When you're thinking about something it seems to find you. I do think about writing fast, or too fast, quite a bit. I was much faster when I started out than now. In order to write for television, you have to be fast so I fit right in. Television is an arena where you don't question if something really works, if it comes to you, it's good enough.
Then I had a long stretch where speed didn't matter, asked a lot of questions and massaged everything. Now I thought I was someplace in the middle of the two but yesterday a former sitcom writer told me how really fast I write. I'm not. He must be REALLY SLOW ;-) . There was a blog post somewhere about writing 10,000 words a day and how to achieve that. Wow. I'm encased in concrete compared to that.
I like to play computer games to think about nothing. I'm sure that's one reason why I don't do particularly well but then I found out the big scoring gamers do lines of coke before playing. This is nuts. So I just felt like well I'm not doing drugs to score an extra 50 points in Crescendo Catcher.
How your mind organizes information may have a lot to do with this speed issue. It's all about your brain, isn't it? I have a friend who is always telling me to write X or Y and I say "I don't have those ideas, where am I going to get them?" Because he's not a writer, he doesn't understand you are limited by the way your mind works. You're limited (Sorry! This may not be a popular thing to say but it's the truth) by your life experiences, your philosophies, your background, your upbringing. I could not write a police procedural well for $50,000. If the money dangled in front of me kept going up, obviously at some point I would give it my best shot. But it wouldn't be as good as someone who really thinks in that way. It would be mechanical for me, not organic. It would show.
Why are we writing so fast? Is it because it's so easy to be published now? Is it to make money? Is it excitement? Because we have so much to say it's like a mental dam burst? It's nice that there are so many readers, isn't it? Everyone kept saying no one would write letters anymore and then email showed up. Then it was people don't read and ebooks show up and people have 500 books on their To Be Read list.
If speed's for dinner, what's for dessert?
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My latest experiment with lighting effects in Photoshop.
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