn-based combat puzzles so much.
PODCASTS & YOUTUBE
I’ve gotten heavily into WRITING EXCUSES, hosted variously by names you probably know. They are on their fifteenth(!) season and publish weekly, so there’s plenty of back catalogue. I’ve blazed through the eps most relevant to me in seasons 12, 14, and 15—12 in particular has taught me a lot.
I’ve also gone through the majority of Lindsay Ellis’ back catalogue on YouTube. I’ve basically been treating her essays as a crash course on the modern studio film. I’ve also cried at several? That may just be where I am in life right now though.
LINKS AND TWEETS
Bryan Washington in the Awl on the importance of giving authors the benefit of the doubt on their narratives, and how infrequently authors of colour are afforded that privilege.
R.O. Kwon in the Atlantic on the rhythm and sound of words:
I’m sure painters, for instance, feel lucky, too—lucky to love color the way they do, or the texture of paint. For me, it’s the feeling of words in my mouth. Words are sound, after all, which makes writing such a physical, bodily experience. Like Wharton says, “I wouldn’t take a kingdom for it.”
Melissa Caruso on structural edits:
Roseanne A. Brown on rewriting and rewriting again:
This interview in The New Stateman with Judith Butler slaps partly because she just hands the interviewer’s ass back to them so many times, but also because I think it’s important to see how JK Rowling has positioned herself as a prominent figure in the debate against trans rights, how she has intentionally made it her name that is invoked in this inhumane crusade, and how this raises her image and reputations in the minds of bigots. This has positive commercial consequences for her: she has, in her own esteem, become a thought leader. Butler demonstrates that one of the best things we can do to stop raising her image is to aggressively shut her harmful arguments down.
This September in OOC we talked about writing schedules, writer’s block, scaffolding in short stories, and three-act structures. Thanks so much for reading along. Until next week, you’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER—let’s put something on the page.