No AI training. Just stop. You don’t have my permission. #stopthescrape

Yes, the Thermwordometer^TM is a thing! And, surprisingly, the name trips off the tongue once you get the hang of it. Thanks again to Dave for labelling something I hadn’t got as far as naming. However, considering the fact that the lovely covid has taken yet another turn – it’s like a symptoms checkbox, as I tick one crappy thing off after another – it feels like the right thing to write about on this Meta Monday.

In an nutshell, I have been gauging my degree of sickness based on how much I write. Clearly, there have been days when I have written next to nothing, and others where I got a chapter, sometimes two, finished. This creative lark requires a bit of thought, and it’s hard to think when coughing and spluttering. But during the quieter periods, often very early in the morning, I got some words down, and that always feels good.

You see, it’s all about the words.

There are two trains of thought here.

1. Every word is precious and must be perfect
2. Every word is practice and there’s no such thing as perfection

There might be variations on such thoughts, but in my covid fug I’m trying to keep it simple.

In number 1, the writer spends a lot of time formulating each sentence, carefully selecting the words for the right emotion, and, in the early days, ensuring there will always be a need for a good thesaurus. Precious writers don’t write much, but they rewrite a lot, honing their craft on a relatively small pool of words. Typos are abhorrent, as is the wrong adjective, or inadequate adverb. Sentences should convey exactly the right emotion, allowing the reader to absorb the sense of time and place and mood in that moment. And, when a beta reader doesn’t experience exactly that, the Precious Writer has another bash at it, seeking perfection.

I am not a Precious Writer.

I go all in with 2, and consider everything I write to be practice, allowing me to become a better writer with each piece I write. Practice Writers might be confused with having a quantity over quality approach. I can understand that, but instead of rewriting the same story over and over and limiting the pool of woods from which I can draw my experience, I publish almost everything I write, and move on to the next story.

In 2023 I set myself the goal of publishing 1,000,000 words. I didn’t publish everything I wrote, but my published words last year amounted to 812,744. In December alone I wrote and published 87,286, although I slowed down when I hit Christmas.

Are there a few typos in there? Yes. Do I care? Yes, in that I’ll fix them when I find them, but my work is not perfect. I’m not aiming for perfection, I’m aiming to be published. When my work is published my work is read. If a couple of typos throw readers out of the story, then it’s the story that didn’t work for them, not the spelling, or a missing comma.

I firmly believe in Jeff Tweedy’s approach to songwriting. You write one song. You write it to the best of your abilities, and you release it. It might not be a hit, but the hit song that follows could not have been written without it.

Practice.

I practice a lot.

Across all my pen names, names I am working to consolidate under just one name, I have published 4,429,083 words to date. That’s a big pool of words to draw on, and doesn’t include all the other words I have written and discarded over the years.

As an example of Precious versus Practice, the published version of The Ice Star is 69,224 words. I was a Precious Writer when I started it back in 2013. I was studying Professional Writing, and following feedback from my supervisors and peers I wrote it three times. Let’s go large and call it 70,000 words as the other versions were bigger than the final one. One might argue that I wrote 210,000 words and I had that many words in my so-called pool, or reservoir of words, to draw on. But no, what I really had was three versions of the same crap, and I was so done with it. Not least as I was trying to accommodate other people’s concerns or suggestions, but because I was revisiting the same story time and again. I spent a few years on this novel. Now, I’m pleased with how it turned out, but it’s no better a novel than something I wrote in fourteen days, just once, before publishing. That would be Seven Graves, One Winter. 56,918 words in fourteen days. I could do that because I had practice.

Practice Writer. That’s me.

Want another head spin?

I wrote Paint the Devil, one of my favourite books, in five days. Paint the Devil is 51,930 words. I set myself the goal of writing five chapters a day, and each chapter had to be at least 2,000 words. So, my daily goal was 10,000 words. I started around 8 a.m. and finished around 6 p.m. I’ll admit, that book was written in anger. I was so angry about the wolf situation in Denmark, amazed at the hate the wolf inspired, and saddened – angered – by the violent human response to the return of the wolf.

The point is, once I stopped being a Precious Writer I became a professional. Professionals of all disciplines build their careers on years of practice. Now, a Precious Writer might be an expert on one story, while me, a Practice Writer, might not be an expert, but I have learned how to tell a story. And, even if I haven’t, if that last story doesn’t quite gel with readers, then maybe the next one will.

Which brings me back to the Thermwordometer^TM .

Since New Year’s Day, I have written 11,492 words so far, not including this blog post. I’ve struggled with covid, but in the few moments when I could breathe, when I wasn’t throwing up, and when my head stopped thumping, I wrote.

Sure, I’m behind with some projects, but I’m 11,492 words richer than I was at the end of 2023. That’s 11,492 more words of practice. And you know what they say, don’t you?

Practice makes perfect.

Yeah, I couldn’t resist. 😉

Chris