How Many Words a Day?

Today I perused an interesting article by James Thayer in Author Magazine entitled "How Many Words a Day?" The question posed, discussed, and answered by Mr. Thayer regards how many words each day on average an author should attempt to move from his brain onto the blank page. The article provides many amusing anecdotes about famous authors and their work habits.

English writer, Charles Hamilton—who used twenty-five pseudonyms, the most famous being Frank Richards—was so prolific that George Orwell accused him of being a team of writers.  Hamilton responded, “In the presence of such authority, I speak with diffidence; and can only say that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I am only one person, and have never been two or three.”  He wrote a million and a half words a year, or about twenty pages each working day (assuming 250 working days in a year).

Prolixity of this magnitude is astonishing to say the least! Mr. Thayer goes on to talk about other writers who produced prose at a slower rate.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings as one novel, which contains about 670,000 words.  It took him eleven years, which is 245 words each working day, or a little less than a typed page. 

Some writers manage their time by devoting certain hours of the day to authorial pursuits. T.S. Eliot had a full time job at the bank, so he made time to write by rising "two hours earlier than was strictly necessary." Rudyard Kipling had his own daily pattern of writing "in the middle of the day, from ten to four." Stephen King writes only in the mornings and reserves the rest of the day for other tasks. Detective fiction author Anne Perry writes "eight or nine hours a day, six days a week."

After discussing the writing habits of many famous authors, Mr. Thayer suggests his own answer to the question: how many words a day? "Writing your novel will be easier if you draft a schedule," he says. "A plan...will organize and prod you, and it will increase the odds you complete the novel." Here is the schedule he proposes:

Initial plotting: one or two weeks.
Research and further plotting: four to six weeks.
Drafting outline: two to three weeks.
Writing the novel: one page (300 words) a day. Finish the novel one year after starting the first manuscript word. If you work full time, 300 words a day is a reasonable goal.
Editing the completed manuscript: about one month.

I could not read Mr. Thayer's proposed schedule without immediately wondering: how does my writing measure up to this? Whenever I spend time writing my novel, I generally get anywhere from 500-1000 words on the page. Unlike Anne Perry and other disciplined writers, however, I most definitely do not write six days a week. Usually, it's more like one to three days a week. Crunching the numbers, it seems that I am a little slower than he recommends, and it will probably take me longer than a year to write my current novel, Road from the West.

Would setting a stricter writing schedule increase my speed? Not necessarily. Mr. Thayer himself remarks that for some people, "a detailed plan is too easy to fall behind, and then discard in frustration." A strict schedule may inspire some authors to keep going with their writing, but for me, it's something else entirely. I have the special motivation of having a husband who asks me about my progress almost every day, who reminds me that I should be writing whenever I complain that I have nothing to do, and who eagerly anticipates the completion of my next book so that he can launch it into the marketplace of publishers. I don't need a schedule; I have David. Which reminds me...I need to stop blogging and get back to working on that novel in case he asks me about it when he gets home tonight.

Making a Racket

Today I Serve was featured on Spalding's Racket, a blog "dedicated to promoting the best in independent authors and their books on the Internet." Spalding promotes the electronic versions of indie books with links to their purchase on Amazon and Smashwords.

In Praise of the Interlibrary Loan

Bishop Asser, in his ninth century Life of Alfred, tells a story about Alfred the Great that illustrates the king's lifelong love of learning and also the precious nature of books in that period:

On a certain day, therefore, his mother was showing him and his brother a book of Saxon poetry, which she held in her hand, and said, "Whichever of you shall the soonest learn this volume shall have it for his own." Stimulated by these words, or rather by the Divine inspiration, and allured by the beautifully illuminated letter at the beginning of the volume, he spoke before all his brothers, who, though his seniors in age, were not so in grace, and answered, "Will you really give that book to one of us, that is to say, to him who can first understand and repeat it to you?" At this his mother smiled with satisfaction, and confirmed what she had before said. Upon which the boy took the book out of her hand, and went to his master to read it, and in due time brought it to his mother and recited it.

In ninth century England a book, hand-copied and beautifully illuminated, was a significant prize to obtain. In our modern era, with the invention of the printing press and now the e-book, it is usually not necessary to go to such lengths as Alfred did to acquire a title we need. Or is it?

As I began my research for Road from the West: A Novel of the First Crusade (my current novel-in-the-works), I found myself becoming more and more intrigued by the character of Tancred, a young Norman knight from Southern Italy. Before I could put a stop to it, he had weaseled his way into becoming the protagonist of my novel. At that point I knew that I needed more individual information on him than summary sources of the Crusade could provide.

I discovered that although there are no modern biographies of Tancred, Robert Lawrence Nicholson had written a dissertation on him at the University of Chicago in 1940. Tancred: a study of his career and work in their relation to the first crusade and the establishment of the Latin states in Syria and Palestine--isn't the name just too scintillating? Where could I find a copy of such wonderfulness? Nowhere in Oregon it seemed and nowhere online for under $300.

I contacted the University of Chicago Library to ask if I could borrow the aforementioned title. The librarian courteously explained that the only way to do so was to go through the interlibrary loan system at my local library. I had never used this system before (frankly, if the library doesn't have a book and I want it badly enough, I just go ahead and purchase it on Amazon), but now it seemed like the only option. I went to the reference desk at the Oregon City library, and the rest was history. Two weeks later I had a copy of a seemingly unobtainable book in my hands with very little exertion and no expense on my part.

Thanks to Benjamin Franklin for establishing the first library in America, and thanks to the Internet for connecting library collections around the country. Nowadays, finding a book, even one as rare as Nicholson's dissertation, is as easy as asking a librarian.

Homeschooler History Obsessions Poll Results

Few school history programs treat all eras of history equally, and most public school curriculum give inordinate importance to the modern era (leaving students in ignorance of everything that came before 1850). Homeschoolers tend to emphasize different periods of history than the public schools do, and our most recent poll asked the question: "What period of history are homeschoolers most fascinated with?"

Choices were: the Reformation, the Pilgrims, the American War for Independence, and the American War between the States. Visitors and followers of this blog gave a decided 52% of the vote to the American War between the States (generally known outside of homeschooling circles as the Civil War).

As a homeschool graduate myself, I have to concur with the outcome of this poll. States' rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the blue and the gray--these occupied far more of our homsechool history time than anything in the twentieth century. One of the ways we learned about the Civil War was through historical fiction, and I remember my late elementary school days were filled with Rifles for Watie (Harold Keith), Across Five Aprils (Irene Hunt), and Turn Homeward, Hannalee (Patricia Beatty).

Since graduating from high school, I've read very little Civil War historical fiction. Do you have any suggestions for historical fiction reads that capture the essence of that era?

What Would the Wife of Bath Say?

Artist's rendering of the Wife of Bath from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

 When Sir Walter Scott pioneered historical fiction by penning Ivanhoe in 1819, he certainly wasn't thinking about how best to include a strong, independent female protagonist. Rowena, the blonde beauty that Ivanhoe ends up with, is almost as insipid a female character as one can find in literature. Rebecca, the dark-eyed, generous Jewess, is rescued from death and dishonor not by her own wits but by the strength of the male hero. For decades after Ivanhoe, historical fiction authors tended to cast men and women in the same roles that Sir Walter Scott used. The man was the hero, the adventurer, the mastermind. The woman was the dependant damsel in distress.

Nowadays, much of historical fiction treats women in a completely opposite manner. Historical novelists (especially female authors) favor spunky, resourceful leading ladies who can rival--or better--the masculine characters with their intelligence, skills, and determination. Instead of waiting to be rescued, the modern historical heroine devises ways to protect herself and even to keep her man safe. I found two examples of this kind of heroine in the last two historical novels I read: Jean Plaidy's The Plantagenet Prelude and Ken Follett's World Without End.

In The Plantagenet Prelude, the twelfth century main character Eleanor of Aquitaine is portrayed as a woman determined to rule. One of her main ambitions is to demonstrate that, in terms of governing a kingdom, a woman can do everything a man can do. When she marries Louis of France, she dominates the relationship and tries to direct all the foreign policy of France. Her second husband, Henry Plantagenet, is much more difficult to control. She chafes under the expectation that she must continually conceive and produce heirs for him. "Her frustration was intolerable. It was unfair that it should always be the woman's lot to bear the children. This shall be the last, she promised herself." The roles of wife and mother are chains holding back her boundless ambition.

In World Without End, set in fourteenth century England, the main female character Caris is determined not to marry for these same reasons. She "resented Merthin for making her an offer she could not accept. He did not understand. For him, their marriage would be an adjunct to his life as an architect. For her, marriage would have to replace the work to which she had dedicated herself." Over and over again, Caris states that she is determined to live her own life and not live through someone else, whether it be a husband or a child. This is one of the determining factors that causes her to get an abortion when she finds out that she is pregnant by Merthin. "I don't want to spend my life as a slave to anyone, even if it is my own child," she declares.

The women in Plaidy and Follett's stories are obsessed with their own status--or lack of status--in a male-dominated world in a way that would not have even occurred to Sir Walter Scott's heroines. One thing we must remember though is that in Scott's time, the notion of women's suffrage had barely surfaced. He described the wants and desires of women as he understood them at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Plaidy and Follett describe the wants and desires of women as they understand them at the end of the twentieth century.

Though historical fiction does give us a window into the time period in which it is set, it also gives us a window into the time period in which it was written. To assume that Scott's description of women in the Middle Ages is more accurate (because it is older) would be just as fallacious as to assume that Plaidy and Follett's portrayal is more precise (because it makes sense in our own time period). Both views are clouded by the conceptions of the author's own times.

To find out what women were really like in the Middle Ages, we need to rid ourselves of preconceptions (as much as possible) and look at the primary source material. Was Margery of Kempe as insipid as Rowena or as feminist as Caris, or was she distinctly different from either? Do the source documents about Eleanor of Aquitaine show that she insisted on equality and despised her role as a mother?

Was marriage a romantic ideal or a degraded departure from independence? It doesn't matter how Scott, and Plaidy, and Follett would answer that question. The real test is this: what would the Wife of Bath say?